Making it Simple

I know we could write books about why America is a fearful, knee-jerk society. White flight in the 1950s and 60s was driven by the fear of African Americans moving next door. Unscrupulous real estate agents would knock on our doors, point out how awful it would be to have blacks living next door, tell scary stories about how rapidly our property values would drop if they did, and we packed up and moved to the suburbs. This kind of simple story telling is what Republicans have been good at since at least 1968, when the party told northern suburbanites that urban lawlessness - they wanted us to visualize blacks - would grow under the weak-willed leadership of liberal Democrats like Hubert Humphrey. This was the same year Harry Dent used the Southern Strategy to win votes from Southerners unhappy with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The message was this:



That's the way Republicans thought. And their methods paid off. Making everything so simple won them votes. The parallel message they peddled alongside their race-based message was just as simple, just as easy to reduce to black and white, easy to understand images:


This is still the Republicans' main message. Democrats have often resisted campaigning this way. They believe that voters can understand complex choices, and that compassion can guide us toward tough, but humane decisions. Or, because Democrats are Americans, and just as prone to fear and knee-jerk stupidity, we respond to Republican tactics by prevaricating, waffling, and abandoning our principles. We position ourselves to say "Yeah! Urban crime is bad!" and "Government doesn't have the answers." Then we look like what we are: spineless copycats.

But I think we have a new opportunity to drive a simple message home about Republicans that should help win votes. It is easy to understand, but isn't cowardly or morally corrupt. It resonates with our principles, and portrays the Republicans in an unflattering, but honest way. Republicans have spent the summer arguing that Latinos aren't Americans, and neither are Muslims, and maybe the 14th Amendment, which gave Blacks full citizenship, wasn't such a good idea after all. And, except for Ted Olson, Republicans don't think gays and lesbians should be given the same rights as the rest of us. How this makes sense politically is hard for me to fathom. The country is increasingly made up of people of color, and attitudes toward sexual orientation are becoming more tolerant and supportive. Yet here they are, marching across the country with the message that America is a Christian, Anglo Saxon society, and the rest of us should shut up and blend in. I say we call them on it:

Glenn Beck's March on Washington

I know I should ignore him. It's always wise to follow Eugene Robinson's advice, he's smart and a Pulitzer Prize winner. But I can't resist commenting on Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally this weekend on the National Mall. I promised, several years ago, to stop using profanity on my blog. To live up to this promise I have resisted saying anything more about Michele Bachmann. But I am profoundly tempted to curse and stomp my feet and rage over this provocation by Beck. And it can't be anything more than that. This isn't historic. Beck is an entertainer. Like Lady Gaga. Would a performance on the National Mall by Lady Gaga be historic? No. What if 250,000 people showed up? It would be a remarkable indication of her popularity. But it wouldn't be historic.

Yet Beck is portraying his event on the Mall as a history-making event. The comparison I made with Lady Gaga isn't as strange as it sounds. Beck, like Lady Gaga, is in the middle of a national tour. He'll appear in Chicago - well, really, Hoffman Estates - at the Sears Arena in a couple weeks. Is that appearance historic too? For those who want a little more bang for your entertainment dollar, Beck is teaming up with Bill O'Reilly for a few dates too, including a stop at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut. Will that be historic? Dude, a decade ago I saw Dylan touring with the Dead. That was freakin' historic!* Beck and O'Reilly at a casino? Not even close.


Okay. So Beck's appearance at the Mall is a show. Why am I letting this bother me? I can't help it, this is the type of hypocritical sham that always makes me fume. Beck said:

This is about the things Martin Luther King stood for. The content of character, not the color of skin.

I doubt, really, that Beck has any grasp of what "Martin Luther King stood for." What Beck aims to do here, in the closing days of what one friend has called the Republicans' summer of racial resentment, is to question whether race has any relevance at all in our national conversation. The right wants to argue that it doesn't, that America is a place where race shouldn't matter. A portion of their audience - Tea Partiers for example - believe that anyone standing up to talk about race is playing on White guilt to get stuff. Seventy-three percent of Tea Party sympathizers think blacks could be just as well off as whites if they just worked harder. This is the dog whistle Beck is blowing when he positions character alongside race. If more African Americans were hard-working Americans, they wouldn't need to worry about their race. I don't know if Beck believes that, but his supporters do.

