Sources for Hitler's racial theories in Mein Kampf

A new critical edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf has been published this month in Germany. It's the first edition allowed to be published legally there after the expiration of the postwar ban on its publication. (Alison Smale, Scholars Unveil New Edition of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ New York Times 12/01/2015; "Mein Kampf". Hitlers Buch wird neu aufgelegt Focus Online 04.01.2016)

This has occasioned new research into the book and its significance. One example is Roman Töppel's
"„Volk und Rasse“. Hitlers Quellen auf der Spur" Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 64:1 (2016). Töppel investigates the likely sources of the racial ideas elaborated in the "Volk und Rasse" chapter of Mein Kampf. And he gives every evidence of having approached the task with stereotypical German thoroughness.

In the process, he finds that the following are the most likely influences on the racial ideas in the "Volk und Rasse" chapter.

• Paul Bang (1879–1945), author of Judas Schuldbuch. Eine deutsche Abrechnung (1919)
• Erwin Baur (1875–1933)
• Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), one of the better-known anti-Semitic racial ideologues, author of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1911)
• Heinrich Claß (1868–1953), author of Wenn ich der Kaiser wär(1912)
• Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923), who was an ideological mentor for Hitler in Munich, an early editor of the Völkischen Beobachter and author of Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (published 1927)
• Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968), author of Ritter, Tod und Teufel (1920)
• Eugen Fischer (1874–1967)
• Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), author of Handbuch der Judenfrage (1907)
• Otto Hauser (1876–1944), author of Geschichte des Judentums (1921)
• Julius Langbehn (1851–1907), author of Rembrandt als Erzieher (1906)
• Fritz Lenz (1887–1976)
• Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), longtime editor of the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter
• Richard Wagner (1813-1833), the brilliant but notoriously anti-Semitic composer, author of "Das Judenthum in der Musik“ ("Judaism in Music") (1850)

Yes, it's a real rogues' gallery.

Baur, Fischer and Lenz were all three geneticists, who published a 1923 study called, "Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene“ ("Outline of human hereditary tenets and racial hygiene"). They promoted such ideas as the notion that the less valuable races breed more prolifically than the more valuable ones, a notion that White Power politicians like Pat Buchanan still promote. They also advocated the idea that "true genius" was inherited and never the result of upbringing and education. That concept will be all too familiar to anyone who has listened to the tedious "heredity vs. upbringing" assertions typically of white racists in America. I learned long ago that when someone poses the rhetorical question "What's more important, inheritance or upbringing?" that you're about two sentences away from a lesson on how "us white folks sure are smarter than them blacks."

Dietrick Eckart (1868-1923), one of the nasty characters who influenced Hitler's racial propaganda in Mein Kampf

That's part of the reason I have to admire someone who can wade through this gutter literature and then write about it coherently and professionally. Because that's mostly what Hitler scooped up into his writing and speeches. There's no doubt that Hitler was shrewd and extremely talented as a politician. But his literary talents were not marked by brilliance. What he provided in Mein Kampf was a propagandist recycling of the anti-Semitic and radical right nationalist idea that he absorbed particularly in prewar Vienna and postwar Munich.

And as Töppel emphasizes repeatedly, it's not easy to track exactly which influences were most important for Hitler at the time he wrote Mein Kampf. Hitler's own claims are unreliable. He claimed, for instance, that all during his service in the German Army during the First World War, he carried around the five volume of Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea in his backpack. But Töppel explains that there is little evidence that Hitler had much if any direct acquaintance with the 19th-century philosopher's work. And that he probably learned much of what he did know of him before writing Mein Kampf was through Dietrich Eckart.

Töppel argues that the scholarship on Hitler's racial ideology has tended to overestimate the influence of several mostly unsavory characters: "geopolitical" theorist Karl Haushofer (1869-1946),; the American segregationist Madison Grant (1865-1937), at least not for the "Volk und Rasse" chapter; French anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936); Joseph Adolf Lanz, aka, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), leader of a small Austrian esoteric racist religious sect he called the New Templar Order; and, Viennese occultist Guido von List (1848-1919). The groups of Lanz von Lebenfels and of List used the swastika as a favorite symbol; the swastika was adopted more widely by German-nationalist groups in Austria in the years before the First World War. As Brigitte Hamann notes in Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Ditators (1996), there is some evidence that Hitler may have been particularly impressed by List's valuation of the swastika as a Germanic symbol.

Töppel also rejects the idea that the novelist Karl May, who wrote cowboy-and-Indian stories set in the American Old West, was any significant influence on Hitler's racial ideology. Hitler's own claim to have read many Karl May novels as a child is totally credible. Because Karl May was incredibly popular among young German and Austria readers. To this day, any German or Austrian under 50 or so probably grew up reading Karl May stories. And those younger are familiar with him through the TV and movies based on his tales, like those of his American Indian character Winnetou.

Töppel stresses that Hitler was highly selective in the ideas he drew from his sources. He took the ones that fit the framework of his notion of the superior "Aryan" race whose most important enemy was the Jewish race. Töppel cites several instances in which sources important for him on some points explicitly rejected other ideas on which Hitler's racial narrative depended. And Hitler didn't care whether there was any actual scientific basis for the ideas on which he relied. He was doing hate propaganda, not scholarly work.

Töppel also notes, "„Mein Kampf“ enthält im Vergleich zu Hitlers Reden und zu völkischen Schriften des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts weder überraschend Neues noch viel Originäres." ("In comparison to Hitler's speeches and to völkish writings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mein Kampf contains neither anything surprisingly new nor much original.")

Hitler's racial propaganda was particularly focused on making "the Jews" the scapegoat for all resentments:

So entwickelten sich „Jude“ und „jüdisch“ letztendlich zu Chiffren für alles, was die Nationalsozialisten bekämpften. Laut einer Aufzeichnung des Unternehmers Eduard August Scharrer (1880–1932) sagte Hitler bereits im Dezember 1922: „Kampf gegen das Judentum ist eines der Hauptmomente in der Orientierung der Massen der nationalsozialistischen Partei. Dieses Schlagwort kann nicht aufgegeben werden, denn dadurch wird erreicht, daß die Massen in jedem Gegner, der aufgezeigt wird, ihren Todfeind sehen und sich danach einstellen.“

[So "Jew" and "Jewish" developed in the end to code words for everything that the National Socialists were fighting against. According to a record of the businessman Eduard August Scharrer (1880–1932) said that Hitler as early as December 1922 said: "Fighting against Judaism is one of the chief moments in the orientation of the masses of the National Socialist Party. This slogan cannot be given up, because through it will be achieved that the masses will see their mortal enemy {the Jews} in every opponent that is designated {for them} and then direct their fire at them.]

Slavoj Žižek is a clown

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is one of the odder figures who counts as a "public intellectual" these days. He is regarded as an important contemporary philosopher. And philosophy is an academic field where important accomplishments are made by people who may have eccentricities.

But this guy is also considered a major contemporary practicitioner of political theory and a leftwing, even Marxist political philosopher. Does this sound like any kind of left-leaning person to you?

In this video, Zizek On Racism YouTube 02/12/2011 he argues that that racist and nationalistic dirty jokes are good things and can be used in "progressive racism." He sneers at "political correctness" in Santa Cruz, in terms that Rush Limbaugh could pretty much use with minor changes. He uses as an example of the virtue of such "jokes"

In this clip, he explains that, well, that The Sound of Music is racist against Germans because it portrays Germans as Jews modeled on anti-Semitic stereotypes. Yes, he seriously argues that. Slavoj Žižek explains why the Sound of Music is racist YouTube date 11/25/2007:

Whatever the quality of his philosophical work, in his role as a public intellectual, he strikes me more and more as a clown. A rightwing clown.

Johann Hari came to a similar conclusion in his article, Pseud's corner New Statesman 04/30/2007.

In the opening scenes of Zizek!, a new feature-length documentary, it is not hard to see why they fall for him. Zizek looks like an immense human Droopy Dawg. He talks with such babbling, neurotic force about everything from quantum physics and Hegel to Meg Ryan that, for a moment, he is hypnotic. Leading the film-makers through his chaotic transcontinental life, he jabbers to them from his bed and even takes them to a long staircase where he fantasises about killing himself - before posing as a splattered corpse on the concrete floor beneath.

As the film progresses, however, Zizek does more than symbolically enact his own death; he commits intellectual suicide, all but admitting that his "philosophy" is a slew of nonsense. If the director, Astra Taylor, intended to make a fawning fan letter - as her cameos in the film suggest - she has failed. If she intended to shred Zizek's credibility, she has succeeded stunningly.

