Thomas Edsall trolls the Democratic Party (Part 2 of 2)

Thomas Edsall addresses tensions in the potential Democratic voting coalition between white voters and people of color in Democrats Can't Just Give the People What They Want New York Times 10/13/2021. In Part !, I looked at how Edsall approaches a conventional but superficial assumption on which pollsters and reporters often rely, the idea that "non-college educated" voters can be equated with "working-class voters."

In his quest to see how Democrats might attract more white working-class voters, he poses these three questions:

1. Should Democrats support and defend gender- and race-based affirmative action policies?
2. If asked in a debate, what should a Democrat say about Ibram X. Kendi's claim that "standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools"?
3. How should a Democrat respond to questions concerning intergenerational poverty, nonmarital births and the issue of fatherlessness?

By coincidence or otherwise, his questions invoke favorite conservative talking points against African-Americans and against laws to oppose racial discrimination.

Affirmative action has been an issue since the Nixon Administration, which first started using an "affirmative action" approach to enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws and then campaigned against "quotas," which immediately became the polemical conservative label for affirmative action. Affirmative action essentially means that employers and institutions must be able to show that they are making a serious attempt to comply with anti-discrimination laws. (The term "affirmative action" is an old common law term.)

The third question is just repeating tropes that Republicans have been using for years and poor people and minorities. Politicians have been making those charges and responding to them for decades.

But I was particularly struck by Edsall's second question, which seemed to be referring to someone (Ibram X. Kendi) who is a household name. Here Edsall is trolling with the anti-critical-race-theory theme, and specifically with a propagandistic claim involving Kendi - who of course is not at all a household name.

David Goldberg gives some context in The War on Critical Race Theory Boston Review 05/07/2021:

The attacks [against "critical race theory"] have also made their way to my office doorstep, probably due to my small contribution to the body of scholarship to which “critical race theory” actually refers—scholarship that first emerged several decades ago, not in the last few years, as a critical response to what was then known as “critical legal studies.” When I picked up my mail a few weeks ago, I found a thick hand-addressed envelope with no return address; the contents included an eight-page-long screed denouncing CRT as “hateful fraud.” The documents are copies of resources prepared by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York (CACAGNY), which filed an amicus brief in the failed Supreme Court case challenging what the group characterized as discrimination by Harvard University against Asian American applicants. The materials echo essays sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, which calls CRT “the new intolerance” and “the rejection of the underpinnings of Western civilization.” The materials suggest a more coordinated campaign than many seem to have realized; I am surely not the only one who received this package.

In conservative accounts, the two authors most commonly cited as CRT’s principal exemplars are Ibram X. Kendi, who trained not in law but in African American Studies (he is CRT’s “New Age guru,” according to the Heritage Foundation), and Robin DiAngelo, a professor of education. Neither is a critical race theorist in the traditional legal sense, and Kendi’s popularizing of some work on race shares little with DiAngelo’s reductive account of what she calls “white fragility.” Other screeds also dismiss philosophers Angela Davis and Achille Mbembe as “scholar-activists” (as if there is something damning about the title). Of course, there is no evidence anywhere of either ever claiming anything resembling that “everyone and everything White is complicit” in racial oppression, or that “all unequal outcomes by race . . . is the result of racial oppression,” as the CACAGNY documents put it. [my emphasis]

In other words, Edsall there is just repeating a stock conservative propaganda talking point against "CRT". And the cherry-picked quote from Kendi about the very legitimate concerns about racial and class biases in standardized tests is presumably meant to offer some academic jargon that might sound like some kind of ethnocentric special pleading to someone who has paid no attention to the standardized-test arguments.

