There is no racism in Arizona

While liberals have been outraged about Arizona’s new immigration law, quite a few commentators have defended the measure as necessary. Usually the argument sounds something like this, “The federal government has punted the ball on immigration! Arizona receives a huge number of illegal immigrants had to do something to stem the tide! This is something.” David Broder made a version of this argument in yesterday’s Washington Post, and Daniel Larison argued a similar point a few days ago in the American Conservative. Ignoring, for now, the fact “something” doesn’t imply “anything,” it’s interesting to me that those in favor of Arizona’s law — or at least those sympathetic to it — fail to see its racial dimensions. To them, this really just is a desperate attempt on Arizona’s part to control its borders.

In all honesty, I would be less hostile to the law (if only marginally) if there were some indication that this was a good faith effort to make headway against Arizona’s growing population of undocumented immigrants. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Not only was the bill sponsored by an Arizona legislator with noted ties to white supremacists organizations, but the Arizona legislature has followed up SB 1070 with a bill aimed at outlawing “ethnic-studies programs” in public schools:

Just a week after signing the country’s toughest immigration bill into law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer now must decide whether to endorse another bill passed by her state legislature — one that outlaws ethnic-studies programs in public schools.

The bill forbids Arizona schools from using any curriculum that promotes “the overthrow of the United States government” or “resentment toward a race or class of people.” It also disallows any curriculum that’s “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group” or that seeks to “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

On top of this, the Arizona Department of Education has “has begun telling principals to remove teachers who speak English with an accent from classes with students who are still learning English.” In light of this new bill, it seems absurd to suggest that SB 1070 isn’t about race and racism. There are ways to curb illegal immigration that don’t require blanket racial profiling and citizenship stops. There are ways to improve English instruction that don’t involve expelling teachers with accented English (the majority of whom, in all likelihood, will be of Latino descent).

Taken together, these bills are a clear sign that Arizona is governed by men and women who seek to whitewash their state as much as possible. I’d be willing to listen to an alternative explanation, but I honestly don’t see how that could be any more apparent.

Money and the Power

Not that it matters, but I wanted to voice my full-throated support for this idea:

As Reagan and Grant supporters duke it out over who should be on the $50 bill, not a single legislator has proposed a woman who could represent the 51 percent of the population that hasn’t been seen on our nation’s currency in more than 100 years. What makes this especially surprising is that 92 women currently serve in the House of Representatives and hopefully understand the importance of female representation on our nation’s currency.

[...]

In the current climate of partisan politics, representatives from each party could introduce legislation proposing a woman from their own party for the honor. Democratic members of congress might nominate first lady and humanitarian, Eleanor Roosevelt. Republican members of Congress might choose Maine senator and presidential nominee Margaret Chase Smith.

I’ve long been an advocate of including significant cultural figures and non-presidential political actors on our currency. To mention a few, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King Jr. both had a tremendous impact on the United States, and you can easily make the case that they are far more important to our modern conception of “American-ness” than Benjamin Franklin (who adorns the $100 bill) or Andrew Jackson (whose face dominates the $20 bill). Beyond that, the United States looks far different than it did a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago. I, for one, would like to see our currency reflect at least some of that diversity.

* And yes, I know this song has nothing to do with the post. Still, it’s awesome.

James Taranto Doesn’t Understand Political Science

Or at least, he gets upset when political science research flies in the face of his biases and ideology. Here are his thoughts on the University of Washington’s recent study on racial resentment among Tea Party sympathizers:

They won’t give it up. “Are Tea Partiers Racist?” asks a Newsweek.com headline, apparently written under the mistaken impression that this hackneyed charge is still provocative. The subheadline reveals that the story doesn’t even speak to whether the tea-party movement is racist but rather makes a more modest claim: “A new study shows that the movement’s supporters are more likely to be racially resentful.”

Well, what do you expect? If politicians and media personalities want to stir up resentment around the question of race, what better way than by badgering people with false accusations of racism?