Tags: critical theory, racism, slavoj žižek

White liberals, white racism and criticism of Obama

Melissa Harris-Perry's article Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama The Nation 09/21/2011 is getting quite a bit of attention. She uses only some very general statistics and no individual examples to strongly suggest that an "insidious form of racism" is behind criticism of President Obama by white liberals/progressives.

Joan Walsh has a long, thoughtful response to the article in Are white liberals abandoning the president? Salon 09/25/2011. Harris-Perry responds to Walsh's criticism in The Epistemology of Race Talk The Nation 09/26/2011.

I think Walsh definitely has the better of the interchange, which I won't try to summarize here, other than to say that the gist of it is that Harris-Perry makes an unconvincing, impressionistic case that (a) white liberals are more critical of the Obama Administration than they were of the Clinton Administration, and (2) that difference is likely to result from white racism among progressives. Walsh explains straightforwardly why both premises are highly questionable. Harris-Perry's response could work well for someone angling for a "FOX Democrat" gig arguing that liberals are the real white racists.

Two points I haven't seen in the discussion on this yet:

1. President Obama in the debt-ceiling negotiations offered the Republicans a Grand Bargain that would cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. This is bad policy in itself and bad politics for the Democrats. These programs are essential for the vast majority of Americans and are very popular because of that. It would be remarkable in the extreme if Obama weren't getting sharp criticism over that.
2. Obama's "triangulation" politics, especially since the 2010 election, has involved defining himself as a centrist by emphasizing his differences with Democratic liberals. In speech after speech, he's highlighted how members "of my own Party" differ with him over policies. Already in 2009, Obama's then Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel was calling liberal activists "f*****g retarded" for trying to put pressure on Blue Dog Democrats, pressure meant to bolster Obama's ostensible position on the health care reform. Later, Rahm apologized to the disabled for using the word "retarded." No apologies to Democratic progressives were forthcoming.

Harris-Perry's "Epistemology of Race Talk" post employs what I assume is some sort of postmodern standard of evidence that is worth noting:

[There] is a common strategy of asking any person of color who identifies a racist practice or pattern to "prove" that racism is indeed the causal factor. This is typically demanded by those who are certain of their own purity of racial motivation. The implication is if one cannot produce irrefutable evidence of clear, blatant and intentional bias, then racism must be banned as a possibility. But this is both silly as an intellectual claim and dangerous as a policy standard.

Readers can judge for themselves whether Joan Walsh is demanding "irrefutable evidence of clear, blatant and intentional bias" in her article. She obviously is not.

But what Joan does do is look at the available polling evidence and asks whether they indicate race as a significant factor in Obama's approval ratings among white liberals. Which is a perfectly sensible approach. Such patterns can be reasonably detected or inferred from opinion polls and other social-science and marketing data without requiring "irrefutable evidence of clear, blatant and intentional bias." Even the US legal system with the assumption of the innocence of the accused doesn't require "irrefutable evidence" to convict someone of a felony, only evidence beyond a "reasonable doubt."

Melissa Harris-Perry made a claim based on historical assumptions (the popularity of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama during their first terms) for which there is evidence on which to test the claim. I certainly have no "irrefutable evidence" that she's wrong. Nor would I say that "racism must be banned as a possibility." But her claim doesn't hold up to the scrutiny to which Joan Walsh subjects it.

Tags: joan walsh, melissa harris-perry, racism, white racism

Ian Haney Lopez on "reactionary colorblindness"

From Ian Haney Lopez, Blind spot: How reactionary colorblindness has infected our courts and our politics The American Prospect 03/29/2011:

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne knows racism when he sees it, and he isn’t afraid to publicly castigate the most recent agents of race hate. Horne is an outspoken opponent of racism in a state roiling with tensions about "illegal aliens" and "anchor babies." The bigotry Horne especially rebukes? Courses like "Latino literature." If Horne has his way, the Tucson public school system—serving a student body that's over half Mexican American and, like other districts, already suffering hard economic times - will lose $15 million in state funding this year unless it terminates its Mexican American Studies program. According to Horne, classes in the program spread "one-sided propaganda" and "brainwash" impressionable young minds by teaching un-American calumnies — that there's prejudice against Mexican Americans in Arizona, for instance.

Horne's effort to whip up public hysteria about the place of Hispanics in our society owes its success to the right-wing co-optation of colorblindness. This story began in law but now defines our politics. Conservatives such as Horne and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts have managed to take the moral high ground away from liberals on race. Using a reactionary form of the old colorblind ideal of a society free from racial oppression, they have declared that our society must no longer see race at all — especially not in continued patterns of mistreatment and definitely not as a basis for remedial efforts. Reactionary colorblindness justifies ignoring continued inequality and attacking affirmative action. In addition, reactionary colorblindness has become a favored tool among racial demagogues in American politics. [my emphasis]

Tags: ian haney lopez, racism, white racism

Continuity in white racism

I recently read extensively through secessionist-era speeches and sermons. Word for word, they echoed the racist diatribes that I heard growing up in the South - from invocations of African barbarism to blatant portrayals of rape and racial amalgamation. Secession died in 1865, but the ugly sentiments behind it persisted. My hope is that the 150th anniversary of the Civil War will spur reasoned discourse and an end to our forebears' destructive vision. I also hope that it will end denial by my fellow white Southerners. The next time you hear someone proclaim that secession was about state's rights, not slavery, ask what right it was that the seceding states were so anxious to protect. [my emphasis]

This is from the contribution of Gordon Rhea to the article A Civil Discourse Charleston Magazine April 2011 (scrool down). It's a reminder of the elements of direct continuity from the days of slavery and the white racism that developed to justify it and white racism of today. As Rhea points out, that means that Confederate imagery is very servicable to present-day white racist agendas:

The Confederate battle flag of my youth represented opposition to integration. Today, it decorates the armbands of skinheads and white supremacists here and abroad.

Confederate apologists protest that hate groups have hijacked their flag, that Confederate symbols represent a proud heritage, not a hateful ideology. But white supremacists did not appropriate the Confederate flag by accident. They were not drawn to it simply by its design. They embraced it because it represented a nation stridently and openly dedicated to its principles. In 1861, the Confederacy's vice president Alexander Stephens proclaimed: "The Confederacy's foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." [my emphasis]

He also points to the sometimes hysterical fears that antebellum slaveowners embraced and encouraged, which was a huge part of the political dynamic that led to the Civil War:

Southern spokesmen described an apocalyptic vision of emancipation, race wars, and miscegenation: The collapse of white supremacy would be so cataclysmic that no self-respecting Southerner could fail to rally to the secessionist cause. Modern Confederate apologists contend that secession was about "states rights," not slavery. They should read the speeches and pronouncements of their forebears, who give lip service to "states' rights" only in the context of the rights of states to decide whether some of their inhabitants could own other humans.

Tags: american civil war, gordon rhea, racism, us civil war, white racism

Anti-black racism in the Libyan civil war - on what's rapidly becoming "our side"

Annett Meiritz reports on a racial factor in the Libyan civil war (Mörderisches Missverständnis: Hatz auf Schwarzafrikaner in Libyen Spiegel Online 08.03.2011). Oil state Libya has black African immigrants from many of the poor countries in Africa. The Qaddafi regime also employs mercenaries, many of them black Africans, as a major part of the security force. Having come to power in a military coup himself, he has kept the Libyan army fairly small and relied heavily on mercenaries responsible directly to him.

In the civil war conditions that rapidly developed in Libya, some Libyans are now violently venting their hatred for the regime on any black Africans they can find, without asking questions about whether they are connected with the Qaddafi regime at all. The article quotes Jean-Philippe Chauzy of the Internationalen Organisation für Migration (IOM) as saying that attacks took place on blacks in Libya before the current unrest, but the budding civil war has unleased a new wave of hatred against black Africans.

Clair MacDougall reports on the subject for the Christian Science Monitor, How Qaddafi helped fuel fury toward Africans in Libya 03/06/2011:

“I think that there are levels of racism within Libyan society that are quite problematic. But racism is not just against other Africans, meaning non-Libyan Africans, but also within Libya itself," says Na'eem Jeenah, executive director of the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa. "Qaddafi’s bodyguards, many of those people are actually from the south of Libya, partly because Qaddafi trusts them more than he would trust people from the north for various tribal and other reasons."

Issaka Souare, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Johannesburg, also thinks that the resentment toward dark-skinned Africans is connected to Qaddafi’s tribal allegiances and his perceived favoritism of Libya's south as well as his “Pan-Africanism.”

Mr. Souare says there may be among Libya's anti-Qaddafi rebels in the long-neglected, now "liberated" east of the country an unwillingness to accept that other Libyans could support Qaddafi.