Edsall quotes Ruy Teixeira, currently listed as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, who seems to have adopted some fairly rigid views of what he calls the "cultural left" within the Democratic Party. For instance, he makes that argument in this piece, The Cultural Left Puts a Ceiling on Democratic Support The Liberal Patriot 09/23/2021. I'll just say here it looks like an unsettling turn on Texeira's part. He certainly seems to be pessimistic about the possibilities for any kind of significant left politics, and actually seems to view it as generally undesirable. (The Five Deadly Sins of the Left American Compass 10/13/2020) He also advocates a "liberal nationalism" and accuses the Democratic Party left of "encouraging identity-based segregation." (Peter Juul and Ruy Teixeira, Toward the Next Frontier: The Case for a New Liberal Nationalism American Affairs 4:3 Fall 2020)

Thomas Edsall trolls the Democratic Party (Part 1 of 2)

Thomas Edsall is a capable reporter who has ironically done some important stories on the far right. I say "ironically," because at least since his 1992 book Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, he comes back again and again to trolling liberals for seeking the votes of people of color.

In Part 2, I look at the position Edsall's essay takes on hot-button race-related issues.

In Democrats Can't Just Give the People What They Want New York Times 10/13/2021, he does a bit more trolling. I don't know if he wrote the headline, because it doesn't exactly fit the essay. But it's a wonderful summary of establishment liberal politics!

(Actually, Democrats can give a majority of the people a lot of the most important public policies they want. But between corporate donations, neoliberal ideology, Manchinema, and the Senate filibuster, they are not delivering on most of it.)

Chain Reaction basically argued that whichever of the two major parties was perceived as the most hostile to minorities and especially African-Americans would dominate US politics indefinitely. It was kind of embarrassing for him when Bill Clinton won the Presidency in 1992. Edsall took to the pages of the New York Review of Books to try to explain what happened (What Clinton Won 12/03//1992)

The "Democrats Can't..." piece basically drags similar tired tropes into 2021. The basic idea is that Democrats are losers because too many white voters are upset that the Democrats are too popular among voters of color. There's a new twist here, which is handwringing about increased percentages of black and Latino voters won by Trump in 2020.

This is a real phenomenon and is worth analyzing carefully. But there are two problems in Edsall's current election analysis. One is a confusion of math and simple algebra. Every vote counts equally, at least within states. A Presidential candidate wins a state by winning a numerical majority of the votes. If 100 people from group X votes in Election #1 and 5% of them vote for the Republican, the Republican gets five votes and the Democrat gets 95. If 1000 people from group X votes in Election #2 and 10% of them vote for the Republican, the Republican gets 100 votes and the Democrat gets 900 votes.

Obviously, a 900-100 Democrats numerical margin is preferable for them to a 95-5 numerical margin.

It's important to watch such trends among identifiable voting segments. But the second problem is the lack of a specific consideration of the particularities of the 2020 election, the high level of interest and intense partisan polarization drove high turnout. The change in the ethnic percentages could mainly be a function of that. It requires more analysis than looking at the percentages. In the case of Latino voters, issues like Trump's clownish regime-change effort in Venezuela and his renewed drastic sanctions of Cuba may have played a role in the turnout and the percentages. In the heavily Latino area of the Rio Grande Valley, there was a real problem with Democratic party operations, where the party organization that has to turn out the vote seems to have more-or-less fallen apart.

Edsall also rolls out a current favorite media consideration, the trend of "college-educated" voters gravitating to Democrats while "non-college-educated" ones lean more Republican. The media and too many political analysts use this difference as a proxy for class, the non-college-educated assumed to be "working class" and the college-educated being middle-class to wealthy.

Political polls tend to have much more complete data on education levels than on income or type of work, so education level is an obvious proxy. But a very flawed one. But some of the biggest and most effective labor unions in the US right now are teachers, nurses, and public employees. Those jobs have a large percent of members with college degrees. (At one time, I was an SEIU union steward in a public agency in California where most of the members had college degrees even back then.) And there are lots of businesspeople without college degrees who are loyal Republicans because ”free enterprise“, or something.

In a recent analysis, Paul Heideman examined data from the General Social Survey (GSS) "which has been asking consistent questions of a representative sample of Americans for almost fifty years" and provides information on type of employment as well as partisan alignment. ("Behind the Republican Party Crack-up" Catalyst 5:2, 2021). Using his employment-based definition of working-class, which treats nurses as workers, for instance, he found that there has been a long-term reduction in working-class voters' party alignments in the context of a hollowing-out of traditional party structures in the US, but nothing that could reasonably be called a major party realignment among workers toward the Republican Party:

Far from becoming more working class, the Republican coalition has become less working class over time. Again, the overall trend is class dealignment. Where the Democratic Party was once far more class-polarized than the Republican Party, both parties have become less working class over time, such that the degree of class polarization in both parties is approaching equal. Independents, meanwhile, remain highly class-polarized, with little change over the past half-century.

