A little turd told me.
I started reading Thomas Frank's new book, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right. A little over six years ago, when I read his very popular What's the Matter with Kansas?, I soon thereafter grumbled about Frank's minimization of how racist Kansas is. This was the passage that set me off:Republicans have perfected the coded racial appeal, and they rally white voters to their cause by subtly appealing to their hatred of blacks....There are undeniably a great number of places where this analysis holds true, but today's Kansas is not one of them. The state may be 88 percent white, but it cannot be easily dismissed as a nest of bigots....Kansas may burn to restore the gold standard; it may shriek for concealed carry and gasp at liberal conspiracies; but one thing it doesn't do is racism.
For some reason, Frank is at it again with Pity the Billionaire, this time minimizing how racist the right (especially the Tea Party right) is. This is from the introduction:Another widely held view attributes the conservative resurgence to white racism, which is supposed to have been whipped into flames by the election of a black president. Indeed, one may point to some spectacular flare-ups of bigotry directed against the president and his party. But individual prejudice and a handful of name-calling incidents should not be enough to indict an entire movement....Regardless of the racial fears some partisans hold...the new conservatism does not systematically generate racist statements or policies....
Well, sure, if you take at face value what conservatives are saying, you'd be hard pressed to find anything racist in their rhetoric, except among their idiotic fringe. But why should Frank or anyone else with two functioning cerebral hemispheres take conservative rhetoric at face value? Did we really go to Afghanistan to liberate women? Do conservatives really worship free-market principles when the U.S. military acts as their "publicly subsidized capitalist goon squad" (in Smedley Butler's words)? Do I even need to go on?
tim_wise, both here and there in his blog and, more recently, in his newest book, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority, has debunked the idea that seemingly race-neutral complaints about taxation and entitlements (core issues for the Tea Party and drivers of the conservative resurgence) are really free of racial resentment. In a nutshell, when entitlements benefited whites to the exclusion of non-whites, people tolerated high rates of taxation and government intervention to help the poor. The anti-tax, anti-entitlement rhetoric has increased over the years as discrimination in government assistance has decreased. Long story short, there are a lot of white people who don't like seeing their tax dollars used to save the swarthy hordes from death and ruination.
Incidentally, in his earlier books, tim_wise has also cited research that reveals that many seemingly non-racist people do, in fact, harbor a lot of racist feelings. Racists these days just know what words to avoid and what opinions to refrain from expressing. But often they can get the same points across by substituting words and phrases like criminal, welfare dependency, terrorist, and single-parent households.
Thomas Frank, of all people, should not be putting this much trust in conservatives. And it would be nice if he realized that being a white person who denies that there's a problem with racism is a bit like being a billionaire who denies that there's a problem with economic inequality.
For some reason, Frank is at it again with Pity the Billionaire, this time minimizing how racist the right (especially the Tea Party right) is. This is from the introduction:Another widely held view attributes the conservative resurgence to white racism, which is supposed to have been whipped into flames by the election of a black president. Indeed, one may point to some spectacular flare-ups of bigotry directed against the president and his party. But individual prejudice and a handful of name-calling incidents should not be enough to indict an entire movement....Regardless of the racial fears some partisans hold...the new conservatism does not systematically generate racist statements or policies....
Well, sure, if you take at face value what conservatives are saying, you'd be hard pressed to find anything racist in their rhetoric, except among their idiotic fringe. But why should Frank or anyone else with two functioning cerebral hemispheres take conservative rhetoric at face value? Did we really go to Afghanistan to liberate women? Do conservatives really worship free-market principles when the U.S. military acts as their "publicly subsidized capitalist goon squad" (in Smedley Butler's words)? Do I even need to go on?
tim_wise, both here and there in his blog and, more recently, in his newest book, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority, has debunked the idea that seemingly race-neutral complaints about taxation and entitlements (core issues for the Tea Party and drivers of the conservative resurgence) are really free of racial resentment. In a nutshell, when entitlements benefited whites to the exclusion of non-whites, people tolerated high rates of taxation and government intervention to help the poor. The anti-tax, anti-entitlement rhetoric has increased over the years as discrimination in government assistance has decreased. Long story short, there are a lot of white people who don't like seeing their tax dollars used to save the swarthy hordes from death and ruination.
Incidentally, in his earlier books, tim_wise has also cited research that reveals that many seemingly non-racist people do, in fact, harbor a lot of racist feelings. Racists these days just know what words to avoid and what opinions to refrain from expressing. But often they can get the same points across by substituting words and phrases like criminal, welfare dependency, terrorist, and single-parent households.
Thomas Frank, of all people, should not be putting this much trust in conservatives. And it would be nice if he realized that being a white person who denies that there's a problem with racism is a bit like being a billionaire who denies that there's a problem with economic inequality.