"There seems to be this idea that if people are supporting Qaddafi, it must be mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa, because it could not be the work of Libyans," says Mr. Souare. "It must be these savage Africans."”

Now that the United States is beginning to intervene militarily, this aspect of what "our side" is doing will quickly become yet another American direct responsibility. Is the United States up to doing nation-building in a violence-and-hate-ridden Libya? It's a question that Congress should be asking urgently.

Tags: libya, racism

Frankfurt School, 1936: Race and pseudoscience

The 3/1936 issue of the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung contained an English-language review by Bernhard Stern of a book by Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon, We Europeans (1936). Stern addressed the current status of knowledge on race:

The influence of racial pseudo-science on state policy makes welcome critical books on race and race theory, in the hope that, they will provide arsenals of scientific fact and argument that will check the spread of the epidemic of obscurantism that threatens to engulf the world. Huxley and Haddon have written a popular book which will serve that function well. They have reviewed evidence and theories on race long known to scientists but fresh to non-academic audiences, and have done so in easy comprehensible terms. Their arguments follow lines familiar to students: there are no pure races because of the universal prevalence of intermarriage; race classifications are based on arbitrary criteria and are tenuous because of overlappings; human types are biologically instable subject to cultural, environmental influences; there is no positive correlation of a specific race and superior intelligence; the concepts race, language and nation must be kept sharply distinct. In short, they conclude that the term race has lost its value as a scientific instrument and philosophies of history based upon it are specious. Materials have been gathered from diverse fields of history, anthropology and genetics, to buttress these contentions, and they are in general persuasive. [my emphasis]

Anthropologists today generally tend to find the concept of race to be not particularly helpful (to put it mildly).

However, the fact that race is an important social category also influences anthropology. I saw a presentation in 11/12/2010 by Alexis Boutin on The Reality of "Race": A Bioarchaeological Perspective. One of the things she pointed out is that forensic anthropologists working on criminal cases must look for indications of characteristics that indicate visible characteristics of the victims being examined, such as ancestral origin and skin color.

But what was true in 1936 is also true today. Those like Nazi race theorists or segregationists who use alleged scientific characteristics to justify their social categories of race are promoting pseudoscience.

The most provocative notion Boutin mentioned in her lecture was that there is more variation within (socially-defined) racial groups than between them. Elaborating on the point in response to audience questions, she said that characteristics like skin color that are taken as markers of social definitions of race are actually very recent developments, a blink in evolutionary time. In other words, they are biologically superficial.

She also explained that genetic bottlenecks account for part of that phenomenon. She used the example of the ancestors of present-day humans migrating from Africa to Europe. In such migrations, there is typically a drop in population. As DNA evidence indicates, what happens in those population drops is that a significant portion of the genetic variation in the original population is lost, the surviving groups carry only a portion of them, i.e., the genetic “bottleneck”.

One such genetic bottleneck may have occurred fairly early in the history of homo sapiens. Curtis Marean reported in the August 2010 Scientific American, “When the Sea Saved Humanity”, on the evidence showing changing climate conditions between 195,000 and 123,000 years ago (an ice age named Marine Isotope Stage 6) which may have reduced the homo sapien population to a small group living on the tip of Southern Africa. A slideshow on the article is available online.

Boutin also pointed out that current social categories of race lump together very diverse populations. In biological terms, in other words, they are basically arbitrary.

Tags: frankfurt school, race, racism

The Democratic Party, liberals and white racism (2 of 2)

The specter of the Willie Horton ad haunted Democrats in 1992

In my Part 1 post under this title, I talked about the advice many Democrats prior to the 1992 elections were giving their Party to distance themselves from anything that smacked of racial or "social issue" liberalism. It was at best a dubious idea then, and it's wildly out-of-touch now. But it has more than a lingering appeal, as witnessed by the addition of an anti-abortion provision to the Affordable Care Act of 2010 at the insistence of Democratic Blue Dogs.

The 20th anniversary issue of The American Prospect (June 2010) contains several articles providing retrospectives to the discussions over the future of liberalism and the Democratic Party that were current when the magazine debuted in 1992. It had become conventional wisdom after the 1988 Presidential campaign, in which Old Man Bush used the infamous Willie Horton ad and the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag to tar Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis as un-American, soft on crime and blacks, and generally weak and unreliable. Some campaign consultants and Democratic officials, particularly those associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), advocated that the Party take a more conservative stance. Different advocates of that course favored varying degrees of conservatism on the Party's part. The fact that Dukakis prior to the general election campaign seemed to be a model of a pragmatic, non-ideological Governor and yet the Republicans still tarred him as a wild leftist didn't seem to make a great impression on the hardline DLCers.

Mark Schmitt recalls those arguments in Reading Progressive History Through the Prospect 08/02/2010:

The Prospect brought a distinct viewpoint to that debate, one in which lines were clearly defined: The most notable alternative came from the Democratic Leadership Council. These moderate-to-conservative "New Democrats" had launched the Progressive Policy Institute in 1989 with a long essay called "The Politics of Evasion," by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck. They argued that the party had not come to terms with the electorate's deep conservatism, especially with worries about crime and welfare, and that neither "liberal fundamentalism" nor more effective mobilization of minorities and low-income voters would overcome that reality.

As I mentioned in Part 1, the Presidential electoral arithmetic prior to 1992 gave surface plausibility to such DLC argument: California, the most populous state with the most electoral votes, was considered to be a safe Republican state in Presidential elections and therefore the Democrats had to win some Southern states to gain an Electoral College majority.

Regardless of how much sense or how little it made circa 1990, those arguments still echo in the chronic defensiveness of the Democrats in Congress and in the Obama White House that we've seen the last year and a half. For many base voters and surely for many swing voters, it often looks inexplicable. But many Democrats are haunted still by the specter of Willie Horton.

Ann Friedman also recalls some later versions of those appeals in All Politics is Identity Politics 08/10/2010:

Kathleen M. Sullivan, writing in the Prospect in 1998, summarized Nancy Rosenblum's book, Membership and Morals: "Rather than socializing members for democracy, groups are likely to be exclusionary, snobbish, and competitive vis-a-vis others. The internal cooperation they foster in no way guarantees that they will be ... civic, virtuous, or deliberative in relation to the larger polity." In 2004, Michael Lind argued in these pages that, in order to regain the majority, the Democratic Party should attempt to dissociate itself from "identity-politics groups -- blacks, Latinos, feminists, gays, and lesbians -- and economic-interest groups, like unions" -- and instead organize itself by geography.

I don't find a link to Sullivan's article, but the Lind article is Mapquest.Dem 12/20/2004.

Lind's position in 2004 in particular was a real throwback to that conventional wisdom of the early 1990s, and an especially blunt statement of it. Part of the flaw of his argument in that 2004 article is that he was trying hard to make a regional argument that fit nearly two centuries of American history, and it doesn't work very well. It also shows a pessimism that, especially in retrospect, looks panicky and despairing:

Outside of selected cities, the core region of the Democratic Party is New England. The Democratic Party is also the minority party at all levels of government.

At present, the Democratic Party is a socially liberal party that welcomes both economic conservatives and economic liberals. But in a country with a center-right majority on social issues and a center-left majority on economic issues of interest to the broad middle class and working class, this is exactly backward: Defining liberalism in terms of social liberalism is a formula for minority status. According to various polls, the number of self-described liberals in the United States is no more than 18 percent or 20 percent. Public attitudes on race, gay rights, and other subjects have been getting more liberal with each generation, but widespread opposition to unqualified abortion rights and gay marriage shows the limits to this trend. ...

The Democrats should retain their bedrock commitment to fighting laws that discriminate against individuals on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation. On other issues, which might include affirmative action, abortion rights, and gay marriage, the Democratic Party as a whole should take no stand.

Or, in other words, keep the Party's principles in rhetoric but on practical issues and specific legislation, throw African-Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and those annoying women with their, you know, female issues under the bus. Or at least send them permanently to the back of the bus. Because the Democratic Party has become "the minority party at all levels of government" and "is slowly being confined to Greater New England." He sounds as panicky there as a Republican who's just heard the word "mosque." Judge for yourself whether the last six years in American politics give credence to his analysis.

For more thoughtful reflections on "identity politics," see the remainder of Friedman's article and Wendy Kaminer's Politics of Identity The American Prospect 09/23/2001.

What scares me is less the effect that anti-black or anti-Latino racism may have on Democratic prospects and more the danger that Democrats will revert to their reflective defensive crouch, which is heavily informed by the flawed ideas of the DLC circa 1990.

