From Beer Summit to Beer Hall Putsch.
Seth Masket at Tusk came away shaking his head after Ezra Klein’s recent interview with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro about his new book “Lions and Scavengers.” Klein works “extremely hard,” in Masket’s view, to take his arguments seriously. Perhaps because Shapiro takes himself so seriously. (There is a humility shortage on both the far right and the far left.)
Despite the massive, national backlash over the White House assault on freedom of speech, despite our horror at seeing the rule of law gutted by the Trump 2.0 administration, despite the Republican Party’s rejection of the principles of democracy, and despite their embrace of Christian nationalism and strongman rule, Shapiro argues (I haven’t read the book) that what radicalized conservatives is that the left, Klein summarizes, “has turned against the foundations of Western civilization.”
Yes, Shapiro is serious.
“It used to be a fight about policy, but now it’s a fight about whether all this is good or not. And that’s a much more fundamental kind of conflict,” Klein proposes and asks Shapiro what has changed.
Shapiro explains that it was 2012:
So in 2008, Barack Obama ran as a unifying candidate, like him or hate him. I didn’t vote for him. I was not a fan. But Barack Obama ran as somebody who was, in his very personage, unifying America. There was no red America, there was no blue America, there was just the United States. There was no Black or white America.
There were just Americans. And the idea was that he was sort of the apotheosis of the coming together. He was going to be the culmination of a lot of these strands of American history coming together to put to bed so many of the problems that had plagued America over the course of our tumultuous history….
So he runs, he wins. Obamacare happens. There’s a big blowback in the form of the Tea Party. And he reacts to that by essentially polarizing the electorate. He decides that instead of broadcasting to the general electorate an optimistic message about America, he is going to narrowcast his election in 2012. He’s going to base it on a much more identity-groups-rooted politics. He’s going to appeal to Black Americans as Black Americans and gay Americans as gay Americans and Latino Americans as Latino Americans.
Yes, Shapiro is serious. What electing Obama was supposed to mean for conservatives (like Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon) was that the country would declare “the long national nightmare” of racial animus was over and finally would move on without reckoning with it.
Masket writes:
Shapiro offers a few examples, such as:
- The 2009 arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for breaking into his own home in Cambridge; Obama said that the police “acted stupidly,” and then convened a White House “beer summit” with Gates and the arresting officer.
- The 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, after which Obama empathized, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
- The 2014 Ferguson riots, during which Obama said that “a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.”
Never mind that the Gates arrest was in July of 2009, not during the 2012 campaign. Or that the poster below began circulating in September 2009. No, it was that in 2012 that Democrats decided that demography was their destiny and Republicans felt it was their demise.
“We’re just demographically losing the argument,” Shapiro says of conservatives. So Republicans “need to run the biggest pulsating middle finger that we can. That pulsating middle finger is Donald Trump — so we’re going to run him in 2016.” Time to burn it all down.
Or as Otter put it decades earlier, “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part!”
That’s the rationalization for conservative radicalization. Not the country electing a Black president and not embracing conservative demands that we stop talking about race (see poster above again).
Masket again:
Basically, it was moments of abuse or violence inflicted upon Black people and Obama pointing out that race was a factor. The exchange after that is interesting:
Klein: It’s hard for me when I look back on that, on the “beer summit” in particular, to hear: That’s what radicalized you all?
Shapiro: Yes. And the reason is: The implicit promise of Barack Obama was the worst conflict in the history of America — which is the racial history of the United States, which is truly horrifying. That in his person, he was basically going to be the capstone of the great movement toward Martin Luther King’s dream.
And when, instead, things seemed to move in the opposite direction, which was: Well, you know, it turns out that Black people in America, they’re inherently victimized by a white supremacist system that puts Black people underfoot….
Klein: It kind of sounds like the interpretation of Obama, at least to you, was that if he’s elected, we’ll agree we’ve gotten past all this — that it’s supposed to make us feel better, and then when it didn’t, that was understood as the betrayal of a promise.
Shapiro: That is how I think most Americans saw it.
This is an important narrative, and it’s not a position just held by Shapiro. Quite a few conservative authors make a similar argument, and I’ve heard similar sentiments from some local political figures I’ve interviewed. The basic idea was that there was some sort of deal: If conservatives permit the election of the first Black president, that will essentially signal the end of institutional racism in the United States, and then we won’t have to talk about race anymore. And any time Obama brought up race he was reneging on that deal.
Now, that narratives breaks down somewhat in a few key areas, such as the fact that this “deal” only existed in conservatives’ minds, and they didn’t vote for Obama anyway. Also, MLK’s dream was about equality and justice, not about putting a Black man in the White House. But Obama, in his style of campaigning in 2007 and 2008, surely did a fair amount to suggest a “post-racial” United States, and sought to allay conservative whites’ fears that he would mainly prioritize Black voters.
My own perspective and Shapiro’s perspective on the past several decades of US politics clearly differ, but there’s a common thread in that racial politics is the main driver. Klein’s question about the Gates beer summit — “That’s what radicalized you all?” — is the right one, and the answer is yes. But it was always about more than a beer summit.
And here we are. We’ve gone from Beer Summit to Beer Hall Putsch.
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In the meantime, my neurologist suspects I have an obscure lupus-like autoimmune disorder that’s causing all kinds of weird symptoms (for one thing, she says the signals my brain are sending to my feet aren’t making it through and I’m off balance) but first she has to rule out blood cancers, etc. There’s also a lesion on my lung and they want an MRI.
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