From The Temple of Democracy, which with the SPLC, are the best online resources out there when it comes to the “southern heritage” movement and racial politics in America.
It is not a new observation that the racial division between white and black working people in the former Confederate states has worked against them and enabled various elites to dominate both of them. Hinton Helper realized that the plantation system oppressed white non-elites before the Civil War. One of the fears of the plantation class before the Civil War was that blacks and whites would work together. You can read about this in “Towards a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia,” by Michael P. Johnson.
There were attempts for black-white alliances during Reconstruction, in the 1890s with Populism, and Mahon in North Carolina, and other times in the history of the South, and this has been an ongoing hope continuing to this day. However, it has been defeated, again, and again, and again. The trump card that the elites have played over and over is white nationalism. The convincing of white working people, farmers, that their interest lies in a common white identity rather than the common economic interest they hold with African Americans in the South. You can’t defeat white nationalism by giving into it. You can’t appeal to it and expect to defeat it. You also can’t expect to beat the established interests in using it. They can always beat your appeal to it. You can’t build an alliance on top of it. The established interests will bust it up with a stronger appeal to white nationalism than you will be willing to make.
To have a movement of ordinary people, black and white, against established anti-democratic interests, you need to defeat white nationalism. FDR thought he could build a progressive future by side stepping the issues. We now witness a party with its strength centered in the former Confederate states demolishing FDRs legacy one step at a time.
“…the reason the Clinton administration was so focused on keeping the body-count super-low is that they were primarily involved in humanitarian “wars of choice.” The standard of sacrifice that it is appropriate to ask of the military in such a conflict is different from the appropriate standard when the United States is responding to aggression or even, I would say, responding to a clear and present danger. This, however, is why all the talk about Iraqi weapons and whether or not the threat was imminent matters. We’re taking casualties in Iraq like it was necessary to fight this war, at this time, in this way, with these allies or else seriously imperil America’s national security. But it wasn’t necessary, even if it did help out the people of Iraq and remove a long-term irritant from our foreign policy, only to replace it with a much more severe short-term one.
I’m going to take another wack at this because the comments section from my last one won’t contain my response.
Howard Dean says: “White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don’t have health insurance, either, and their kids need better schools, too.”
They ought to be, but they aren’t. And, for a good number of them the reason is pretty obvious. As David Niewert says in this post :
Why would the Confederate flag be an issue in northwestern Washington? Because it is a symbol of white supremacism for people well outside the South as well. This is why phony arguments about its meaning are only cover for the stark reality that anyone — particularly anyone of color — who is confronted by the flag knows all too well: The Confederate flag is meant to intimidate — to trumpet the values of white supremacy. The “heritage” which it harkens back to is mostly rife with the charred corpses of lynched innocents.
Ok. I know that Howard Dean wants no part of that. But, it is inescapable that the confederate battle flag is a potent symbol of race hatred for some people and that it’s obviously not a symbol that the Democratic party should use or accept. And, rejecting the flag does not translate to telling all southerners they are jerks. After all, forty-five percent of white southerners vote Democratic and reject the confederate flag.
Dave Johnson says in the comments to my previous post that when Dean uses this language he is talking about getting poor white guys to vote for the Democrats. Of course he is. But, he’s also the guy who’s very likely to become the Democratic nominee for President of the United States and I expect that person not to be a putz and use symbols and images that speak to beliefs that are completely at odds with the central values the Democrats have held fast to through “3rd ways” and “center-left realignments” and elections won and lost for the last 40 years. The only Democrat I know who might use the battle flag is Zell Miller and even he didn’t back Dean up.
As Sara says in the same comments:
I Assume Dean has a good point here, which he argued well at an earlier date, namely that the Symbolic Politics of identity had not gotten anyone health insurance or any other benefit — and it was time for the Democrats to address all that. If this is his idea about how to do such, well it’s pretty weak. It may be Dean is trying to prove he is not “politically correct” or one of the other points of opposition to liberalism, but it is unlikely to get him all that many votes from Molly Ivins “Bubba” and “Bubette” — and it is going to hurt him among those of use who expect clear argument, and not just symbol chasing.