As I pointed out in any earlier essay, Sarah Palin, who will also speak at the rally this weekend, has complained that those who emphasize our differences - how African Americans are still discriminated against, how gays and lesbians are denied equal protection of the law - are damaging the nation. She, and Beck and the Tea Party crowds they will speak to, believe that the Constitution should be honored, and loading it down with amendments, like that awful 14th Amendment, or hanging Supreme Court decisions on it that, in their opinion, can't possibly reflect the framers' original intentions, weakens us. For Beck and his fans, the nation's character is embodied in our Constitution. It reflects the Christian, Anglo-Saxon principles of its authors. And when we compromise on those principles, to appease blacks and gays and other whiners, we undermine our foundations.

But for Martin Luther King, race mattered. And so did social justice. And it doesn't matter how Beck wants to twist King's speech, or reimagine its meaning, it is inescapable that King wanted us to address inequalities that had plagued us since the nation's founding. When King spoke in 1963, he wanted to draw our attention to the fact that African Americans lived "on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity," and that they were still languishing "in the corners of American society." Will Beck or any of the speakers at this weekend's conservative Lollapalooza talk about the persistence of poverty in an age of deepening economic inequality? Will he talk about the marginalization of people of color, including immigrants, in a summer devoted to making Latinos and Muslims feel like outsiders, whatever their citizenship? I very much doubt it. If not, his claim that he is in some way standing up for the things King cared about is a lie. King was about transforming America. Beck and everyone he is dragging along on his conservative revue want to reproduce America, in all of its pre-civil rights inequality.


* Admission of truth: I didn't see that tour. I was too into indie rock at the time to spend my entertain dollar on a couple of dinosaur acts pairing up for an obvious cash-grab. But now, heck yeah, I'd line up to see Dylan play with anyone.

A Win for Equality and Justice

So Proposition 8 in California has, at least for now, been overturned. The decision is being appealed, and will surely end up in the Supreme Court. The summer of the 14th Amendment continues.

The decision itself is fascinating, and Vaughn Walker's careful reasoning is a joy to read. For one thing, he demolishes the idea that the "yes" vote on Proposition 8 represents in any meaningful way "the will of the people." He unpacks how Protect Marriage financed and managed the messaging, and that it was, for all purposes, a religious movement. Whether this has any significance as a finding in law I don't know, but it makes Jeff Sessions, for example, look like a cheat and a liar as he pouts that the decision is "an example of a judge feeling that they know better than the people". The passage of Prop 8 is, in fact, an example of how special interests can buy election outcomes. It says nothing at all about where we are as a "people" on this question. If you want to know that, consult Nate Silver, not the results of the vote on Proposition 8. Silver shows that changing demographics - the aging of America mainly - and shifting opinions will make same-sex marriage the law of the land in a matter of years. Proposition 8 is a burp, a historical bubble.

Further, Walker argues that deeply held "moral" opinions - whether they represent the majority or not - should not guide our law and policy, if they subvert the Constitution. Walker writes: "Marriage in the United States has always been a civil matter. Civil authorities may permit religious leaders to solemnize marriages but not to determine who may enter or leave a civil marriage. Religious leaders may determine independently whether to recognize a civil marriage or divorce but that recognition or lack thereof has no effect on the relationship under state law." Under state and federal law, what matters is the Constitutional test, not the unanimity of opinion or its situatedness in dearly loved moral or religious traditions.

Further "California, like every other state, has never required that individuals entering a marriage be willing or able to procreate." So the idea that marriage is an institution formulated to produce and raise children is a thought raised merely to advance an argument against gay marriage, but it has no basis in law or in our "tradition and history." This last point is important, since, as you might recall, Samuel Alito based his decision in McDonald v Chicago on the idea that Americans have a "history and tradition," of shooting holes in each other to protect our home and possessions.