Tags: democratic party, racism, white racism

The Democratic Party and the politics of white racism (1 of 2)

Ross Barnett, Governor of Mississippi 1960-64 and a leader of white resistance to desegregation and the rule of law

While puzzling over the strange "concern troll" polemics of Bob Somerby at his Daily Howler site, I was struck by how his thinking on the subject of Democrats and the politics of race resembles a particular strain of thinking among Democrats circa 1992. For one representative version of this line of argument, see the sad 1991 book, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics by Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall. Here is how Thomas Edsall stated his view around the same time in Willie Horton's Message New York Review of Books 02/03/1992 edition (link behind subscription):

These issues - including, crime, welfare, affirmative action, defendant's rights, the erosion of the family - exploit the combination of racial tension and resentment toward special privileges for the poor, and toward tax dollars going to people who do not deserve them. That such feelings have become so visible and highly charged has put Democratic liberals at a disadvantage. It is hard for Democratic politicians to make political capital out of the sluggish economy and the divisions on the right because too many voters in presidential elections are hostile to their approach to social issues. The contemporary failure of liberalism lies not only in its dramatic loss of majority support but in the vehemence and seeming inexplicability of the sustained rejection by the voters of the Democratic Party and its nominees. The moderately egalitarian New Deal liberalism that produced majorities from the start of the Great Depression through the election of Lyndon Johnson has been undermined by the competition between constituencies and interests that now differ sharply about the meaning of equality. In Birmingham, Alabama, formerly Democratic white firemen angrily oppose still Democratic black firemen over the standards to be met for promotion to lieutenant and captain. In East Los Angeles Hispanic parents claim that whites who fled into the San Fernando Valley twenty years ago are trying to keep Hispanic students out of UCLA.

The leading activists within the Democratic Party, who largely control the selection of nominees, are far more willing than the public generally to allocate resources favoring relative newcomers, whether for education or welfare or public jobs, along racial, ideological, and ethnic lines. The bitterness of the disputes over such matters as municipal contract "set-asides" for minorities and over admission to the advanced "magnet schools" in some cities has made heterogeneity, once the strength of the Democratic Party, a source of destructive political infighting. The demands of Democratic politicians for fairer taxes and new public investment might seem to have obvious political appeal in 1992; but those demands are regarded skeptically by voters who ask: fairness for whom? investment for the benefit of which racial or ethnic groups? or which gender? [my emphasis]

Edsall was and still is treated as a liberal. But this stuff has always read like a "concern troll" conservative pitch to me. In form, he's wringing his hands over the dilemma that the Democrats are committed to social justice in various forms, but are confronted with large numbers of white Real Americans who have unfortunate hostility toward various minorities and poor people.

One doesn't have to look too closely to see the problematic nature of Edsall's approach. For one thing, Edsall concentrated on Presidential elections, at a time when both Houses of Congress, a majority of governorships and most state legislators were Democratic. He uses this clumsy slight-of-hand to claim that "too many voters in presidential elections are hostile to their [the Democrats'] approach to social issues." But was that so? There are mounds of poll data one can parse various ways. But one of the paradoxes of the Republican dominance in Presidential politics from 1980 to 1992 was that on individual issues, including hot-button social issues like abortion, a majority or plurality favored Democratic positions. Asking the question, why do voters support Democratic positions but Republican Presidents get elected?, is a very different question than, how can the Democrats address the fact that so many voters are hostile to their positions on "social issues"?

Cut through the "concern troll" talk and what Edsall was essentially arguing was that for the Democrats to be a competitive political party nationally, that they had to convince voters that they were conservative on "social issues" and not so friendly to racial minorities, either. The surface plausibility of that argument in 1991-2 came basically from three realities: Republicans had won three Presidential elections in a row, and conventional wisdom among the punditocracy was that Old Man Bush was a virtual shoo-in for re-election; the realignment of white Southerners from the Democratic to Republican Party was still a relatively recent thing and conventional wisdom still considered Southern conservatives registered Democratic to be in play in Presidential elections; and, California had voted Republican in the Presidential elections of 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988.

As long as California was a solidly Republican state, the Democrats needed to carry at least some Southern electoral votes to be able to win the Presidency. Whatever plausibility the "concern troll" argument had in 1992, in other words, was largely based on the assumption that California was a reliably Republican state in Presidential election. In fact, California voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Ironically, the racial-fear-mongering Willie Horton ads Old Man Bush used in his 1988 race and to which the title of Edsall article refers, were used by the 1992 Clinton campaign to discredit Bush in the eyes of racially tolerant suburban swing voters.

And in 1994, during the last big wave of xenophobia, Republican Governor Pete Wilson backed the now infamous anti-immigrant Proposition 187. The proposition was so badly drafted that basically none of it stood up in court. But the long-term political effects were dramatic. It permanently and significantly increased the voting participation rate of Latino voters, and it heavily shifted their preferences to the Democratic Party.

It's worth noting in the current context that on race, the Republican Party of 1992 was on the whole considerably more moderate in its outward approach than today. Old Man Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas turned into a public fiasco even though he was approved for the Court (after which he went on to become one of the Court's least distinguished Justices in history). But the nomination also gave Republicans the opportunity to tout the existence of conservative Republican African-American figures. Until Prop 187, the Republicans were working hard to appeal to Latino voters. In 1991, Old Man Bush and other prominent Republicans were very public in opposing the election of Louisiana's Republican Senate nominee, the notorious racist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. That didn't mean they had given up their Southern Strategy of appealing to white voters on the basis of racial fears and prejudices. But they were going on the assumption that to be perceived as encouraging or countenancing open white racism would be electorally detrimental to their prospects.

The Democratic Party realignment in the South today has long since taken place. The question for the Democrats there is how to build majorities. But the Republicans' Southern strategy has given them pretty much a lock on the voters who can be swung by racial resentments and prejudices. So the Democrats' prospects for boosting their support among white voters turns around winning over voters for whom anti-black and anti-Latino prejudice are less important than other issues. And also on winning over the increasing Latino voting demographic. After the passage of the anti-Latino SB 1070 in Arizona this year, polls in Texas showed a significant shift there among Latino voters to the Democratic Party.

And in this environment, people like Somerby expect that the Democrats are going to damage themselves politically if they are vocal about opposing white racism?

Incidentally, I use the phrase "white racism" in particular because white people have never had a problem finding ways to criticize racism among African-Americans are Latinos. For those of us who actually can perceived white racism when it's staring us in the face and shouting in our ears, it's a very familiar refrain that its those people who are racist against us. I don't use the phrase to minimize the harm of anti-white racism. I use it because I want people to know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about white racism.

(Continued in Part 2 tomorrow)

Tags: democratic party, racism, white racism

Frustration on the Arizona anti-Latino law

This is frustrating to see. The Obama administration did file suit against implementation of the stop-and-search-the-brown-people law before it formally takes effect at the end of this month. But when they did, according to James Doty in The president who won't call racism racism Salon 07/07/2010, they presented a legal argument that may wind up producing a court decision that leaves the racial-harassment provisions of the law intact! He writes:

The government's complaint in the Arizona case, which challenges the law commonly referred to as SB 1070, asserts repeatedly that the law frustrates the federal government's ability to implement national immigration policy. (In legal parlance, the argument is that federal immigration law "preempts" state statutory enactments.) Entirely absent from the government's argument, though, is any claim that the law encourages officers to racially profile Hispanic residents and violate their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches -- the aspects of the law that many people find the most objectionable.

That’s surprising, because a preemption argument is unlikely to fell the most controversial provision of the law: the requirement that officers investigate the immigration status of any person they reasonably suspect is in the country illegally. The government's lawsuit argues that this mandate impermissibly burdens the federal bureaucracy, but it's hardly intuitive that verifying immigration status with federal officials would thwart the goals or policies of the feds. (To the contrary, federal law specifically authorizes state officers to verify immigration status with the federal government.) In contrast, the notion that that the law foists raced-based decisions on law enforcement officers offers both a more compelling storyline and firmer legal ground.

In legal and moral terms, this is just the wrong approach. In political terms, this is starting to look like yet another instance where Obama and the Democrats are handed a golden opportunity - in this case to shift major numbers of Latino voters to the Democrats and also to challenge the Republicans' toxic narrative on race-related issues - and the Dems trying hard to blow it. Fortunately, as Doty mentions in his article, the ACLU is mounting a legal challenge to those sections of the law.

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, racism

Characteristics of racist pseudoscience

Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau, father of pseudoscientific race theories

The only major essay in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung for 1933 is in the third edition: Paul Ludwig Landsberg, "Rassenideologie und Rassenwissenschaft. Zur neuesten Literatur über das Rassenproblem" 3/1933. Landsberg's essay has some excellent general observations about racist ideology of the time, combined with a couple of observations that are suprisingly retrograde even by 1933 standards. But his general characterization of racist ideology is still useful today.