And, I would add that if you are going to use symbols and images to convey your argument to the masses (which I think is absolutely necessary in the modern media age) then you should certainly eschew associating yourself with negative symbols that the other side has created to sow division between the very people you are trying to bring together.
As for separating himself from the ranks of the politically correct, Dean already is perfectly positioned to do that. His “Sistah Soljah moment” would be to make a pitch for gun rights in front of the New York or California Democratic Party Convention. The boos that ensue from that would warm the hearts of pick-up driving swing voters everywhere and it wouldn’t have to be done again on the backs of a historically shat upon minority group who has shown this party nothing but loyalty. They already did their bit with the original Sistah Soljah.
Anybody who’s been observing politics for a while knows that this issue of how to attract white southerners is a big conundrum for the Democrats (although Ruy Teixeira would argue that we really shouldn’t worry too much about it.) But, the enthusiastic embrace of the flag as an election ploy by some in the comments to my last post on this subject (not Dean himself, mind you) tells me that the Democrats may suffer from a serious misunderstanding of who we can and cannot draw to the Democratic party.
Some commenters seem to believe that the issue of racial equality is a loser for Democrats so we are simply moving to a class based argument, just like the Republicans have been agitating for, for years. Pmac says that “most blacks are capable of sufficiently complex thought that says it’s more self-interested to be divided by class than by race,” to which I can only observe that Ward Connerly has apparently been magnificently successful in making inroads in the democratic party even as we’ve been remiss in getting through to the pick-up truck crowd. I wonder, though, how African Americans by and large feel about this.
I do think it’s pretty obvious that we can’t get the racist dittohead vote unless we tell our black voters to go fuck themselves. It’s a (southern) strategy to be sure, but I don’t think it’s a particularly good one even if it weren’t morally reprehensible. The fact is that we need to have an enthusiastic 95% turn-out of African Americans to go with our 45% of whites in order to win in the south anywhere, something that didn’t happen in 2002 and is widely considered to have been a huge contributing factor in our squeaker of a loss in the midterms. So, this is something we should be very sensitive to in this closely divided electorate.
But, even if we were to tell the African American consituency to suck it up, I doubt that expressing a wish to get more “white folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back” will ever draw many converts from the ranks of the right wing unless we are also willing to toss gay rights and abortion and a whole lot of other civil rights issues that virtually define the Democratic party on to the bonfire, too. That’s the problem with capitulating in culture war battles. You give them an inch and they take a mile.
There are, however, many hard working white guys all over the country who just don’t want to hear about the damn flag or much of anything else about the culture wars anymore, from either side. They are concerned about losing their good paying jobs and their freedom to own a gun and the national security of the United States. They listen to Rush on the road from time to time but they think he’s kind of a blowhard and they voted for Junior but he’s starting to make them feel nervous. They believe in God but they don’t make a fetish of religion and they are just as sick of hearing people argue about that as they are of the pissing and moaning about the flag. They get teary when they hear the national anthem and yes, they drive pick-up trucks. But, as Gephardt shrewdly noted, they don’t fly the confederate flag, they fly the American flag.
They vote Republican because they think Democrats are weak. It is a matter of temperament, not culture. A lot of them were in or around the military and are comfortable with blacks in positions of equality or authority, and they don‘t give a shit about “southern heritage” symbols if they are going to cause trouble. They are sick and tired of hearing about race because it never seems to go anywhere. They like problems to be solved, not chewed over.
These guys are reachable for us from a number of angles, but we sure won’t gain any points by waving around the confederate battle flag on the stump. It looks patently phony, particularly coming from a Vermont doctor who signed the only civil union law in the country, and these guys are very sensitive to phoniness. And they are sick of the argument. The way to appeal to them is by reframing the culture war issues, not by clumsily evoking the GOP’s favorite divisive symbols. It’s not our style and everybody knows it.
Bush doesn’t care about working people and has fucked up the Iraq war. We care about the working man and we will fix the situation in Iraq and deal with terrorism like adults. That is what will get these guys.
One final bone to pick on this issue.
