[Conor Friedersdorf]
Mark Schmitt has a piece in The American Prospect that offers one wonderful passage and several to which I object.
Let's take them one by one.
Conservatives like to construct an elaborate tale of betrayal in which the true faith can be restored by wresting it away from the unseemly ambitions of Republican politicians. But that story denies the reality that the downfall of both the party and the movement began on the very moment that Bush shed all the hedges and compromises--such as "compassionate conservatism" and the Medicare prescription drug benefit--and began to try to govern like a conservative. The Bush era ended two days after the 2004 re-election when Bush declared, "I earned ... political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Starting with the effort to privatize Social Security, everything went straight downhill. The rejection of the Republican Party came not because it failed conservatism but because conservatism failed.
Hmm. I thought the rejection of the Republican Party happened due to a failing war, a souring economy, ineptitude symbolized by the failures after Hurricane Katrina, a series of political scandals that showed some GOP leaders to be corrupt idiots, an unpopular president -- need I go on? A half-hearted effort at Social Security reform is the least of the reasons for the GOP's unpopularity.
Next, however, comes the wonderful passage:
If the intellectual commissars of the opposition party were Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who in Grand New Party propose supplementing a mild social conservatism with actual economic supports for fragile families, our political system would be nicely balanced.
Grand New Party is an excellent book that you should definitely read. I disagree with a fair amount in it. But I'd gladly sign onto any project in which Ross and Reihan are my intellectual commissars.
Now back to the questionable passages:
The politics of American-ness needs to be cloaked in policy, simply because it's unpalatable otherwise. Without the helpful crutches of symbolic issues like welfare, crime, and immigration, the raw edges of the politics of people-not-like-us would be a little too uncomfortable, and not just for those of us who fall into one or more of the "pluribus" categories. But thanks to the unlikely trio of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John McCain, the usual game is impossible. Clinton took welfare and crime off the political agenda. Bush made global belligerence and eternal tax cuts unpalatable. And McCain's inconvenient position on immigration takes away what Republicans last fall were dreaming would be their silver bullet. As a result, with Americans saying they are willing to pay more taxes for health care and better schools, with Republicans at a disadvantage in the polls on every single issue, there is no respectable costume in which to dress up identity politics.
One problem Democrats have is a mindset that treats welfare, crime and immigration as "symbolic issues." Bill Clinton "took welfare off the political agenda" by passing a once in a generation reform that led to an unprecedented decrease in welfare rolls, largely by encouraging lots of women who were formerly on welfare to get jobs. Crime got taken off the agenda because thousands fewer people were being murdered every year than at the height of America's crime wave. Immigration policy has perhaps the most dramatic impact on the future of the nation than any other issue. Dismissing these things as "identity politics" is willful blindness.
Traditionally, the phrase "identity politics" has referred to the Democratic coalition's caucuses, interest groups, and competitive claims of wrongs to be righted and rights to be granted. Identity politics on the left, according to this very conventional wisdom, opened the door to an alternative politics of national identity on the right. And yet in 2008, the Democratic presidential nomination battle between an African American and a woman has not exacerbated left identity politics but brought it to a peaceful close.
!?
"And yet in 2008, the Democratic presidential nomination battle between an African American and a woman has not exacerbated left identity politics but brought it to a peaceful close."
Wishing doesn't make it so.
Huh? The "failing war" was the number one foreign policy priority of the neocons. The "souring economy" was precipitated by unregulated participants in the mortgage market, precisely the sort of thing conservatives love. And the "incompetence" with respect to Katrina involved the federal government doing something, i.e., local disaster relief, that no self-respecting libertarian, or even federalist, would admit as a legitimate federal activity in the first place.
Now one might believe, as I do, that the economy isn't doing all that badly, that the war in Iraq may still turn out for the best (read Daniel Drezner's latest, though that isn't the actual conclusion he draws), and that Katrina wasn't very important. But to claim that these failures weren't the result of "conservative" ideas and programs is not tenable.
And if the "Bush isn't a real conservative" or "Bush isn't conservative enough" meme were tenable, then social security privatization should have helped him, not been even a minor source of decline.
Obviously you’re not a member of the “reality-based community.”
"Dismissing these things as "identity politics" is willful blindness."
He's wrong to put them down as all "identity politics," but they were definitely packaged that way in GOP campaigns, most famously with Willie Horton. The GOP too often took legitimate concerns over crime rates and our welfare system not working as well as it should have and racialized them with "black men are going to kill your son and rape your daughter" and "black welfare queens with ten kids are stealing all of your money to buy Cadillacs."
Bill Clinton had very little to do with welfare reform or decreased crime rates. The GOP forced welfare reform down his throat (he vetoed it twice) and his wife and Donna Shalala spent the next six years trying to undermine its effectiveness in the various bureaucracies.
Regarding crime, state legislators, mayors, police chiefs and local prosecutors responded to public pressure to put more bad guys in more prisons for longer periods of time. Hence the crime rate dropped. Clinton had nothing to do with it. He often takes credit for it by claiming he put "100,000 new cops on the streets." While I'm all in favor of that approach, the actual figure was closer to 20,000 and most of them were park rangers or EPA envirocops.
Reality man claims that the GOP racializes issues like welfare and crime for political gain. That's because those issues are, primarily, racial. Welfare usage among minorities is about triple the white rate. Blacks make up 12% of the population and commit 50% of the violent crime. Hispanics account for 12% of the population and account for about 25% of the violent crime. The black-on-white crime rate is 9X the white-on-black rate and the Hispanic crime rate is 3-4X the white rate. You can argue why that's the case, but not whether it's the case. So, the choices for the Left are one, acknowledge these realities and their causes (Yuck--Unpalatable, as Mark Schmidt would say) or two, Thomas Frank it and claim that these are all "symbolic distractions" from the real issues of corporate greed and GOP plutocracy. Good luck with that.
You're missing the forest for the trees by putting so much weight on the phrase "symbolic issues". Just mentally delete "symbolic" and reread the passage. The point is that identity politics needs to be dressed up in policy, not which policy is used for this purpose. And doing so doesn't mean the policy itself is reduced to identity politics, or that it's some worthless symbolic pander, just that it's being used for this purpose. A more charitable interpretation of "symbolic" in this context is that the way these issues are handled is symbolic of identity politics, not that these are worthless or unimportant issues, as you rightly point out.