krebscycle

Just a week or so ago, Paul Ryan, the Budget Guru of the Republican Party, went on Bill Bennet’s radio show and said:

“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning to value the culture of work, so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

If you were completely ignorant, you might wonder about that “inner cities” reference – because the poverty rate in rural America is higher than the rate in metropolitan America.  What, possibly, could it be about poor people in Detroit that is more attention getting than say, poor people in Eastern Kentucky? If you were in doubt, Mr. Ryan helpfully cited Charles Murray as his primary source on this cultural problem. Murray’s well debunked book, Bell Curve, tried to show that blacks and Latinos are just dumber than white Americans.  You might also recall that Bennet himself, just a few years ago said

“If you wanted to reduce crime, you could – if that were your sole purpose – you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down.

Ryan was on Bennet’s show to sell his budget proposals which slash spending on social services and poverty reduction in order to fund tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy. So one might conclude that Ryan was trying to sell Bennet’s audience on a budget that would actually harm them by appealing to their prejudices. This would not be a new tactic.

We were in Tennessee. During a motorcade, the President spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs by a few plain, he called them homely, white women on the edge of the crowd. Late that night in the hotel, long past midnight, he was still going on about how poor whites and poor blacks had been kept apart so that they could separately be fleeced-. ’‘I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.” – Bill Moyers.

If we had a real free press in this country, Ryan would have been put in the spotlight and called to account here. He would have been pressed to explain why he won’t let President Obama’s Jobs bill come up for a vote, why he ignored rural poverty, what jobs he expects poor people in Baltimore or East Tennessee to get, whether he condemns or supports Charles Murray’s theories about white superiority, whether he really does mean what he so clearly implies – that black unemployment is due to uninterest in work. The media, if it were doing its job, would have made it difficult for Ryan to do a kind of nudge-nudge-wink-wink sales job and forced him to spell it out. By not doing that, the media allows Republicans to make racial appeals on the side, without owning up to them.

But our crappy media won’t do that – because the Republicans have been able to get reporters fired for exposing their racist game. Joe Williams lost his job and go called “the real racist” for pointing out the obvious: that Mitt Romney even looked uncomfortable around black audiences.  So here is Chait with the excuse:

Yet here is the point where, for all its breadth and analytic power, the liberal racial analysis collapses onto itself. It may be true that, at the level of electoral campaign messaging, conservatism and white racial resentment are functionally identical. It would follow that any conservative argument is an appeal to white racism. That is, indeed, the all-but-explicit conclusion of the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession: Republican politics is fundamentally racist, and even its use of the most abstract economic appeal is a sinister, coded missive.

Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.

This is directly contradicted by the incident that sparked this whole discussion. Ryan is selling tax cuts to white people with the story that he wants to stop the government from giving their hard earned money to  lazy black people who don’t want to work.  But Chait won’t, can’t, refuses to admit what is in front of him because doing so would expose him to a vicious and effective Republican attack. The Right Wing media would explode into a fury of accusations that Chait was the real racist, that he was  liar, an anti-semite, a child molester, a forger, a Russia secret agent – whatever it takes. And the rest of the media would chime in in with stories about how Chait was facing accusations that, on the one hand, he denied, but on the other hand were being raised by many sources. The New York Times might write something like “The Liberal and Democratic partisan Chait, denies widely circulated stories that he has taken payments from the Obama Administration and forged documents, but critics insist there is plenty of proof.”  The Republican pushback got Joe Williams fired, it got Martin Bashir fired, it even got Dan Rather fired – Chait is not immune. So pontificating futilely is the safer course.