Dems And GOP Do NOT Have Similar Problems With Race

I really have to seriously disagree with this Kevin Drum post that Democrats and Republicans have mirror image problems on race. It is the usual media false equivalence on steroids. I would agree with conservative Avik Roy when he says, “conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy.” And I also agree with Drum when he states, “The problem for Republicans is simple to describe: it’s not that their leaders are racist, but that they’ve long tolerated racism in their ranks”. But he then goes on to say that the Democrats’ problem is that, by bashing this white nationalism and calling out racism when you see it, it immediately turns off those white working class voters and dooms the Democratic economic message from ever getting through to them. To say that calling out racism is a “problem” is almost beyond the pale. And perhaps if Republican leaders didn’t tolerate that racism, Democrats wouldn’t have to call them out on it so often.

But more than that, Republicans call for the deportation of millions of immigrants, propose monitoring mosques and subjecting Muslims to loyalty oaths, offer economic policies that hurt that white working class and enrich the 1%, and, as he says, tolerate and encourage the racism within their party, either implicitly or explicitly. Democrats, on the other hand, fight to increase the minimum wage which will help the white working class directly and indirectly, attempt, against Republican opposition, to provide affordable health insurance that will also benefit the white working class, try to get the government investment in areas that have been abandoned economically, and I have yet to hear one word from the dais of the Democratic convention that painted the white working class with the broad brush of racism. Drum is absolutely right in his analysis of the Republican problem on race. But I believe he has it totally backward when it comes to the Democrats. It’s not that the white nationalists tune out the Democratic economic message because they believe Democrats are calling them racists. It’s that the white nationalists tune out the because of their racism. Does Drum honestly believe that Democrats would be able to sway a large bloc of white nationalists to their economic message by essentially dropping the matter of race altogether. I certainly don’t. For the white nationalists and a segment of the white working class, it is all about tribal politics.