Taranto goes on to disparage the idea of a “marginalized minority population” — African-Americans can’t be marginalized if we elected one president! — and then challenges the study by arguing that it can’t be valid because “It did not plumb the emotions of the participants, who were given a prepackaged assertion and permitted only a binary response.” Indeed, by Taranto’s lights, it’s entirely possible that Tea Partiers are less racially resentful than most, because “It’s possible that agreement with a statement like “Blacks should do the same without special favors” reflects a resentful spirit, but it could also reflect a respectful one–a confidence that blacks are as capable as anyone else.”

Taranto might not realize this, but the University of Washington’s survey is just the latest in a long trail of research devoted to examining the impact of ethnocentrism on political behavior. Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam explore this in Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion (as Matt Yglesias has noted several times), and Tali Mendelberg addresses a version of this point in her book The Race Card. The clear conclusion, from both, is that racial attitudes are tied very closely to political opinions and political behavior. And while the racial resentment scale isn’t perfect, it is still useful as a means of examining the relationship between political ideology and racial prejudice. What’s more, the University of Washington’s results have been borne out in other surveys. The New York Times/CBS survey of Tea Party sympathizers found that 52 percent believe that “too much has been made of the problems facing black people.” What’s more, 25 percent believe that “the policies of the Obama administration favor blacks over whites.”

Taranto’s temper-tantrum over the University of Washington’s survey is another example of the fact that among conservative ideologues, actual racial prejudice isn’t a huge concern. Despite mountains of evidence suggesting otherwise, Taranto doesn’t seem to believe that racism has a tangible impact on the lives of racial and ethnic minorities. And he acts accordingly; his outrage is reserved for those special times when someone has the audacity to call prejudice on the conservative movement.

Virginia’s “Job’s Governor” fires another shot in the culture wars

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell moves to step four of his plan to alienate everyone who didn’t vote for him:

Gov. Bob McDonnell praised State Police Superintendent W. Stephen Flaherty today for reinstating a policy that allows State Police chaplains to invoke Jesus.

Flaherty rescinded the policy two years ago, after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prayers delivered on behalf of the government must not favor one religion over another.

McDonnell said the state should not tell chaplains how to pray, but they should be allowed to pray according to the dictates of their consciences.
Several faith-based groups, including the Family Foundation, had asked McDonnell to reinstate the policy.

When Bob McDonnell ran for governor of Virginia, he insisted — emphatically at times — that he was no culture warrior. Yes, he served in the state legislature for fourteen years as a noted right-wing culture warrior, but throughout his campaign, he stressed that his top priorities were jobs and economic growth. When the Deeds campaign hammered him for his 1989 thesis for Regent University — where he outlined a 15 point right-wing agenda for the Commonwealth — McDonnell shot back with a pledge to lay social issues on the way side, focus his administration on jobs. McDonnell sold himself as a “jobs governor,” won the election, and then promptly took to showing Virginians that he was full of shit.

In the four months since he was sworn in as governor, McDonnell has rescinded protections for gay and lesbian state employers, declared a “Christian Heritage Week” (devoted to perpetuating the myth that the Founders created a distinctly “Christian nation”), declared a “Confederate History Month” (with no mention of slavery), and has now reinstated a policy giving free license to State Police chaplains to be sectarian. And this is to say nothing of his attacks on abortion rights or his enthusiasm for felon disenfranchisement.

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing Virginians can do about McDonnell’s sharp veer to the right. Since Virginia doesn’t allow governors to serve consecutive terms, McDonnell is free of the electoral pressures that most other governors would face. And assuming he isn’t terribly invested in a future statewide career, this leaves him effectively immune to political pressure. Which means, in essence, that Virginians still have three-plus years of right-wing nonsense to endure from Governor McDonnell.

