Re: I have told you that race is a complicated issue in this country as it is in the world. It differs from one person to the next. You would be wise to give it up here.
And you would be even wiser not to fancy you're the only insider-who-knows-it-all about US politics....
the welcome candor of kevin phillips
By Michael Lind | bio
As a Southerner who has spent a decade writing about the Southernization of American politics, I feel compelled to defend Kevin Phillips from the implication in some quarters that he is, as it were, a xenophobic Yankee South-basher. There are xenophobic Yankee South-bashers, of course, though most of them nowadays denounce a much more amorphous and arguably nonexistent cultural region, "Red State America." But Phillips is a careful researcher who understands that American national politics has always been driven less by ideology or class than by the tribal factors of race, religion and region.
To point out this obvious fact, however, is to violate a media taboo.[*]
The media taboo is the one that prevents the candid discussion of regional culture, religion or ethnicity as an influence on American politicians. Instead, we are supposed to pretend that political debate is a graduate school seminar among identical generic Americans who adopt particular political philosophies for mysterious reasons that have nothing to do with ascriptive identity. It is considered impolite if not bigoted, for example, to suggest that an Irish-American politician might be influenced by ethnicity in thinking about Ireland, or that there might be any connection between Quaker upbringing and views of the legitimacy of force.
While discussions of the influence of personal identity on political views are off limits, discussions of economic interest are considered fair game. Thus the same journalists who shy away from discussing a politician's cultural background do not hesitate to report on the possible influence of personal profit on his or her policies.
We have seen this double standard in the case of Tom DeLay. Contrast the amount of ink that has been spilled on DeLay's business and lobbying connections to that devoted to his religious worldview and East Texas subculture. But Tom DeLay did not fly to Israel and tell the Knesset he considered himself an Israeli for economic reasons or even cynical electoral reasons. You have to understand Southern Christian Zionism to understand him.
I've worked with politicians in Texas and Washington and abroad, and in my experience a politician's worldview is the most important factor in his or her policy. And most politicians, like most people, absorb their worldviews from the communities in which they grow up.
To understand Massachusetts politicians, study Massachusetts. To understand Texas politicians, study Texas. If you try to understand American politics as a philosophical debate between "left" and "right," you will go crazy. It all makes sense, however, if you see it as a struggle of shifting coalitions of ethnic groups and regions--Northeast and Midwest, South and Pacific Coast, Latinos and Jews, evangelicals and Catholics, whites and blacks. The striking correlation between ethnicity and partisanship--between being black or Jewish and being Democratic, for example, or between being a white Southern Protestant and being Republican--is impossible to explain in terms of individually-chosen ideology or even class interest, because ethnic groups and regions in the U.S. tend to vote as blocs, regardless of income.
Kevin Phillips understands the nonrational tribal factors that drive regional and national politics in the U.S., and he is impolite enough to discuss them. For which candor, whether we agree with all of his conclusions or not, we should be grateful.
tpmcafe.com
[*] Americans fancy they all live in the same country... LOL! How wrong! The vastness, the geographical expanse of North America gave them the illusion thereof. Yet, it's now obvious that two different Americas have grown alongside over the past fifty years, one of them being the reactionary South that, somehow, never kept up with the civil rights, the end of segregation, and the demotion of the Judeo-Protestant creed as just another religion.... White southeners have been circling their ideological wagons and have been fighting a rearguard action ever since the 1960s --against the civil rights, the Vietnam trauma, gay rights, secularism, and... Israel. Of all the latter battlegrounds, only Israel happens to be situated OUTSIDE the US. Hence the blind support of Israel provides white Zionists with a convenient outlet to vindicate their domestically frustrated agenda while not rocking the boat at home... Cynically, we can put it this way: better for the Bible belt's unremitting racism and religious fanaticism to unleash themselves half a world away in backward Arab "failed states" than at home. In this sense, I believe, the US crusades in the Middle East, conveniently suits the Judeo-Protestant elite.... Peace at home, hell abroad --but for how long?
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