Month: March 2019

When it comes to politics, the tips are not made of the same meat as the rest of the wing. The demographics of the supporters show that it’s some sort of white meat, but it’s not clear just what sort, hence the mystery.

In the traditional right/left spectrum in America, the people who lean to one side or the other are called conservatives and liberals, respectively. But some people don’t just lean, they fall over, and this makes them qualitatively different.

Despite being on opposite extremes in one sense, these radicals are united by a shared political style: populism. But they often hide behind misleading terminology that allows them to deflect criticism, generally by sounding like they’re not extremists. This rant is mostly about calling them what they are instead of allowing them to maintain their disguise.

The correct term for the extreme right—whether it’s the hard right, far right, or the trendy alt right—is not conservative. The literally correct term is fascist. Of course, this word has long applied to the lunatic fringe: the neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, Birchers, and many libertarians.

Back then, these people were taken for granted by the mainstream Republicans—after all, it’s not like they could vote for the other party—and pointedly excluded from public events because they are embarrassing nuts.

The Republicans would still feed them red meat in the form of dog whistles and tacit support for bigotry. But they maintained plausible deniability by pretending that their actions were in the service of high-minded, bland-sounding, abstract principles such as small government or individual responsibility or states’ rights.

Conveniently, the social programs they attacked so as to harm minorities were the very same ones that the oligarchy hated. In this way, poor and middle-class white people were tricked into supporting policies that helped only the rich. It was a con, and it worked.

That con is no longer necessary. Where it once would have been hyperbole to call the Republicans, as a whole, fascists, things have changed. There are still conservatives in the party, particularly among the voters, but the people in charge are overt fascists.

Trump, Miller, Bannon: not one of these is a conservative in any sense. They are not defined by their caution about radical changes or their adherence to tradition. They’re just goose-stepping fascist scum.

Now, particularly outside of America, but increasingly even inside, fascists are often referred to as nationalists and populists. Trump even bragged about his nationalism. This is accurate, but doesn’t tell the full story. The source of confusion is that both of these terms also fit the other side: the left-wing extremists.

In America, the far left refers to itself as progressive, which is misleading in many ways. The biggest problem is that the term is sometimes used by actual liberals, due to the history of Reagan turning the l-word into a slur. Since the rise of St. Bernard, socialism has also been embraced as a label, but it’s not necessarily socialism in any Marxist sense, except when it is.

It’s also misleading in that it omits their populism, which is what distinguishes them from liberals, even more so than their extremism. Whereas liberals are equally focused on social and economic justice, left-pops give lip service to the former but care only about the latter. They are also nationalists, although more isolationist than expansionist.

Populism is a style of politics that entails both rhetorical and policy commitments, and is overlaid on top of political extremism on both ends. The rhetoric defines supporters as the only legitimate representation of “the people”; the ones who actually matter. Invariably, these special people are primarily white and male and otherwise non-minority.

Populism demands radicalism, activism, and ideological purity, and has no respect for experience, objectivity, or competence. There is no room for progress, only immediate, revolutionary change, and it doesn’t matter that revolutions always kill people. Populism denigrates the competent people as “the Establishment” and insists that, due to a willingness to compromise to get things done, they are inherently corrupt. This is ironic, as populism is, in practice, strongly associated with corruption.

While the populist right deserves to be called fascist, there is no equally handy term for the populist left. As I’ve written elsewhere, socialism is inherently ambiguous, and it since become a boogie man used by the Republican fascists as a cudgel against all Democrats, even the liberal base. But there is clearly a constellation of left-populist associations, which include such things as the Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Young Turks, and Bernie Sanders, and they need a name.

Aside from the generic left-populist, the best term I’ve found is based on their parallel with the Tea Party Movement, which is the right-populist faction that took over the RNC. Taking over the DNC is the stated goal of the left-pops, which is why some of us call them the Herbal Tea Party.

But you don’t have to love or use that term, unless you want to. You do have to distinguish between conservatives and fascists, and between liberals and leftists. That’s because extremism is an entirely different beast, no matter which extreme.

The base of the Democratic Party, the group that votes consistently and reliably for it, consists largely of women and people of color. One of the ways that some Democratic presidential candidates have been differentiating themselves while playing to that base is by backing reparations for African-American slavery.

This idea not only takes the moral high ground, it is a genuinely liberal goal that outflanks Bernie Sanders from the left while showing how his color-blind approach to (primarily economic) equality does not serve the base. Politically, it’s a bold move because it’s very much one of those broad, sweeping agendas that is ambiguous yet capable of alienating. In its current form, we can expect it to turn off white people broadly, even ones who genuinely oppose racism.

One answer to the ambiguity and skepticism comes from Marcus H. Johnson, a Twitterati celeb with a solid track record of compelling, well-thought-out political analyses. This rant is my sympathetic but partially dissenting response to his most recent one, entitled “Here’s What A Reparations Plan Could Look Like“. Read it. I’ll wait here.

There is much to admire about the approach he takes here, but also one fatal yet fixable flaw. First, he makes the moral case, which is honestly the easiest part. No amount of money can make up for what America did to the people they kidnapped, imported, and enslaved, but it can go a long way to countering the lasting harm by, as he says, “closing the racial wealth gap”. Otherwise, slavery’s effects continue through the generations unabated.

Second, Johnson does the math about how much it might cost, showing that it’s economically feasible, not only in terms of being a manageable ongoing expense but also due to savings from second-order effects, such as lowering incarceration rates.