Now you wanna frisk me and search my ride/call me all kinda names try to hurt my pride

Sarah Palin doesn’t think that there’s any “ability or opportunity” in Arizona’s new immigration law for racial profiling. Surprisingly, her Fox News colleagues disagree:

The most objectionable thing about Arizona’s law is the blatant racial profiling, but that doesn’t seem to phase most conservatives. Jonah Goldberg doesn’t see a problem with it. George Will doesn’t see a problem with it. Byron York doesn’t even understand that it is racial profiling (note to Mr. York: the difference between flashing your ID at the DMV and being asked for your papers is that the latter will only happen if you’re brown). There’s a straightforward explanation behind this tacit support for racial profiling in Arizona; simply put, conservatives have long been defenders of racial profiling in law enforcement.

You only have to look back five months — after the failed “underpants bombing” — to see conservatives voice their enthusiasm for anything that would give extra scrutiny to brown people. Tom McInerney, a retired Air Force general, proposed that we “be very serious and harsh about the profiling,” especially if “you are an 18 to 28-year-old Muslim man,” in which case “you should be strip-searched.” The National Review’s Andy McCarthy endorsed the view of the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, who argued that profiling was necessary given that “suicide bombing is a purely Islamic phenomenon.” Even conservative elected officials are willing to voice their enthusiasm for profiling. In an Armed Services Committee hearing on Fort Hood, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) declared that he “believes in racial and ethnic profiling.”

In fact, the conservative enthusiasm for racial profiling goes beyond national security and immigration. Conservatives tend not to see a huge problem with the fact that African-Americans are disproportionately stopped and searched by law enforcement. Here’s Heather MacDonald, circa 2001, defending the racialized status quo of police pullovers:

Racial profiling crusade is the most successful gambit in decades to try and divert attention from perhaps the most intractable social problem we face, which is black on black crime and the anti-police activists are trying to make police racism an irrebutable presumption. Whenever law enforcement statistics show a high rate of minority stops and rests, but the police go where the crime is. The policing revolution of the ‘90s was to make policing data driven. The police aren’t looking for white or black, they’re looking for criminals and they go to the neighborhoods with the highest rates of crime, those tend to be minority neighborhoods.

If you are shocked by the conservative movement’s warm reaction to Arizona’s experiment in racial profiling, then you simply haven’t been paying attention.

In fact, some of my favorite gardeners are Latino!

I think George Will is trying to be clever here, but it really just comes off as incredibly obtuse and not a little bit racist:

Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood — some even before it was a territory. They were in America before most Americans’ ancestors arrived. Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.

So, if I have this right, the real racists aren’t the Arizonans who decided on state-wide racial profiling as the solution to the immigration problem; they know plenty of Hispanics and thus can’t be racist! No, the real racists are the (presumably pointy-headed) liberals who don’t even really know Hispanics, aside from the ones that plant their flowers and wash their dishes. Since, I mean, that’s pretty much the only you’d ever see them, right?

Now is also a good time to note that Will resides in Chevy Chase, MD, which at last count had a Latino population of 3.4 percent. Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with Will’s strangely limited view of Latinos. Nothing at all.

Failtacular Column of the Day

My birthday was a few weeks ago, but if I could go back in time and make a different wish, I’d ask God — or whoever is responsible — to keep clueless columnists from comparing the Tea Party Movement to everything under the damn sun. For instance, here’s Anne Applebaum:

Here is a riddle: What would the Tea Party movement look like if it were British, privately educated and had once worked as a ski instructor in Austria?

The answer: It would look like Nick Clegg, leader of the British Liberal Democratic Party — and possibly the beneficiary of the biggest revolution among British voters in decades. For those who don’t follow these things, the Liberal Democrats are Britain’s historically insignificant third party. In its current incarnation, the Liberal Democrats date from the late 1980s, when the Labor Party was a near-Marxist monolith, the Tories were the party of Margaret Thatcher, and there was a lot of space in between.

Seeing as how Applebaum doesn’t bother to draw this comparison out any further, I am going to assume that this is the extent of her reasoning. And it’s terrible. Indeed, you don’t actually have to know anything about the Liberal Democrat party to peg this as a painfully vapid comparison.

