Flags Versus Dollars
November 7, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Howard Dean's remarks about the need to appeal to white Southerners
could certainly have been better phrased. But his rivals for the
Democratic nomination should be ashamed of their reaction. They
know what he was trying to say - and it wasn't that his party should go
soft on racism. By playing gotcha, by seizing on the chance to take
the front-runner down a peg, they damaged the cause they claim to serve - and
missed a chance to confront the real issue he raised.
A three-sentence description of the arc of American politics over
the past 70 years would run like this: First, Democrats and moderate Republicans
created institutions - above all, Social Security and Medicare - that
provided a measure of financial security to ordinary working Americans. The
biggest beneficiaries of these institutions were African-Americans and
working-class Southern whites, and both were part of the
moderate-to-liberal coalition that dominated American politics until the 1960's.
But the right opened an increasingly effective counterattack, with a strategy
that included using racially charged symbolism to get Southern
whites to vote against their own economic interests. All Mr. Dean
was saying was that Democrats need to understand and counter this strategy.
I know these are fighting words. But the reliance of modern Republican
political strategy on coded appeals to racism is no secret. Controversies
over efforts to remove the Stars and Bars from the top of the South Carolina
Statehouse, and to reduce its size on the Georgia flag, played a
significant role in Republican victories in 2002. And the evidence that
race is still a crucial factor is as fresh as Tuesday's election.
The big story in that election was the victory of Republicans in
Mississippi and Kentucky. The secondary story, however, was a string of victories by
Democrats in affluent suburban areas in the Northeast. In my state,
New Jersey, Democrats took firm control of the state's Legislature.
What this tells us is that some people - either in New Jersey,
Mississippi or both - voted against their economic interests.For whatever you
think of Bush's economic plan, it's clearly much better for New
Jersey - a rich state, which gains a lot from tax cuts tilted toward
the affluent -than for a poor state like Mississippi.
Consider, for example, the effects of estate tax repeal,
a central feature of the 2001 tax cut. Almost nobody
in Mississippi pays the estate tax. In 2001 only 249 estates
in Mississippi paid any tax at all; raising the exemption to $5 million,
which some Democrats suggested as an alternative to
full repeal, would have reduced that to a couple of dozen.
By contrast, New Jersey, with three times Mississippi's population,
had almost 10 times as many taxable estates.
Or consider the 2003 tax cut. It was also heavily tilted toward
the affluent, and therefore toward rich states. According to Citizens for Tax Justice
estimates, the typical New Jersey family got a $409 tax cut. In Mississippi,
the number was only $165.
So did Mississippi voters support the Republicans, even though
they get very little direct benefit from Bush-style tax cuts, because they - unlike
New Jersey's voters - understand the magic of supply-side economics?
If you believe that, I've got an overpass on the Garden State Parkway you
may be interested in buying.
Now maybe New Jersey voted Democratic because of irrational Bush
hatred. But I think it's a lot more likely that white Mississippi voters, unlike
their counterparts up north, are still responding to Republican flag-waving - and
it's not just the American flag that's being waved.
Yet the fact is that Mississippi, being relatively poor, will lose
disproportionately if the right wins on its full agenda, which involves a big rollback of
New Deal and Great Society programs. (I'll explain in a future column
how Republicans are using the prescription drug bill to lay the groundwork
for later Medicare cuts.)
Mr. Dean wasn't suggesting that his party adopt the G.O.P. strategy
of coded racial signals, and by and large African-Americans - my wife
included - understand that. What he meant by his flag remark was
that Democrats must make the case to working Americans of all colors that
the right's elitist agenda isn't in their interest. And he's right.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
nytimes.com |