Dean’s comment is one of those “process comments” that should not be on the campaign trail in the first place. It’s like Bob Dole blurting out that he was endorsing Prop 209 in California because it was a “wedge issue,” or Bush saying “I‘m gonna tell the American people that the nation is more secure.” If Dean believes that the Democrats need to appeal to “white folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back” then it is incumbent upon him to actually formulate a message that will do that. Merely expressing a desire to do it isn’t going to move the ball forward. Edwards has a great message on this, and I really hope that people are paying attention to what he’s saying.
And, for what it’s worth, saying that my position on this is colored by my support for Clark is bullshit. I’ve been writing about the confederate flag and the southern heritage movement for a long time and my reaction has little to do with the primary battle. I would come down hard on Clark exactly the same way, for both moral and practical reasons. It’s bad politics, that’s all. This is not a realigning election and we will lose if we don’t keep our base enthusiastically behind us and appeal to enough swing voters to keep the GOP from stealing it. Let’s wait for a second term to start planning how to deprogram the dittoheads, ok?
I hope that Dean wises up and figures out what he really needs to do to win in the South. He’s a smart guy and I’m confident that he can figure out some way to communicate without evoking divisive culture war images.
In response to a Red Cross worker wondering why someone would attack the Red Cross he says:
What do the terrorists and their allies want? They want to get Iraq and its resources e.g. oil, weapons, cash, — back into their sweaty hands so they can utilize them to further for their viciously destructive aims. They can accomplish that by killing as many all foreign infidels and their allies as possible, and by driving the rest out of Iraq.
That includes you, Ms. Doumani. You too, represent the hated Judeo-Christian West and it won’t help for you to say you never eat at McDonald’s and that you think George W. Bush is a unilateralist and uncultured cowboy. The fact is you’re working for the Red Cross and people who remember the Crusades and the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols remember what that cross used to stand for.
WTF?
The “terrorists” want to get Iraqi oil, cash and weapons back into their sweaty hands…
Well, the hell with that. Possession is 9/10th of the law. WE have the Iraqi oil, cash and weapons and we’re not giving them back.
And, there’s nothing in his piece to suggest that this worker said a word about McDonalds or cowboys. That image just seems to have appeared unbidden in his fevered little fantasy about nefarious Anti-American Red Cross workers with foreign sounding names. He just opened a little can of Bush Doctrine preemptive whoop-ass on her in case she might be thinking about maybe having a program or a desire to hate Happy Meals and cowpokes in the future.
And then he pretty much tells her that the “terrorists” attacked the Red Cross because of the crusades, and his tone suggests that he isn’t convinced that actually isn’t a pretty good reason to blow the shit out of them. Damn those anti-freedom fry, crusading blood hustlers anyway.
I gotcher Sackin’ o’ Baghdad for yah, right here.
I fear we are starting to see the re-emergence of that crazy ass, Linda-Blair’s-head-spinning like-a-top thing that was so characteristic of even the more sober wingnuts during the Clinton years. Whenever things don’t go their way they go all wild eyed and drooly start screeching like Joan Crawford in coat hanger factory.
I know that Howard Dean isn’t a racist, but I also know he isn’t stupid so I’m having a hard time figuring out why he’s said this confederate flag bit more than once. His vaunted campaign staff have let him down mightily if they didn’t school him by now about what an offensive symbol the confederate flag is to the vast majority of Democratic voters and cautioned him to not say it anymore.
This will not do, and it’s not just the flag thing, it’s also that he accuses his rivals of employing the GOP politics of racial divisiveness by criticizing him. He really is the one in the wrong on this and he sounds like a Republican member of the judiciary committee himself when he throws a racism charge at the others in this situation:
a Dean spokesman called the criticism “a desperate political attack on the part of Governor Dean’s opponents.”
Spokesman Jay Carson said Dean was trying to explain that Democrats need to broaden their appeal to Southern men, who in recent years have voted Republican in growing numbers. Carson said Dean has been using the flag line since he started campaigning, and that his rivals misconstrued it as support for the Confederate banner.
Dean also released his own statement to clarify his comments.
“I want people with Confederate flags on their trucks to put down those flags and vote Democratic,” he said in the statement.