However the Republican Party has changed since the 1980s, the driving force has plainly not been the rise of working-class Republicanism. The Democrats, it is true, have experienced near-catastrophic levels of working-class exit. But the Republicans have not, in the main, reaped the gains of this. Partisan polarization within the working class has diminished, with the result being that no party commands a clear majority of working-class support. Similarly, within the Republican Party, the share of the party made up of workers has actually diminished over the last few decades. [my emphasis]

But for popular consumption, the idea of the Republicans as the "working-class party" is useful for the party's populist posturing.

Biden and the risk of a no-mandate Presidency

I'm fine with the concept of a united front between conservatives and the left against fascism, Orbanism, or other forms of authortiarianism.

In theory. But politics doesn't happen only in theory. And in the current American political reality, we have two political parties who in some important sense have collapsed. The Republicans are now the Bunker Boy party. Trump is driving the position and tone of the party, and he's generally incompetent at government and knows only demagoguery as a political strategy. And he's a serious authoritarian. Robert Reich puts it this way:

Trump is a fascist. https://t.co/E77DID8hiB

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 7, 2020

But the political scene is defined by asymmetric partisan polarization. Joe Biden, now all but formally the Democratic Presidential candidate, is a conservative Democrat. And he's pursuing what may be the only kind of campaign he's capable of mounting, which is to continually define himself as Not Trump.

But in a country that has been through two weeks of a genuine popular uprising against white racism and militarized policing, this is man who is leading the Democratic Party. Joe Biden Warns Of "Predators On Our Streets" Who Were "Beyond The Pale" In 1993 Crime Speech America Rising PAC 06/18/2020:

Yes, that was 27 years ago. And Biden has enough sense to try to strike a different tone in today's political environment. We have to hope he does! Because trying to out-Republican the Republicans, or trying to sound moew authoritarian than the authoritarians, which is exactly what Biden was doing there, is not only a losing strategy for 2020. It also would leave the new Democratic President with no mandate but a Republican-but-not-Donald-Trump one.

It will be interesting to see if the Republicans and/or other pro-Trump groups will try to use this videa to depress Democratic turnout in some areas. Because this whole segment drips with racialized fear-mongering. He didn't need to be specific about the race of the incorrigible evildoers he was talking about her. This was a period in which violent crime really had peaked. But the political context was heavily racialized by blaming crime on dishonest and demagogic images of degenerate, conscience-less black young men - who came to be labelled by a pseudo-scentific label of "superpredators". So when Biden says in that clip after 2:50, those scary monsters need to be "in jail. Away from my mother. Your husband. Our families," he didn't need to hold up cartoon from a Citizen Council magazine to show people who he was talking about.

A sad contemporary documentation of this assumption around that time came from Thomas Edsall with Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991). Allegedly taking a liberal perspective, Edsall argued that whichever party was seen as the most anti-black party would dominate American politics for the foreseeable future. The 1992 Presidential victory of Bill Clinton provided convicing evidence against that argument. But Joe Biden, working with the Clinton Admnistration, was still on that bandwagon.

The attractiveness of that position for the Democrats of that day was in no small measure a function of the fact that California at the was considered a safe Republican state in Presidential elections, and therefore Democrats needed to win votes from conservative Southern whites in national elections. Clinton and Gore actually carried California in 1992. And California Gov. Pete Wilson permanently tarnished his own reputation and made California a safe Democratic state by his successful passage of Proposition 187 in 1994. The law itself was overturned by the courts as unconstitutional. And it boosted Latino voting rates in California and shifted Latino voting preferences significantly more to the Democratic side.

So even the supposedly hardheaded, pragmatic calculation driving that brand of Democratic politics in the early 1990s was highly questionable.