The Deutsches Historisches Museum provides a biographical sketch of Landsberg in Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901-1944) - ein Exilkrimi. Landsberg fled the Nazi regime early in March of 1933. He was the son of Jewish parents; his father was the first Jew to become the Rector of the University of Bonn. They remained Jewish but had their son Paul baptized as Protestant, and married a Catholic.

He went first to Switzerland, then to Spain, where he secured positions as a university professor, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced him to flee Spain. He went then to Paris, where after the war with Germany began he eventually took the name Paul Richert. He was interned in one of the detentions centers France established for German nationals after the outbreak of war, and was eventually repatiated to the Germans and he wound up in the concentration camps. He died of tuberculosis in the camp Heinkel-Oranienburg in 1944.

Landsberg discussed six characteristics or tendencies of pseudoscientific race theories, which he traces to Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) and his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines [Essay on the Inequality of Human Races](1853-1855), who was followed by characters like Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1928). The six include:

1. Taking the race with which the writer of the race theory identifies as the chief possessor of the highest value. Race theorists sometimes give this preference/identification to a race not their own.

2. A denial of the changeability over time within a single race, including the influence of social environments, which the pseudoscientific race theorist seeks to deny or minimize. This and the first characteristic set up a pretence of the stabilization of the alleged superior race, a claim of enduring qualities over many generations.

3. Discussing "pure" races without bothering much about the question, "Pure since when?"

4. An identification of a biological racial or ethnic groups with a nation and a people. In reality, "Kein bestehendes Volk and keine Nation bildet rassenmäsig auch nur in entferntesten eine Einheit." ["No existing people and no nation constitute even in the least bit a racial unity {i.e., a pure race}."]

5. Stress on the concept of racial breeding and racial hygene.

6. Assumption of an anthropology (a general definition of humanity) based not on empirical rality but on an assumption of the primary importance of race. Along with it comes an historical concept of the history and development of a race.

Landsberg refutes various aspects of racial theories of the time, dismissing them as unscientific:

Nun gar, sagen wir, die Werke Michalangelos oder Goethes aus deren Blutsherfunft verständlich machen zu wollen, gehört zum offenbarer Unsinn.

[Now, we say, to want to attempt to understand the works of Michalangelo or Goethe based on their blood heritage is obviously absurd.]

The clear-headedness of most of Landsberg's analysis makes even more surprising a couple of his arguments. In connection with his fifth characteristic of pseudoscientific racial theories, he seems to concede a lot to the eugenic theories of that time when he writes:

Der Gedanke der Rassenhygiene an sich is uralt, er geht mindestens auf Plato zurück; er ist auch ein weitgehend richtiger Gedanke.

[The notion of racial hygene is ancient. It goes back at least to Plato; and it is also to a large extent a correct notion.]

He elaborates on that by citing the scientific developments like Mendelian genetics in the study of biological inheritance. He doesn't go on to make any explicitly eugenic arguments, such as that of the alleged need to prevent the mentally disabled from having children, one of the most cruel ideas of Anglo-Saxon eugenics. His main point is that the most dangerous ideas are not the purely crazy ones, but the ones that are mixed with a substantial portion of reality. He's arguing that discoveries in biological genetics can add undeserved plausibility to pseudoscientific race theories. But though he clearly argues against the latter, one might have expected that he would have more clearly distanced himself from eugenic-friendly formulation.

The second erroneous notion is one that he far more clearly embraces, that of Lamarckian evolution, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) argued that acquired physical characteristics, such as muscles built up through exercise, could be passed along to offspring. The link just given to the UC-Berkeley Museum of Paleontolgy explains:

Lamarckian inheritance, at least in the sense Lamarck intended, is in conflict with the findings of genetics and has now been largely abandoned -- but until the rediscovery of Mendel's laws at the beginning of the twentieth century, no one understood the mechanisms of heredity, and Lamarckian inheritance was a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. Several other scientists of the day, including Erasmus Darwin, subscribed to the theory of use and disuse -- in fact, Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary theory is so close to Lamarck's in many respects that it is surprising that, as far as is known now, the two men were unaware of each other's work. ...

His mechanism of evolution remained a popular alternative to Darwinian selection until the beginning of the 20th century.

But by 1933, Lamarckian evolution had been rejected by biology for decades. One of Sigmund Freud's stranger intellectual quirks was that he also held to a version of Lamarckian evolution, arguing that memories could be transmitted by inheritance to future generations. But even with a famous name like Freud's joining him in the error (at least in a limited way), arguing for Lamarckian evolution in 1933 was just not a sound scientific claim.

However, his description of the characteristics of pseudoscientific racial theories is not dependent on accepting the Lamarckian theory of evolution. His article is a reminder of how thoroughly at this time such racial ideologies were discredited by the level of scientific knowledge of the time.

And, speaking of ideology, Landsberg has a good comment about what constitutes and ideology:

Was den Begriff der Ideologie anlangt, so liegt es uns fern, den Ideologen etwa mit dem Betrüger gleich zu setzen. Dass eine Lehre also Ideologie zu bezeichnen ist, sagt aus, dass sie sowohl ihre Entstehung, wie ihre Evidenz für ihre Anhänger im Wesentlichen nicht einem Erfahrungsinhalt verdankt, sondern einer sozialen Funktion, einer Auswirking in der Gesellschaft und ihren Kämpfen, welche von ihr erwartet wird. Diese Absichten und Erwartungen brauchen natürlich keineswegs bewusst zu sein.

[Concerning the concept of ideology, far be it from us to equate the ideologue with a deceiver, for instance. That a teaching deserves to be designated as ideology means that not only its origin but also its credibility for its adherents is not attributable essentially to its experiential content, but rather to its social function, an effect in the society and its conflicts, that is expected from it. Of course, these purposes and expectations are in no way necessarily conscious ones.]

Tags: frankfurt school, racism

Indo-Europeans, language and the myth of the "Aryan" race

Guido von List (1848-1919)

Earlier this year I spent some time looking at the relation between what was once commonly called the ancient Aryan language and the 19th- and 20th-century concepts of the "Aryan race" that the Nazis made so infamous.

This article, Arier, from the Glossar Rechextremismus of the German state of Brandenburg gives a very good summary (in German) of the concept of "Aryan" as it came to be used by the Nazis.

As they employed the term, "Aryan" actually meant little other than "not Jewish". Although the Nazis considered Germans a superior race to Slavs and others, as well. But my focus in this post is not the Nazi concept but the much older history that racist thinkers and propagandists have claimed as a background for the so-called Aryan race.

As the Glossar Rechtsextremismus notes, the Nazis so discredited the word "Aryan" that the ancient langauge that was once described neutrally as Aryan is now called "Indo-European."

The Indo-European languages are many, extant and otherwise: the proto-Indo-European language gave birth to the following languages, in alphabetical order: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Avestan, Bengali, Celtic, Czech, English, Faliscan, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hindi, Hittite, Illyrian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latin, Latvian, Luvian, Messapic, Oscan, Persian, Phrygian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swedish, Thracian, Tocharian, Romany, Welsh, and Yiddish.

J.P. Mallory in his text In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth (1989) argues that the most plausible location of the original Indo-European "homeland" is in the steppes of the "Pontic-Caspian" area, very roughly the area north and northeast of the Black Sea. The primary evidence for this reconstruction of prehistory is linguistic and archaeological, but primarily linguistic. He dates the development of the original Proto-Indo-European language as no latter than 2500 BCE and with evidence of an existing "cultural vocabulary consistent with a date of roughly the fourth millennium BC." Language and archaeology are related in examining the evidence. He describes, for instance, how the Proto-Indo-European word for horse, *ek'wos, correlates with the archaeological evidence of the spread of horses in Central Europe and the types of terrains which would have been most congenial for them.

Mallory writes:

Proto-Indo-European probably evolved out of the languages spoken by hunter-fishing communities in the Pontic-Caspian region. It is impossible to select which languages and what areas, though a linguistic continuum from the Dnieper east to the Volga would be possible. Settlement would have been confined primarily to the major river valleys and their tributaries, and this may have resulted in considerable linguistic ramification. But the introduction of stockbreeding, and the domestication of the horse, permitted the exploitation of the open steppe. With the subsequent development of wheeled vehicles in this area, highly mobile communities would have interacted regularly with the more sedentary river valley and forest-steppe communities. During the period to which we notionally assign Proto-Indo-European (4500-2500 BC), most of the Pontic-Caspian served as a vast interaction sphere. ... Words would have passed freely between different dialects, and the later isoglosses which seem to leap geographical boundaries, such as Greek or German and Tocharian, may have been the result of these interactions. In addition, higher versus lower variants of Indo-European languages may have been spoken, which would further account for why some linguistic groups preserve certain words and others lack such reflexes. In the east, both Proto-Indo-Europeans and later ancestors of the Indo-Iranians were in contact with Finno-Ugric speakers. In the west, the shared agricultural vocabulary of the European languages may have developed along the middle Dnieper or in contact with the numerous Tripolyean settlements of the western Ukraine.