“We have working white families in the South voting for tax cuts for the richest one percent while their children remain with no health care,” said Dean. “The dividing of working people by race has been a cornerstone of Republican politics for the last three decades. For my fellow Democratic opponents to sink to this level is really tragic. The only way we’re going to beat George Bush is if Southern white working families and African-American working families come together under the Democratic tent, as they did under FDR.”
I’m more pragmatic than I’ve ever been about presidential politics, and I know that he wasn’t actually endorsing the confederate flag, but antipathy to this symbol is embedded in the DNA of African Americans since the civil war (and liberals everywhere at least since the civil rights movement) so I can’t quite figure out why he would think it was ok to use it. Appealing to racist sympathy, which is what the confederate flag symbol is really all about, cannot coexist with the Democratic party of 2004. It’s not the same as supporting the NRA or being for free trade or once voting Republican. The issue of civil rights is the moral center of our party. It’s not negotiable.
Sure, we must try to boost our appeal in the South, but we must be very, very careful never to do it that way. It’s not only wrong, it wouldn’t work anyway. For every yahoo who wudda, cudda, shudda voted Democratic if we accept the symbol of their (racist) “heritage,” there will be 5 southern African Americans who will just stay home. Even if it weren’t abhorrant on a moral basis, for Democrats, southern racism is a zero sum game.
If Dean meant to say that the party must once again appeal to working class and rural white guys who drive pick-up trucks (which is what I assume he meant) there is absolutely no reason to evoke that stupid flag. How about saying “working men who drive pick-up trucks and watch football on Sunday?” Or, “guys who drive pick-ups and wish they drove Nascar?” There are many, many more southern white men who don’t feel the need to put a confederate flag in their pick-up than there are southern white men who do. Those are the guys we want.
I don’t want to make too much of this (although I admit that I would be very hard on any Republican who regularly opined that he wanted confederate flag wavers to vote for him) but Dean has to stop using this image or risk developing a serious perception problem — not just for being dramatically insensitive to racist codes and symbols, but as a mulish, my-way-or-the-highway, know it all.
That’s what Bush actually is, but Karl Rove has the sense to know that he can’t get elected if people see him that way. Neither can Howard Dean. A little humility is called for on this one.
You might call it blank-slatism. Colonized or occupied countries become prey to the philosophical imaginings and unrealizable political wish-lists of the home countries. Privatizing everything is a pretty hard slog at home? Let’s do it in Iraq where we control the whole show. School choice? Hey, teachers unions are nowhere to be found in Iraq. Let’s try it there.
Yo, Tom Friedman. Is this what you had in mind for spreading freedom and democracy in the middle east — fulfilling every wet dream of a bunch of ivory tower think tank extremists who can’t persuade Americans to drink their kool-aid? If it is, looks like you’re getting your wish.
Good luck to the poor Iraqi people. They have been released from the yoke of authoritarian tyranny only to be placed in a neocon petri dish to be probed, prodded and experimented upon by a bunch of failed and discredited Dr Frankensteins.
Bush came to office after the closest presidential election in American history in 2000, and he is taking no chances in his bid for re-election.
He has vacuumed up about $90 million in re-election funds and is well on his way to his stated goal of $170 million. The money can only be used for the primary season.
Faced with no GOP challengers, White House and re-election officials say they will use much of the money for an enormous get-out-the-vote effort – the kind that helped Republicans win important races last year and take control of the Senate.
The cash also prepares Bush for heavy television advertising, though the money must be spent by the Republican convention that begins in late August in New York. The money will help Bush court Hispanics, Roman Catholics, union members and women, White House officials say.
Do not underestimate how very, very desperate these people are to remove that asterisk nest to Junior’s name in the history books. All presidents want a second term. But, this one never got a legitimate first one and they know it. They won’t go down easily.
So, tell me again who the enemy in this war is? Female Iraqi physicians who fall in love with American GI’s? Got it.
TWO US soldiers who marched down the aisle with Iraqi brides are to face a court martial.
“They’ve been formally charged with disobeying an order – no fraternising with the Iraqi people,” said Vicki McKee, mother of one of the soldiers.