Walker goes on to dismantle another proposal offered by Proposition 8 supporters by dragging in anti-miscegenation laws. He reviews that: "Many states, including California, had laws restricting the race of marital partners so that whites and non-whites could not marry." Those laws were once justified as being "naturally-based and God’s plan just being put into positive law," the same argument advanced all along by Protect Marriage and supporters of Proposition 8. Walker points out, though, that "Racial restrictions on an individual’s choice of marriage partner were deemed unconstitutional under the California Constitution in 1948 and under the United States Constitution in 1967." These laws were swept away because, in the words of the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v Virginia, "Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

If that is true of race-based marriage restrictions, it is surely true for sex-based restrictions. Discrimination and bias and "invidious" opinions cannot be the basis of policy in a society that celebrates equality.

The next step Walker takes is even more applause-worthy. He says: "Marriage between a man and a woman was traditionally organized based on presumptions of a division of labor along gender lines. Men were seen as suited for certain types of work and women for others. Women were seen as suited to raise children and men were seen as suited to provide for the family." However, "currently, the state’s assignment of marital roles is gender-neutral. [B]oth spouses are obligated to support one another, but they are not obligated to one another with a specific emphasis on one spouse being the provider and the other being the dependent. The legal status of a wife has changed. Her legal personality is no longer merged in that of her husband." Fascinatingly, Walker offers an opinion on the equality of men and women in a judgment about the equality of same-sex and traditional marriage. He not only frees gays and lesbians from the chains of "invidious" opinion, but forcefully reinforces the equality between men and women in a society where that idea is still too uncertainly established.

Piece by piece, Walker concludes, marriage under law doesn't serve as a union for procreation, or as a foundation for the reproduction of certain religious traditions, or as a cooperative arrangement permitting men and women to respectively perform distinctive economic functions. Marriage, in our day and age, has legal and institution value (since inheritance and social welfare benefits have become interrelated with marriage) and psychological and health benefits - married people, studies show, live longer and are happier.

So the supporters of Proposition 8 are essentially left to argue that the benefits of marriage should be denied to same-sex couples merely because of invidious biases situated in supporters' religious traditions. This entire campaign is about their hatred of gays and lesbians, and nothing more. And the state has no interest in withholding the social and individual benefits of marriage from gays and lesbians merely because one part of our society hates them.

The 14th Amendment gets HOT

Who would have thought? The 14th Amendment has been popping up all over the place. I know I'm spending an extraordinary amount of time on this, but I am flabbergasted by all of this. Let's review.

Samuel Alito relied on the 14th Amendment to bring down Chicago's hand gun ban, arguing that the 14th Amendment incorporated the protections of the 2nd Amendment, making the right to possess guns a right that states (and municipalities) could not strip away. He went further, making the claim - which I ridiculed - that the authors of the 14th Amendment were deeply concerned with assuring recently emancipated blacks the right to hold on to their guns, despite the efforts of the Southern states to take them away. In actuality, the City of Chicago was closer to being right - the 14th Amendment was concerned with discrimination; the Amendment's goal, when combined with the aims of the 13th and 15th Amendments, was to assure African Americans full citizenship by ending slavery, promising equal protection under the law, and guaranteeing the right to vote. By reaching into the debate associated with the Amendment's passage to extract random claims that link the 14th Amendment to concerns about gun rights, Alito discredits himself. He hangs his decision on the words of Samuel Pomeroy, an undistinguished Senator from Kansas, who said:

“Every man . . . should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his home-stead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.”

In Alito's world, the 14th Amendment was designed to assure that emancipated blacks could preserved their freedom, and the sanctity of their homes, through the use of their shotguns. Clarence Thomas echoes this concern, quoting Frederick Douglass: "The black man has never had the right either to keep or bear arms, [and until he does] the work of the Abolitionists was not finished." So for these two conservative justices, deeply distrustful of government, emancipation and full citizenship was something African Americans won at the barrel of a gun, not through prolonged struggle, legislation, court decisions, protest, and the timely deployment of federal troops. What a peculiar and narrow view of American history.

