Some truths are so
important that they bear repeating. One
such truth is that for as long as the Republic has existed, the key to an understanding
of American politics has been race. This truth was once again borne in upon me by
the extraordinary video that has surfaced of Mitt Romney's impromptu talk to a
closed meeting of fat cat Republican donors.
[A second, subordinate, truth of contemporary American public life is
that everything, without exception, has been captured on a handheld device by
somebody or other and can be counted on to surface when least convenient.]
Romney's surreptitiously
recorded speech is widely viewed, on the right as well as on the left, as
having put paid to any lingering dreams the Republicans might have had of
winning the election. As Tallyrand is
reputed to have said about Napoleon's murder of the duc d'Enghien, it was worse
than a crime, it was a blunder. What can
Romney have been thinking when he casually dismissed 47% of Americans as
free-loading moochers incapable of caring for themselves and slavishly beholden
to Democrats throwing them slops? Never
mind that Romney had his facts completely wrong. I think we have become accustomed to
that. But in the midst of an election
that he is currently losing, what can have possessed him to speak
condescendingly and contemptuously of a tad less than half of the American
electorate?
The answer, as always, is
race. Let me repeat what I have written
here before. Both before and after the
Civil War, poor whites in the South and also in the North, bemired in a
socially and economically disadvantaged position in American society, consoled
themselves with the thought that however poor they were, however much they were
disrespected by their wealthier and socially more prominent betters, at least they were not Black! In both the North and the South, here was a
permanent underclass toward whom they could show disdain, whom they could
discriminate against, and on occasion whom they could lynch with impunity. That structural fact of American life was
written into the Black Codes -- laws that reinstituted de facto servitude after the
end of formal, legal slavery; it was written into Jim Crow, into the
exclusionary racial covenants that kept Black families trapped in ghettoes, into
the racial quotas at Northern colleges, and into the devil's compact between
employers and White labor unions that kept former slaves from any chance of
securing good industrial jobs.
The success of the Civil
Rights Movement in ending Jim Crow, in breaking down the barriers to
employment, and in winning the vote for Black citizens deprived poor Whites of
their only consolation for their disadvantaged condition, and they reacted with
anger, bitterness, and a deep sense of betrayal. It is the bitter residue of this ressentiment that explains the tenacity
with which poor and lower middle class Whites vote against their economic
interest by supporting Republican candidates whose policies sink them ever
deeper into economic despair.
Mitt Romney knew what he
was saying when he described 47% of Americans as takers, moochers,
free-loaders. He was talking about Black
and Brown Americans, and he was talking to White America. The numbers do not matter, nor do the
facts. What mattered was a desperate
attempt to tap into that deep well of bitterness and try to transform it into a
winning coalition of White voters.
Happily, he will
fail. But he is not a fool, and what he
did was not in fact a blunder. It was
one last resurrection of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy.
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