Her son, Sergeant Sean Blackwell, 27, married a English-speaking Iraqi physician, 25, in August.
They exchanged vows during a double ceremony with Blackwell’s friend Corporal Brett Dagen, 37, and another Iraqi doctor in her mid 20s.
Both women had been working with US troops.
“How could they go to Iraq and not be friendly and fraternise?” Mrs McKee told the New York Post.
Now back to our previously scheduled program from Atrios featuring a letter from an aide to Paul Bremer who apparently believes that all the Iraqi people lived in caves and never even saw daylight under Saddam until we came along and showed them that they could walk on sidewalks and drink coffee and play cards and live, you know, life.
You’d think they’d be grateful enough that they wouldn’t let their little doctor hussies marry our boys, though. That’s taking “living life” just a little bit too far.
There is a war going on, you know.
Oh wait…not that there’s a war on…you know what I mean…it’s a liberation. But, that doesn’t mean people are free to just like, marry anybody they want…that’s fraternizing in a war zone…
All the Friedmanesque nonsense about American exceptionalism makes me want to lose my lunch. Wilsonian internationalism, liberal or neoconservative, has always had a santimonious missionary tone about American superiority that automatically makes it suspect in my eyes — particularly when it has so often been hypocritically employed to excuse our worst impulses.
Should we stop genocide and ethnic cleansing? Yes. Should we not support authoritarian dictators on behalf of greedy American busnessmen? Yes. Should we work within international institutions to create global consensus on civilized behavior? Of course. Should we lead by example? If only we would.
Should we invade foreign countries and forcefully impose American style democratic capitalism because it is the best of all possible worlds and nothing could be finer?
American values never had, and never will have, an “exceptional” role in the history of the world, any more than Islamic values did during the great conquests that constructed the Caliphate, any more than Roman values did under Caesar, Augustus, and the others, and so on. America’s dominance of the world is a contingency of history, not proof of the rightness of our ideals. Sure, democracy is a lot better style of governance than a theocracy or a Roman Empire. But the US didn’t invent democracy and was only one of several countries and cultures that helped spread it. And today, it is inarguable that other democratic countries have fairer election systems and that other democratic countries treat both their individual citizens and their businesses in many ways that even the most gung-ho America lover would envy. And it is arguable – indeed it is a very common argument – that American economic rule is any better than any other country’s for the citizens of a third world country whose economy we dominate. The number of monstrous dictators this country has accommodated, and still does, is shocking.
Manifest Destiny and other ideas helped justify American expansionism. Today, it has resurfaced in debates about America’s “exceptionalism” and as part of the “mission” of the neo cons. As I’ll show in other posts, about Woodrow Wilson and others, it is also highly influential in one strain of American political liberalism. To say the least, in a world which has overwhelmingly rejected Bush’s overt attempts to impose an American empire through military force -and which will certainly continue to resist such attempts in many different ways- America will need to drive a stake through its narcissistic fantasy that it is “special” and its values are, or should be, everyone’s. Aside from the fact that it is patently ridiculous to believe America is exceptional, there lie monsters (example: the embarassing absence of the important nations of Europe from the Coalition of the Willing).
To recognize that the US is simply one more country that is sometimes great, sometimes mediocre, and sometimes horrible shouldn’t diminish anyone’s love of country. In my case, if anything, it increased it. Suddenly, the phony impression I had of a bromide, perfect America was replaced by wonderment at the sheer scale of this country’s achievement, both for good and ill. Suddenly, America became real. Because “destiny” is bogus teleology. But America’s interactions with its world and the challenges of doing that well while honoring America’s boundaries are profoundly exciting.
Exactly. We Americans benefit hugely from the great riches and opportunity that this (mostly stolen) land gave a bunch of immigrants cast off from all over the planet, and there is much to be proud of in what we managed to achieve. But, it is completely absurd to look at this country and not be able to see that we are a long, long way from perfection and that there is much we can learn from others, from history and ourselves. We aren’t exceptional and we don’t have to be.
The line between good and evil is within each human being, they are not characteristics of nationality or tribe. We don’t have a monopoly on either one and neither does anyone else.