And yet, here we are in 2020, with the Democratic Party still trying to sound as bland and accomodating as possible to Republcian positions. Of course, the Democrats still have a long list of policy positions they recite that makes the eyes of even the staunchest Democratic partisans glaze over after a few seconds. But the define their themes and images around a bland moderation rather than developing themes that build support for Democratic reforms.

For instance, Barack Obama did a "virtual town hall" last week. (Obama holds virtual town hall on policing and civil unrest PBS Newshour 06/03/2020) He was clear and comforting and thinks things have mostly gotten better over the last ten years on the white racism front. And talks about task forces. [Deep sigh!]

I've missed the protest signs saying, "We Demand a Task Force!" That's like a throwback to those long-ago days of, oh, a month ago when people were scandalized at talk about a "revolution" in the form of, well, national health insurance and higher voter participation.

The 1 1/3 hour-long event also features legendary freedom fighter and Wall Street lawyer Eric Holder. Who was Better Than Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions. He quotes Richard Pryor saying that "you don't see many old fools". Does this guy not talk to anyone over 35? Did he pay any attention at all to the age patterns among white people who voted for Bunker Boy in 2016?

It also features Phillipe Cunningham, who sits on the Minneapolis City Council and who according to his Wikipedia profile "identifies as black, queer, and transgender." He gives a (to me) strangely chipper pitch about all the constructive things they've been doing to reduce police violence in, uh, Minneapolis. That same city council just passed what sounds like a bold "abolitionist" reform of their police forces. But after Minneapolis cops touched off a nationwide peaceful revolt by murdered George Floyd, I'm not sure how much they have to bring in the way of successful police reform ideas at theis moment.

The Democrats do seem to be using Obama as a major surrogate for Biden. Which is smart politics.

But we still need to be concerned about what a government can accomplish whose only political mandate is We're Not Trump. Rick Perlstein has this take on the moment (Michawel Finnegan, Biden vows police reform after sealing Democratic nomination to challenge Trump Los Angeles Times ):

Historian Rick Perlstein described Biden, a U.S. senator for 36 years, as a “bellwether politician” who — like Johnson before he ascended to the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination — is not easily seen as a leader of major structural change in American society.

But the “interlocking catastrophes” of COVID-19, a historic surge in unemployment and now racial upheaval could well force Biden, should he unseat Trump, to rise to the occasion and pass laws as sweeping as the New Deal adopted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to overcome the Depression, he said.

“The kind of sink-or-swim ideology of America is not going to cut it,” said Perlstein, author of “Nixonland,” a book on the social turbulence of the 1960s and ‘70s in the United States. “So it is in a lot of ways a New Deal moment, and it really demands a president who’s willing and able to build a coalition for structural change, or else we’re going to face all kinds of catastrophes like the ones we’re going through now.”

Thomas Edsall manages to make a sound and important point about the much-discussed "white working class" in the US

I'm not a Thomas Edsall fan because for 30 years or so he's been making a concern-troll argument for Democrats to be more conservative than they are at any given point in time. But in We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is New York Times 08/28/2019, he actually digs into the standard assumption that uses education rather than income or occupation to distinguish who is "working class." And it turns out that some substantial portion of the "white working class" voters who support Trump aren't coal miners or oil field workers or food processing plant workers but affluent business owners.

He quotes two political scientists, Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm, whose study he discusses:

Individuals in the low-education/high-income group tend to endorse authoritarian noneconomic policies and tend to oppose progressive economic policies. Small business owners and shopkeepers — particularly in construction, crafts, retail, and personal services — as well as some of their salaried associates populate this group.

He also cites some important historical data on the effect of declining union membership on partisan voting. Unionized workers tend to vote more Democratic.

Does anyone remember how Obama in 2008 committed to supporting the "card check" procedure to make it easier for workers to join unions? When House and Senate Democrats introduced a bill in early 2009 to implement it, Avi Zenilman described how Obama, uh, supported it (Obama's Card-Check Gambit New Yorker 03/10/2009, internal liks omitted):

So what does President Obama, who supports the bill, do? Take on the teacher’s unions, and draw a distinction that labor’s opponents have successfully blurred over the last few decades: there may be bad unions, but that doesn’t mean unions are bad.