Now we have the surging demand from the Republican leadership for the repeal of the 14th Amendment. Mitch McConnell, John Kyl, and Lindsay Graham want to overturn the 14th Amendment because it gives citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States." They believe that the children of illegal immigrants, born here in the U.S., should not be granted citizenship. Or, rather, they pretend to believe that. In actuality they are playing for the votes of the tea partiers and patriots who believe that illegal immigrants sneak across our borders, and quickly have sex, for the very purpose of producing an "anchor baby," a little miracle that guarantees the child's legal rights and allows, in many cases, the infant's mother a chance to stay in America, collecting, in the view of the extreme right, "welfare and other state and local benefit(s)." Again, my mind can't comprehend a view of the world, and human activity, this narrow. This view of undocumented aliens - imagining them as diabolical plotters, scamming the system - reaches into two despicable narratives. On one hand, it portrays them as criminals, engineers of a vast welfare fraud which victimizes all Americans, by stealing our tax money. This strategy of portraying immigrants as criminals is an old one, and has been used to mobilize resentment against immigrants time and time again. Paul Gilroy, for example, points to how the right in Thatcher's England typically blamed immigrants for the collapse of law and order in Britain's rusting cities.

This depiction of immigrants as welfare cheats also plays into another narrative the right has been promoting since 2008. As I have discussed in other posts, the Republican party has been playing dangerous games with our sense of collective identity. One view of American identity looks at our Anglo Saxon roots, and makes the claim that we are a white, Christian nation. And as part of that cultural legacy, we are a hard working people, drawing on a religious predisposition to labor, and save, and provide for our families. We are at risk, the right claims, because immigrants are contaminating our protestant culture with alien practices and beliefs. These foreign cultures don't value work, but instead celebrate laziness, indolence, and sloth. In their most disturbing and racist fringe formulations, these opinions portray Latino immigrants as the product of backward cultures, that have inhibited their development for generations. When they cross our borders, this fringe believes, they bring their sickness with them, and as we absorb their culture into ours, through multicultural curriculums and the celebration of Latino heritage, we weaken ourselves, and lay the foundation for our nation's failure and decline.

These are the voters Republican politicians are reaching out to with their proposals to repeal the 14th Amendment. It isn't a legitimate debate. It's an appeal to hate.

John Kyl and Lindsay Graham: our New Ambassadors of Hate

Following on my recent efforts to work through the implications of today's political stew for our shared sense of common national identity, I come to only one conclusion: This is a fight that is intensifying. Yesterday on Face the Nation, John Kyl echoed Lindsay Graham’s call for a Constitutional Amendment that would eviscerate the 14th Amendment, denying citizenship to children born here in the US if their parents are here illegally. (See here.) It is mind boggling, to me, that all of the progress since the Civil War – the 14th Amendment was one of the 3 post-Civil War Amendments that institutionalized the idea that the US was an inclusive nation – is being challenged by Republicans in order to win political points with the paranoid fringe of America’s right. Kyl and Graham (and John McCain) don’t even believe the hateful rhetoric they are peddling. They just know there is a market for it. There is almost no chance of adopting an amendment of the type they are discussing. It is all agitation and positioning – we hate immigrants (and blacks and everyone not like you) as much as you do. Vote for us! But the deeply institutionalized constitutional shifts represented by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are too important to play games with; if we question their legitimacy we question the widening of the circle of inclusion that has characterized the past 150 years.

I’m more deeply convinced that Sarah Palin is America’s Margaret Thatcher. Just as Thatcher represented Britain’s idealized sense of itself at a moment of national decline (and in the face of a transforming wave of immigration), so Sarah Palin represents our idealized sense of ourselves. She’s the scrappy homesteader from America’s last frontier, independent, uncorrupted by the evils of multiculturalism, urban welfarism, and watered-down Christian faith. The parallels between Britain’s reaction to the twin dilemmas of economic decline and demographic change (as mapped out by Paul Gilroy in his brilliant work) and our current situation are unmistakable. The result in Britain: they navigated through this (eventually) and London now is a proudly multicultural city. But along the way they had race riots, saw the emergence of a racist and violent skinhead culture (still alive from place to place in Britain’s rusting industrial cities and among the nation’s soccer hooligans) and spent years and years in neutral, unable to move ahead while these issues were fought out. I think our result could be even more explosive. We are by nature a more violent society (as recently celebrated by Samuel Alito and the Supreme Court), we have an existing infrastructure of white supremacist hate groups (and an internet landscape to spread their racist rantings), we are consumed by a fear of foreigners exaggerated by our 'war on terror,' and our politicians are more openly hateful and confrontational in their language.