Without any real evidence, Applebaum has positioned the Liberal Democrats and the Tea Party as movements of the center (the “radical” center, perhaps?). But that’s plainly untrue of the Tea Party Movement. As revealed in the recent New York Times/CBS survey, the movement is overwhelmingly white, male and conservative. 54 percent of Tea Partiers belong to the Republican Party and 73 percent identify themselves as somewhat or very conservative. Unless the center of American politics has taken a sharp veer to the Right, it is clear that the Tea Party Movement is just another species of right-wing populism.

Likewise, the Lib Dems are firmly situated on the Left, with a particular commitment to liberal values (of the classical variety) and civil libertarianism. And while the Lib Dems have critical disagreements with the Labour Party — mostly pertaining to civil liberties and the extent of state intervention in the economy — it is not at all accurate to place them in the center of British politics. In fact, given the anti-war and pro-European Union bent of the Liberal Democrats, I’d tag them as the left-liberal alternative to Labour.

To be fair, I didn’t expect Applebaum to write an interesting (or even factual) comparison of the Tea Party Movement and the Liberal Democrats. American simply aren’t equipped to cover foreign elections, even for a country as culturally similar as Britain. More often than not, their attempts to cover foreign elections fall flat. What’s more, they have this annoying habit of viewing everything through the lens of American politics, which leaves them incapable of grasping crucial distinctions and important differences. By and large, Anne Applebaum’s column is pretty typical of the genre, so I can’t be too hard.

Jonah Goldberg: an authoritarian with a dunce cap

cross-posted from Attackerman

Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, isn’t too alarmed with the reach or scale of Arizona’s new immigration law:

I support the Arizona law, but I’m also worried that it could lead to civil rights abuses.

It seems that whenever government expands either its powers or its enforcement efforts, you should be worried that it could go too far. But such worries have to be balanced against necessity.

I agree that there’s something ugly about the police, even local police, asking citizens for their “papers.” There’s also something ugly about American citizens being physically searched at airports. There’s something ugly about IRS agents prying into nearly all of your personal financial transactions or, thanks to the passage of Obamacare, serving as health insurance enforcers.

In other words, there are many government functions that are unappealing to one extent or another. That is not in itself an argument against them. The Patriot Act was ugly — and necessary.

I honestly don’t see how you could analogize the government’s ability to collect taxes with the government’s ability to demand papers and indefinitely detain immigrants. But then again, my name isn’t Jonah Goldberg and I’m not stunningly incoherent.

You would think that after having researched and written a revisionist 400-word history of fascism, Goldberg would be equipped to identify authoritarian laws and impulses at first glance. But you would be mistaken. Goldberg sees nothing conceptually wrong with a government empowered to arbitrarily stop anyone and demand their identification papers. It is “ugly,” he concedes, but ultimately necessary. Which seems to be a common sentiment for Goldberg. Whenever the government deems necessary an expansion of police power, you can usually find Goldberg near the bleachers, cheering along. Warrantless wiretapping? Goldberg says yes! Waterboarding? Goldberg says why not! Aggressive wars? Goldberg can’t wait to get started!

Of course, when it comes time to raise taxes — or when Democrats want to expand the safety net — Goldberg gravely intones against the perils of government influence and the dangers of fascism, “This organic food movement, the whole-grain bread operation, the war on cancer, the war on smoking, that these things were as fascist as death camps and yellow stars.” Demanding identification papers from “suspected” immigrants is par for the course, but providing health care subsidies to low-income workers puts us squarely on the road to serfdom.

But this (incredibly disturbing) attitude is typical of movement conservatives. They are slavish devotees to the cult of executive power and police authority, and will embrace anything — anything — that furthers those goals, especially when if it targets the “other.” As I wrote a few days ago:

…actual abrogations of freedom — indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping, torture, anti-immigration police state laws — are completely acceptable, since they target people on the margins of society. And this holds even if the measures in question are illegal, or run counter to custom. If the goal is to “stop Muslims” or send “illegals back,” then anything and everything it takes to get there is justified. For a large number of conservatives, the exception is the rule, at least for people who don’t look like them.