This common linguistic background reflects a cultural background. But it can't be considered a "race" in any meaningful sense of the word. Much less a group of pure descent from some original proto-Indo-European speakers 4500 years ago. Whatever their distinctive physical characteristics may have been in 2500 BCE, their genes have been widely shared since then, and other genes widely shared with theirs.

Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954)

The racial theories of the 19th century were largely pseudo-science, or just plain bad science. The late Stephen Jay Gould did a fascinating book called The Mismeasure of Man (1981) describing how white scientific researchers on race who appeared to be seriously trying to ground their work solidly in evidence were nevertheless heavily influenced in their interpretations by their cultural assumptions on race. He does so by re-examining the original data from which they were drawing there conclusions.

But pseudoscientific theories of race like those elaborated by Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) cannot be assumed to have been based on scientific good intentions. Those influences heavily formed the Nazi brand of racism and anti-Semitism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes Chamberlain's view in its article on Race:

The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), the son-in-law of German opera composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain individuals with similar traits ... Moving from this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key strands of western civilization - Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and art – emerged from the Aryan race. Jesus, for instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion, since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. Similarly, Aristotle's distinction between Greeks and Barbarians was reinterpreted as a racial distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans. These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe, particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest, Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman Catholic cultural fetters. But while Roman institutions and practices may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical tolerance would have no healing effect. Chamberlain's writings, not surprisingly, have come to be seen as some of the key intellectual foundations for twentieth century German anti-Semitism, of which Adolf Hitler was simply its most extreme manifestation.

This wasn't science or good-faith inquiry. It was crass anti-Semitism and racism cooked up to meet the prejudices to which Chamberlain wished to pander.

But pseudoscience isn't the only source of misinformation about the fictional "Aryan race". Esoteric groups also promoted racist notions about the "Aryans", particularly the theosophists. The Austrian cranks Guido von List (1848-1919) und Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) were two esoteric racial theorists whose work influenced Hitler's thinking and the racial/historical writing in his book Mein Kampf.

Tags: indo-european language, national socialism, nazism, racism

His soul (Westbrook Pegler's) goes marching on

I posted last year on 08/10/09 and 09/15/09 about Westbrook Pegler (1894-1969), the Old Rightist who Sarah Palin quoted anonymously in her speech accepting the Republican Party nomination to be the new Dick Cheney. Pegler got kicked out of the John Birch Society (JBS) in 1964 for becoming too openly anti-Semitic. But prior to that, he was one of their favorite writers for their magazine American Opinion. (The current JBS magazine is called The New American.)

Westbrook Pegler: "As to whether I am a racist ... yes, I am."

In the November 1963 number of American Opinion, Pegler hadn't yet crossed whatever line JBS founder and leader Robert Welch drew between obvious anti-Semitism and too-obvious anti-Semitism. Welch himself introduced the magazine's lead article by Pegler. Although he had obviously begun to have some doubts, cautioning the reader that "Mr. Pegler has the temerity to hold a few prejudices that do not coincide with my own." But calling Pegler an outstanding and influential American journalist ... even when he is so obviously weakminded as to say thing with which I disagree, in language of which I disapprove." Although since Welch not only headed the JBS but was the editor of the magazine in which he chose to print the article very prominently, he couldn't have disapproved of it too intensely.

What kind of language made even Robert Welch uneasy? The piece is called "Pegler on Bigotry", though oddly it has Pegler referring to himself in the third person at one point. The month of this American Opinion number, Nov 1963, was the month John Kennedy was assassinated, I might mention. The author of the homey quote about small towns Palin used in her speech wrote:

I am one of the few declared American bigots. This implies the state of mind of one who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to a political party or a belief or opinion - and doesn't deny it. Jesus Christ was obstinate and intolerant of evil. So am I. And on that meaning of bigotry I take my stand.

You might expect from that opening paragraph that Pegler was making some kind of word play at least he thought was clever, and setting up an argument to accuse his critics of falsely defining him as a bigot. Actually, though, he talks in that article about bigotry in the normal usage of the word. It's just that he clearly thinks bigotry is a good thing. He continues directly:

Thus, bigotry is often laudable, calling for courage and for contempt toward the herd-mind of school teachers, publishers, ill-taught and queasy clergy, and most Presidents of the United States. There are millions of secret bigots too; but they are a sorry lot of parasites thriving on the courage of their betters.

In this country, bigotry is a protest against the censorship of thought and expression exercised by the Beverly Hills, Harvard, and Cape Cod riff-raff - and against their disgusting vulgarity. Such a protest is held to be a violation of an unwritten nothing called human rights. I may freely grant that it is such a violation because human rights are not defined and may not exist. I obey laws not superstitions. Actually, no human being has even a legal right to live if the rest of a society in their sovereignty decide to kill him.

Pegler took off from that latter "principle" to attack the Nuremberg War Crimes trials:

This is the first principle of the miscalled Liberal element... It is ambiguous and double-jointed. The Government of the United States confirmed it and put it into horrible execution, in the Bloody Assizes at Nuremberg, to punish the Germans for doing the same thing. Our Russian comrades sat beside us on that court, still bloody-handed from their own massacres.

Since the Nuremberg Trials aren't nearly as well known or understood as they should be, I'll point out that Pegler was completely misrepresenting the legal basis for those trials. They were prosecutions of German officials who were accused of violating laws in force in Germany at the time the crimes were committed. The trials were scrupulously fair. Several major defendants were acquitted. Those "Russian comrades" among the judges voted for convictions in all cases. (In BircherWorld, Harry Truman was as much a part of the ginormous Communist Conspiracy as Joe Stalin.) And the trials were not "to punish the Germans". They were prosecutions of specific individuals.

Those sentences I just quoted provide an example of the hazards of wading through far-right propaganda, whose most prominent characteristic when you're reading it is typically its deadly dullness. If the reader takes them as at least being factually correct or enunciated in good faith, he can wind up swallowing two or three whoppers per sentence. Trying to explain a portion like I just did isn't really a matter of "refuting" it, or of unwinding whatever pieces of it might brush up against reality. For instance, there actually were war crimes trials of some Germans in Nuremberg. But that contact with reality is almost incidental, snatches of the real world plastered onto a paranoid construction of an all-powerful World Conspiracy. Stating the real-world facts touching the same subject is literally stating an alternative worldview, which by definition is non-credible to the conspiracist.

There's more from Pegler:

I yield no obedience to any verboten [sic] concocted by any private society to wheedle and seduce Negroes of their votes and to suppress truthful discussion of the nature and history of organized Communism.

I know very few Negroes socially but most of those whom I do know are confident of my respect and my friendship for them. ...

Negroes on the whole have not yet had enough political experience as voters to realize that the vote has very little value except as a means to destroy the Nation by voting undeserved gifts of money to subjects of the dominant party. But I have been allowed to vote ever since my twenty-first birthday and the franchise has meant only that I have had a choice between professional politicians, usually two scoundrels. Three of them betrayed my country to Soviet Russia. [my emphasis]

He doesn't specify which three politicians did that deed. But, yes, he did write that "the vote has very little value except as a means to destroy the Nation".

As to whether I am a racist - which is a common but false synonym for Nazi, used by the bigots of New York - yes, I am.

Then as now, "New York" often is used by far rightists to mean "Jews". Which the immediately continuing sentences show is how it was meant there:

All Nazis are bigots. But the good bigot is not necessarily a Nazi. He probably hates Nazis just as he hates Communists. The most malignant organization of bigots on the other hand is devoted to the persecution of law-abiding Americans, especially in the Federal courts of New York; to muzzle their expressions of belief regarding the rights of the Arabs.

I didn't bother to dig out exactly what alleged court persecution to which he may have been referring. "Communists" in BircherWorld of 1963 included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King (of course!), Nelson Rockefeller and pretty much most elected Democratic and Republican office-holders.

The New York Herald-Tribune has made free and nasty use of the term "racist" in discussing commotions in the Southern Tier of States incited by agents from New York.

Gee, racism in the Deep South in 1963? Surely only a Jew Communist could say such a thing.

It's not only New York Jews who Pegley saw as bigots:

All my Negro friends are racists. They have no desire to be white and I have no desire to be Negro. If I had to choose membership in some other race I would elect to be a Negro because the Negroes in our country in my time have made greater progress against worse odds than any other element. ...