If he wanted to, he could probably make an even stronger argument here. For example, any substantial downward distribution of wealth has beneficial collateral consequences because of the increase in demand and subsequent creation of jobs, leading to a positive feedback cycle that strengthens the economy.

Finally, Johnson recognizes that reversing the effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutionalized racism (particularly redlining) is a multigenerational project, not something that can be accomplished with a lump sum payment.

He offers a few alternatives, including a persuasive hybrid. And he is entirely cognizant of how such a program would be at risk of being, as he says, “siphoned off by outside actors”, both before and after the money is spent.

The problem that remains is the elephant in the room, which is that “reparations would be race-specific as opposed to a race-neutral plan”. Only Black people—by whatever definition—would be eligible. He defends this by saying that, while race-neutral plans are popular, they “have a poor track record of actually curbing the racial wealth gap”.

That may well be the case, but I don’t believe that race-specificity is necessary, plausible, or good for reparations.

We know it’s not necessary because Jim Crow laws, not to mention modern voter-suppression techniques, successfully target Black people while ostensibly remaining race-neutral. It’s a simple trick, but one that goes both ways.

The fallout from historic white supremacy is plainly visible in a variety of metrics, so economic reparations can be targeted to disproportionately help those who were disproportionately hurt while still remaining race-neutral in form. This would amount to turning the methods of systemic racism back against itself.

It comes down to the difference between equality and equity. The truly color-blind approach leads to equality, which helps everyone but still leaves some people out. That’s because it assists those who don’t really need it while not giving enough to those who truly do. However, helping people on the basis of their identity uses group membership as a proxy for need, with errors in both directions and at the cost of abandoning equality, which generates backlash.

The alternative is to bring equity by focusing on context, not color. Under this doctrine, people get as much as they need of what they need, not just a nominally equal share, with distribution based on metrics, not demographics. For example, in the cartoon above, the second frame shows boxes assigned based on height, not hair color.

Race-specificity is not plausible because predicating benefits on racial identity is politically and intellectually self-defeating. It feeds the narrative that the equal rights movement is nothing more than a constellation of partisan agendas, each seeking to boost its own identity group over others.

This false narrative thwarts intersectionality, undermines support from equalitarians, and provides cover for white supremacists. St. Bernard will deride it as identity politics, and just this once, he’ll have half a point. Moreover, the whole concept depends on an essentialistic notion of race as a biological fact, which is literally the core of racism. This will never fly.

Practically, there is no principled, reasoned basis upon which to define Blackness for this purpose. The #ADOS movement insists that reparations should be limited to “American descendants of slaves”. By that measure, neither our first Black president, Barack Obama, nor our (hopefully) next one, Kamala Harris, would qualify. After all, neither Kenya nor Jamaica are part of America, and both of these people are “mixed race”. Many Americans would, in practice, be unable to prove that they qualify due to a lack of birth records dating back to the days of Lincoln.

Johnson’s version is more sane and would apparently include both Black presidents, but it’s not clear where he’d draw the line or on what basis. If history teaches us anything, I can only imagine that any attempt at legislating Blackness at this level would collapse into the same absurdities that led to terms like quadroon, octoroon, and hexadecaroon, all of which are based on the overtly-racist “one drop rule” of hypodescent. This just won’t work.

Race-specificity is not morally good because it leaves out all the other groups that are the targets of systematic oppression, both historical and ongoing. African-American slavery was not just an economic crime, but a cover for rapes, beatings, and murders, yet it exists on a spectrum of badness that is populated by other forms of oppression against other victims.

Native Americans were enslaved, massacred, and forced into reservation ghettos. Where are their reparations? How about the Japanese-Americans who were rounded up into internment camps? Or the Hispanics who were mass deported in the 30’s or the ones who have more recently been separated from their families and caged? Or the women who could not vote, were excluded from professions, and to this day make dimes on the dollar? Or the gays or the Jews or the Muslims? Why some but not others? It’s not fair.

A wise man, martyred for the cause, once said that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. Yes, we do need reparations, much along the lines that Johnson outlines, but they have to be aimed at closing the discrimination gap for everyone; not in a blind way, but in one that counters all forms of discrimination against irrelevant and effectively-immutable traits instead of feeding them.

We want to create an America that not only has a low Gini coefficient, but where Black men can feel safe when the police drive by, and women can feel safe in their own homes. By serving the greater goal of fostering equality of both civil rights and economic standing, we can achieve true social justice.

The two goals are interdependent, so we must fight both heads of the hydra—bigotry and oligarchy—at once in order to achieve them. If we focus on just one aspect of hierarchy at a time, the other will defeat our efforts. Systemic and social discrimination are not just attacks on the obvious targets, but a proven way to undermine unity among the oppressed so as to let the already-rich and already-powerful become even more so. Likewise, equality of opportunity depends on economic equality in order to yield equitable results.

The solution is intersectionality; the recognition that, whether seen in terms of identity or class, there is only one war for equality, no matter how many fronts its battles are fought on. We can only do this by crafting policies that focus on context, not color and use metrics, not demographics so as to serve each person in each group according to their own needs, never leaving anyone behind.

There is strength is unity, but only if the unity is fair. That’s why I support all the reparations for all the people in the form of a Newer Deal. This includes reparations for African-American slavery, but is not limited to them.