Jonah Goldberg is a tireless opponent of state action…on Tax Day. But when the government wants to indefinitely detain American citizens or vastly expand its police power to stop and detain anyone it suspects of “illegal immigration” (read: Hispanics), he has nothing to offer but good words and loyalty. By now, it’s more than apparent that Goldberg will support anything — anything — that punishes or pushes the “other” further to the margins of society. Which, considering his avowed anti-fascism, is more than a little ironic.

The Incredibles needs a TV spin-off

My friend Alyssa is okay with the recently announced Monsters, Inc. sequel, but would rather see Pixar give the sequel treatment to The Incredibles:

The Incredibles also is a movie about a standard-looking metropolis that’s secretly full of extraordinary people. But the questions The Incredibles raise about how talented people fit into and alter society are wider-ranging (as well as questions of aging, romance, and Anna Wintour Parody), more deeply-explored, and I think ultimately more interesting than the way Monsters, Inc. explores how children are becoming more jaded at younger ages. And the commentary on the superhero genre was simultaneously witty and useful. I want to spend more time in that city, and on those issues.

I agree with Alyssa’s take on why we need more Incredibles (and Lord knows I’d like to see more Frozone), but I don’t think Pixar should use a feature-length film to return to the universe of The Incredibles. Given the subject matter — superheroes — the large cast of characters and the ready made plot lines, I think it would be far more interesting to see The Incredibles return as a half-hour television series. With the Parr family officially in the superhero business, the question of “what makes a hero” isn’t just relevant to Bob Parr, it’s important to the whole family. A television series just seems like a much better way of exploring that from the perspective of each family member. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that with television, there’s much more time delve further into the awesome mythology of The Incredibles universe.

The Founding Fathers were politicians too

Andrew Cohen’s praise for the far-sightedness of the Founding Fathers is typical of the genre. Whenever our contemporary politics are gridlocked, and whenever it seems that our system is incapable of working on behalf of future generations, we look at the Founders with envy, “Why can’t our leaders be as wise, or as prudent, or as farsighted?” Here is Cohen in his own words:

I have belatedly come to “The Founding Fathers Reconsidered,” a very good book written by R.B Bernstein and published last year by Oxford. Among his many other points, Bernstein points out that future icons Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Adams — to name just a handful — possessed not just an extraordinary sense of self-awareness but the rare intellectual and emotional rigor to keep the “long view” in sight.

[...]

The “Fathers” aren’t beloved today because they were such perceptive political philosophers and dogged Men of the Enlightenment. They are beloved today because their long view about America — republicanism, democracy, separation of church and state, tension between power and press — have been so successful for so long. And this is so, in part, because they were razor smart, and politically courageous, and eminently well-rounded, and brilliantly well-educated, and intellectually (if not personally) honorable, and curious about so much of the world.

The Founding Fathers may have had the long-view about some items — though, given how dramatically the federal system has changed, I’m not sure that’s the case — but on a whole host of others, they were just as short-sighted and opportunistic as the politicians Cohen decries. The 3/5th compromise and the Constitution’s complete disengagement with slavery were crass political moves aimed at appeasing Southern slaveholders. We tend view the Senate as an institution handed down from the Lord himself, but the truth is that it owes its existence to expediency; small states were unwilling to sign on to the Constitution unless they were assured fair influence in the legislature. Even the written Bill of Rights was a reluctant concession to the anti-Federalists.

The Founders were admirable men — slave-owning notwithstanding — but the Constitution was shot through with the short-term politics of the late 18th century. Indeed, the first eighty years of American history should throw water on anyone inclined to praise the far-sightedness of the Founders. Forty-five years after ratification, the country was divided over whether or not states could nullify federal law, and thirty years after that the nation suffered the costs of the Founders’ short-term political concerns by way of a bloody, apocalyptic war over slavery.