It is clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry.

However, the slackers may be excused when they do not know the true meaning of the world. They do not want to be oppressive. Neither do I.

I am bigoted against the Kennedy dynasty because they are dishonest by all tests to date.

Did I mention this was the American Opinion issue for the month in which Kennedy was assassinated? As Robert Kennedy Jr. recalled of Pegler, when there was discussion in 1965 of his father possibly running for President, Pegler expressed the wish that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."

In the "Pegler on Bigotry" piece, he also writes:

I received two Christmas gifts of $500 each from a Judge Armstrong, of Natchez, Mississippi; a rich man who suffered an awful going-over because he wanted to endow a little Southern college with a proviso that the students should be taught that white people are superior to Negroes in some ways. That was honest, legitimate bigotry. It was not hatred. He believed he was right.

To the extent that there's any sense to it when people operating in Pegler's dimension make a distinction between racism or bigotry and "hatred", the idea is that hatred is some kind of personal grudge, whereas hatred directed against entire groups is good. But like I say, reality-based approaches to this kind of thing are more about defining their worldview than getting caught up in the bushes and brambles of the symptoms.

Pegler in the American Opinion article proceeds to describe the Democrats as "the Party of Satan - as of course it has been ever since the recognition of Soviet Russia" by Franklin Roosevelt.

A good bit of his article is devoted to two political figures who his readers would recognize as having at least "Jewish-sounding" names: former Secretary of the Treasury Hans Morgenthau and New York Sen. Herbert Lehman. And Eleanor Roosevelt. In this quote, he apparently means "franchised" as having a vote:

Her career was notoriously immoral in her hypocrisy, and cruelty, and her insensate greed for money. Lehman promoted her imposition on millions of franchised fools to the extent that, on her demise and for a long time before, she was often described as the First Lady of the World. This was managed idolatry. In the first place she was not a lady at all but a rascal. I hate rascality.

He closes with this little philosophical summary:

Bigotry truly should be a civic function as well as a personal joy of all good citizens.

You see, bigotry is irresistible in most human beings which is perhaps the reason that no Congress has ever dared forbid it by enactment. That has been left in the main to mewling, other-handed golfers who have prospered in the commerce called journalism.

And, no, I can't even guess to whom "other handed golfers" may refer.

This is the kind of sewer from which Glenn Beck and his Tea Party movement are drawing a major part of their inspiration and ideas. So far as I know, Beck has never pushed Pegler's writing the way he does that of his current political guru-from-the-grave Willard Cleon Skousen, a Birchite political paranoid who became an important player in the Christian Right. But it's worth being realistic about the background of this sort of Bircher thinking. Especially now that Beck is frantically broadcasting it to his FOXist fans.

I actually came across that "Pegler on Bigotry" article while looking for an issue of American Opinion that featured Skousen. It certainly gives a glimpse of the kind of intense hatred and extreme rhetoric that was being directed particularly against John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., in late 1963. While there was no FOX News in those days and TV network news maintained quality standards such that raving bigotry wasn't featured as respectable commentary or news presentation, these kinds of attitudes were featured on local TV and radio in the South and in innumerable pamphlets and books in places like the still-segregated South and Western states like Arizona and southern California.

Tags: anti-semitism, racism, radical right, westbrook pegler

Let's not talk about the big white elephant in the room

Lincoln Mitchell, a professor of international politics at Columbia University, argues in The Pointlessness of the Racism Debate Huffington Post 09/20/09:

It is reasonably obvious that some of the attacks on President Obama will always be motivated by racism, but it is equally apparent that attributing all criticism to racism, something that Barack Obama, as both candidate and president, has never done, would be wrong. As such, the racism debate servers little real purpose. Nobody is going to be convinced. Nor is anybody is going to stop or change their behavior or their accusations.

In other words, white racists are going to keep on being white racists no matter what anyone says. So it's better for Obama supporters not to talk about white racism at all.

There are several problems with Mitchell's argument, starting with its cloud-level framing. This makes it easy to defend against criticism, a consideration of which academics are keenly aware. Whatever criticism someone makes of a cloud-level argument, the writer can say, "Oh, no, I didn't argue that." Omissions can be similarly defended.

He writes, "The debate about racism is currently being used by the right wing to distract from the important issue of health care reform." (my emphasis)

Up there in the clouds, Mitchell's post can't focus on the specific ways that the American media, particularly TV pundits, deal with racism. They love to talk about. Though they rarely have anything worthwhile to say about the topic. It's also a distraction for them. But our TV journalists are infotainers. Distractions are pretty much all they want to talk about. Mark Shields slipped up on camera earlier this month and said, "The political class, of whom I guess I'm one, we're -- we're all frustrated sportswriters." They want to talk about "horse-race" issues: who's leading in the polls, what the vote count is likely to be.

They love theater criticism. David Broder, The Dean Of All The Pundits, explained in his Washington Post column of 09/13/09 that to analyze Barack Obama's health care speech before the Joint Session of Congress, he watched it with the sound off. Because, The Dean said, he wanted to shut out "the argumentation" so he could focus "on the tone and body language, the elements that communicate most directly with the audience." How The Dean catches the "tone" of a speech without hearing the words is unclear.

Our celebrity pundits also love to talk about scandals. And sex. And fantasizing about Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage. The policy details of health care reform? Boo-ooring! They'll talk about almost anything other than something like that. They will wring their hands and wonder how so many people can be conned into believing whoppers like the "death panels", though. The idea that they themselves have done a lousy job of reporting on health care reform usually doesn't enter their discussion of reasons for that strange result.

For white people, talking about white racism is always an annoying intrusion that distracts them from thinking about the stuff that's important to white people.

On the other hand, talking about racism is something that major Republican Party leaders like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck do all the time. You know, the problematic kind of racism, the racism supposedly directed against white people. Beck is facing a serious advertiser boycott of his FOX program after saying on-air on July 28 that Obama is "a racist" with "a deep seated hatred for white people".

From down here on the ground, it looks like what Professor Mitchell is saying up there in the clouds is that, faced with with leading figures on the Republican right (do the Reps have anything but a right wing?) openly race-baiting the President, Democrats should just cover our ears to that kind of thing and say, "La-la-la-la, we can't hee-eear you!"

Yes, us white folks can think that strangely. Especially if you're a celebrity pundit, or aspiring to become one.

On the topic of white racism and its role on the Radical Right and in the Republican Party, though, I'm still leery of claims that the invective against Obama from the Radical Right is unprecedented. Digby recently called attention to this analysis published in 1998 by the conservative Hoover Institute, Why the GOP Is Doomed by Chris Caldwell Hoover Digest (4/1998). He recalls the 1994 Republican Revolution, as its supporters happily called it, following on the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. His article focuses on what he saw as long-term weaknesses for the Gingrichized Republican Party. But he reminds us in doing so of the kind of rhetoric that was creating that problem and the events that provided an uncomfortable context for it:

It’s understandable that voters have found Republicans “frightening,” given the dovetailing of southern Republican antigovernment rhetoric with that of right-wing terrorists. From this standpoint the two signal events of the 104th Congress were the Oklahoma City bombing, on April 19, 1995, and the government shutdowns of 1995–1996, advanced in a belligerent rhetoric of “revolution” that Americans distrusted.

On the morning that Timothy McVeigh sent hundreds of innocents to their graves, the lead story in all the major newspapers was President Clinton’s disastrous speech of the night before, the low point of his entire presidency, in which he argued pathetically that he was still “relevant” to the country’s politics. Clinton’s numbers quickly began to turn around. Newt Gingrich’s popularity, meanwhile, remained strikingly low. Gingrich called “pathetic” the media’s conflation of his “revolution” and McVeigh’s. But the court of public opinion is not a court of law, and politicians who show too much overlap with a force that Americans consider a genuine menace are punished for it, as the Democrats were during the Cold War.

And, like the Democrats of the seventies and eighties, the Republicans in the aftermath of Oklahoma City compounded the problem through their nitpicking libertarian indifference to Americans’ fears about armed violence. In thrall to their supporters in the National Rifle Association, the Republicans were soon trying to repeal a 1994 assault-weapons ban, after a brief postbombing breather. ...

