Over at New York
Magazine, which today suffered a website crash that
temporarily lowered Internet smug levels by a measurable degree,
Jonathan Chait
makes the bold claim that the Democratic Party is entering a
period of dominance. His argument is partially rooted in favorable
ethnic and generational trends that have much to do with the
relative skills of the two major parties in enticing new
voters—something that can confer a very real, but hardly pemanent
advantage. But Chait also proclaims victory for the donkey party
because, he says, “America’s unique brand of ideological
anti-statism is historically inseparable…from the legacy of
slavery,” and who wants anything to do with that?
It’s tempting to say “what the fuck?” and take Chait’s argument
as an exercise in self-congratulatory lunacy—part of the attempt to
declare
an argument over, and further debate illegitimate—that has
become so popular recently.
But Chait links to an earlier piece of his that is both more
nuanced and very revealing of a hermetically sealed cultural and
intellectual hothouse, one that can make it easy to assume a
natural march to victory by his side and inevitable defeat for his
opponents.
In “The
Color of His Presidency,” an analysis of the (alleged) racial
politics undergirding support and opposition for the Obama
administration, Chait acknowledged the limits of tying everything
the right/Republicans (he tends to group people as “Democrat” and
“Republican” and dismiss independents as really one or the other)
do and believe to racism.
Yet here is the point where, for all its breadth and analytic
power, the liberal racial analysis collapses onto itself. It may be
true that, at the level of electoral campaign messaging,
conservatism and white racial resentment are functionally
identical. It would follow that any conservative argument is an
appeal to white racism. That is, indeed, the all-but-explicit
conclusion of the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession:
Republican politics is fundamentally racist, and even its use of
the most abstract economic appeal is a sinister, coded missive.
Impressive though the historical, sociological, and
psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also
happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or
meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense
racist.
Chait then documents some of the more thoroughly dishonest
attempts to attribute racist motives to conservatives, especially
by MSNBC, whose commentators apparently see hidden hoods in every
elephant lapel pin. He also discusses that network’s special
ability to get under thin GOP skin.
And it’s here that we go back off the rails, as we discover that
the Republican Party is somehow no longer mainstream and part of
American culture.
It exposed a sense in which their entire party is being written
out of the American civic religion. The inscription of the
civil-rights story into the fabric of American history—the
elevation of Rosa Parks to a new Paul Revere, Martin Luther King to
the pantheon of the Founding Fathers—has, by implication, cast
Barack Obama as the contemporary protagonist and Republicans as the
villains.
He later adds:
The unresolved tension here concerns the very legitimacy of the
contemporary Republican Party. It resembles, in milder form, the
sorts of aftershocks that follow a democratic revolution, when the
allies of the deposed junta—or ex-Communists in post–Iron Curtain
Eastern Europe, or, closer to the bone, white conservatives in
post-apartheid South Africa—attempt to reenter a newly democratized
polity.
Chait then goes on to pseudo-scientifically do what he seemed to
criticize just paragraphs earlier: link support for not just
Republicans but also for small goverrnment ideas to America’s
history of slavery. He does this based on one study of
political habits and history in counties of the Old South.
And here we are again: No need for debate, it’s all about
internalized racism.
What does this have to say about conservatives in New Hampshire
or libertarians in Arizona? Who the hell knows.
Chait is very much a Red Team vs Blue Team thinker—deep down,
you’re one, or you’re the other. He marinates at New York
Magazine, among like-minded thinkers, for whom small
government ideas and the Republican Party have largely been
“written out of the American civic religion.” Everybody who
disagrees is tainted by slavery in Mississippi.
Never mind that the president’s
approval ratings are kind of crappy and below average
compared to his predecessors, or that
both major parties are viewed unfavorably by a majority of
Americans. That civic religion may not have quite the saints or
shrines that Chait assumes.
This is not to say that Republicans are incapable of their own
very real bouts of stupidity. When it comes to nominating
cringe-worthy candidates, the GOP is perfectly capable of
fulfilling MSNBC’s fever dreams. It often does seem firmly fixed in
an unattractive authoritarian past, even as younger Americans are
receptive to arguments about the
size of government, the
unworkability of Obamacare, and the
superiority of private charity to government spending.
Coupled with their tolerant social views,
millennials would appear to be pointing more toward a libertarian
future than a liberal or conservative one. If only one or both
of the major parties would make a real play for that
constituency.
Which is to say, if Republicans are capable of bouts of
stupidity, so are liberal pundits.