In a speech this morning on education and the budget, Obama explicitly criticized “supporters of my party [who] have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay.” (Teacher’s unions have long been skeptical of the policy.) Even though the speech covered a wide range of topics, both the AP and the Wall Street Journal’s stories homed in on the intra-party criticism as their leads.

The idea died, I'm sure much to Obama's relief. His dropping the card-check idea was consistent with his Mugwump no-red-America-no-blue-America approach. It kept him in office for eight years. And then Donald Trump became President.

Amanda Marcotte also tweeted a favorable reference to Edsall's analysis.

This is so critical to understand. For white Boomers and older, having a college degree was not necessary for a middle class, or better, life. For Gen X and younger, having a degree was no guarantee of good employment. https://t.co/4CRojsOVq3

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) August 29, 2019

Thomas Edsall tells us that Republicans and Democrats are violently partisan

I believe Thomas Edsall may have just set a new record in "Both Sides Do It"-ism in his columan, No Hate Left Behind New York Times 03/13/2019.

Edsall sometimes does good reporting on the far right. But has also been positioning himself as a liberal concern troll at least since his 1991 book Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, co-authored with Mary Edsall. That book is a good reflection of the general atmosphere among Clintonesque Democrats of that time. The kind of thing you hear in those clips of Joe Biden in the 1990s talking about "predators" to justify draconian federal crime laws that put huge numbers of young black men in prison for minor drug offenses.

In this column, at a time when far-right violence in the US is common and left-wing versions virtually non-existent, and with Trump playing Viktor Orbán in the White House, Edsall blames partisanship and inclination to violence on, yes, Both Sides Do It!

He cites a study called "Lethal Mass Partisanship: Prevalence, Correlates, & Electoral Contingencies" by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason. Some other time, I may post more about that paper itself. But how Edsall uses it in his column should immediately raise questions about how well the survey material correlates with his argument.

Unless you're a FOX News junkie or a TV pundit, it's painfully easy to see right now how radical right political violence is a serious problem with no far left parallel on the "other side" in the US. So Edsall's citations like this need to be absorbed with some very critical judgment:

We’re not finished: “What if the opposing party wins the 2020 presidential election. How much do you feel violence would be justified then?” 18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans said violence would be justified on a scale ranging from “a little” to “a lot.”

Kalmoe and Mason analyzed the data to see what kind of voter was likely to adopt extremely critical views of the opposition party:

Strongly identifying with one political side is associated with increased political hostility toward opponents in terms of moral disengagement, partisan schadenfreude, and partisan violence. 

... Contrary to the expectation that the losers of elections might be more inclined to violence, the two authors determined that winning increases support for violence against the opposition.

There was “significantly more support for partisan violence among strong partisans when told their party was more likely than not to win in 2020.”

Overall, the authors wrote, “our evidence suggests that winning more than losing prompts strong partisans to feel less opposed to partisan violence.”

Edsall is just being a brat in that interpretation. The question he cites is near meaningless unless supplemented by others, most notably a differentiation between whether the responsdents are talking about legal, official violence, e.g., the police arresting someone planning a mass murder, or extralegal violence.

There is an obvious possibility on why people might more inclined to violence if their side wins. The Republicans think the Democrats would try a violent uprising against Trump because that's the kind of thing old Republican white people are being fed on a daily basis by Republican-leaning media figures. That's divorced from reality, of course. On the Republican side, however, Trump himself is threatening extralegal violence if a Democratic President is elected in 2020. And there is plenty of hardcore rightwing political violence actually happening now.

There's nothing surprising in itself sinister that people would think that if their party's candidate wins, the other side would start engaging in violence, and therefore legal, official, governmental force would need to be used to counter it. And since Trump is actually threatening and encouraging violence, and since far right violence is happening right now, it's pretty obvious why Democrats would think official force might be need in response to extralegal violence by people sympathizing with the loser of the election.

Tom Edsall's interpretation of statistics, and of politics, need to be read with particular care.