Suddenly, in the wake of Oklahoma City, Americans noticed that it was conservatives, not liberals, who assailed the FBI and railed against putting 100,000 cops on the streets. It was the NRA, not the ACLU, that was raising money by attacking the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as “jackbooted thugs.” Today it is the right, not the left, on which suspicion falls first whenever a bomb goes off. The identification of Gingrich with McVeigh may have been excessive, but there was no denying that sometime since the Reagan administration the Republicans had replaced the Democrats as the To-Hell-in-a-Handbasket Party, the party more congenial to haters of America. [my emphasis]

Although Caldwell was endorsing the view of the Democrats having overlapped with the menace to the country during the Cold War (he presumably means Soviet Communism) and of having been "the To-Hell-in-a-Handbasket Party", he recognizes in doing so that by 1998, the Republicans had become in public perceptions and, apparently, even in some more objective sense the kind of Party that they had previously accused the Democrats of being: indifferent "to Americans’ fears about armed violence", advocating a "revolution" that most people rejected, a party "congenial to haters of America."

Yes, white racism was a major factor in that round of Republican and Radical Right craziness, too. As Caldwell obliquely observed at the time:

The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed the “tipping point” and begun to alienate voters from other regions.

The most profound clash between the South and everyone else, of course, is a cultural one. It arises from the southern tradition of putting values - particularly Christian values - at the center of politics. This is not the same as saying that the Republican Party is “too far right”; Americans consistently tell pollsters that they are conservative on values issues. It is, rather, that the Republicans have narrowly defined values as the folkways of one regional subculture and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country. Again, the nonsoutherners who object to this style of politics may be just as conservative as those who practice it. But they are put off to see that “traditional” values are now defined by the majority party as the values of the U-Haul-renting denizens of two-year-old churches and three-year-old shopping malls. [my emphasis]

Southern "folkways" in this context normally is a polite way of saying "white racism". Which, as Professor Mitchell explains to us, doesn't do any good for Democrats to talk about explicitly.

Notice in that last quoted sentence, Caldwell implicitly assumes that conservative Republican voters in what he calls elsewhere in the article "the most sophisticated parts of the country" are worried about the "values" emphasis of the Party. By "the most sophisticated parts of the country" he means not the South where you find "U-Haul-renting denizens of two-year-old churches and three-year-old shopping malls." Are members of the United Steelworkers' Union (USW) or the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) who vote heavily Democratic likely to look down on people who rent U-Hauls? That's where the Republicans use of the bogeyman the neocons called the New Class comes in, to give people who rent U-Hauls the notion that its the wicked libruls that look down on them, not conservative Republicans and plutocrats from "the most sophisticated parts of the country."

And by the way, what the hell is so "unsophisticated" about renting a U-Haul?!?

Tags: racism, radical right, republican party

Race and American politics

I suppose that we can never have the perfect timing for this issue to be discussed or the perfect circumstances. But now that the discussion is happening, I'm trying to keep in mind some distinctions. One benefit I see of the current discussion on white racism and politics is that liberals are recognizing that that the power of the Radical Right today, with its deep roots in the Republican Party, can't be dismissed as ineffective and crazy, though "crazy" is very obviously there.

Some people actually know what they're talking about on the topic, e.g., Jimmy Carter.

Others are completely clueless about the subject, e.g., Maureen Dowd and David Brooks. (In that link, Bobo Brooks also shows himself to be fairly clueless about Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, too - no surprise there.)

Our Pod Pundits on TV love to talk about race. They generally talk about it in the silliest and most superficial ways possible. And, as always, they follow the very narrow and often ditzy Beltway Village scripts in doing so. But at least it spares them the painful boredom of having to talk about health care policy or research comparisons between spending and results on health care in the US versus other wealthy countries.

Bob Somerby is doing his part to try to keep the discussion of race fact-based, though he doesn't seem to have great expectations about the prospects for that having great success. In his Daily Howler post of 09/17/09, he takes another pass at the perils of a superficial and ahistorical approach to the problem of white racism in politics. As he puts it:

Liberals ran off and hid in the woods during the wars against Clinton and Gore. Perhaps for that reason, it’s hard to get our “liberal leaders” to discuss what happened back then. That leaves liberals thinking that the vitriol aimed at Obama is without known human precedent. It must be the racists, we declare.

Yes, there’s race in the vitriol aimed at Obama. (There was race in the vitriol aimed at Clinton! Remember how hard slimy little Drudge worked to pimp that “black love child?”) But the similarities between these Democratic eras vastly outweigh the differences - except in the “career liberal” world.

And except on cable, of course.

Remember: If you form the wrong diagnosis for a problem, you will soon be forming the wrong solution. And good lord! How we love doing that!

Can we share a little secret? Some of us liberals are in love with racism. We wouldn’t know what to do without it. [my emphasis in bold]

This is why I put so much greater value on what Jimmy Carter had to say. Because he not only knows the problem of white racism in politics in his historical context, in its complexity and in its specifics. But that doesn't mean he has to talk about it as though he were delivering an academic treatise. On the contrary, he's actually good about capturing that kind of complexity in brief and clear statements. Given his awareness of his own moral authority, he surely had thought carefully about the statements he made on the subject this week. And he sounded as though he were choosing his words very carefully.

Gene Lyons in Obama gets the Clinton treatment Salon 09/17/09 is focusing on the same risk: that our celebrity pundits' fondness for talking about race can wind up distracting us from the important historical continuities in the Republicans' behavior.

The journalists that I see doing the best actual reporting and analysis on this aren't from the Establishment press, which doesn't surprise me: Dave Neiwert of Crooks and Liars, Sara Robinson of the Campaign for America's Future (CAP), Max Blumenthal, Michelle Goldberg, Frederick Clarkson, and Bruce Wilson, the latter few of whom write in various forums including The American Prospect, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Talk2Action.org and Religion Dispatches.

One distinction is between the role white racism plays among movement conservatives, among violence-oriented far-right groups, among grassroots Republican voters, among independent white voters (and there don't seem to be that many independents right now), and among Democrats. The differences are important enough to render generalizations about racism among "white voters" largely meaningless unless those distinctions are kept in mind.

There are quite a lot of studies and polling data out there that are relevant to the discussion. But because racism is a more general attitude than a specific issue, polling data have to be interpreted especially carefully. Just summarizing white voting versus minority voting, like Tom Edsall likes to do, doesn't really tell us much by itself. It's more likely to just be a template on which the writer can spin his or her own favorite assumptions.

But it is possible to use polling data sensibly and with reasonable caution, as Joan Walsh did in a recent post, for instance, in which she observes, "[Obama's] current 43 percent white approval rating could be cited as proof that Obama has simply come back down to earth after more than seven months in office, since that's the exact share of white support he got on Election Day.)" In that column, she looked at overall trends in declining approval for Obama, which is a larger set of trends that the passions of the teaparty activists.

She adds an additional worthwhile polling observation in this excerpt from Salon 09/17/09:

But if you read the 800 letters on my "Blackening of the President" piece, you'll mostly hear that race doesn't play a role in Obama's problems. What I found astonishing was the extent to which so many on the left and right seemed to agree that Obama's troubles with white voters are entirely policy, and have nothing to do with race. From the right, his white numbers are declining sharply because he really is a socialist; from the left, it's because he's a crypto-Republican and betrayed us on FISA, torture and maybe now the public option. Had they clicked through to the Pew poll I linked to, my racism-denying friends on the left would have been sadly disappointed. Obama's support has fallen much more among conservative Democrats than liberal Democrats, 12 points to 6 points. Pew didn't break that down by race, but it's an interesting data point.

Finally, I also said multiple times that I don't think Obama's drop in white approval is mainly about racism. It very likely reflects a predictable coming back down to earth for a black president who got 43 percent of the white vote. But to deny the role race is playing in stirring up the Birthers and Deathers and the Limbaugh and Glenn Beck fans is silly. [my emphasis]

Michele Goldberg has a good new piece, The Return of the Repressed The American Prospect Online 09/15/09, which gives a glimpse of how racism can intertwine intimately with economic concerns:

To some extent, a newfound suspicion of government was probably inevitable as soon as Democrats took power. At the same time, with the implosion of the Christian right's leadership and the last year's cornucopia of GOP sex scandals, the party needed to take a break from incessant moralizing, and required a new ideology to take the place of family values cant. The belief system analysts sometimes call "producerism" served nicely. Producerism sees society as divided between productive workers -- laborers, small businessmen and the like -- and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy -- they are both financiers and welfare bums -- and their larceny is enabled by the government they control.

Producerism has often been a trope of right-wing movements, especially during times of economic distress, when many people sense they're getting screwed. Its racist (and often anti-Semitic) potential is obvious, so it gels well with the climate of Dixiecrat racial angst occasioned by the election of our first black president. The result is the return of the repressed.

The Nation has also published a couple of good, nuanced articles on the topics of white racism and the Radical Right lately, A Method to Their Madness: Beneath the Radar by Gary Younge 09/09/09 and Right On by Kim Phillips-Fein 09/09/09.

Tags: racism, radical right