Evaluating Policy Platforms By Their Relationship to the Status Quo, Right-Wing Racism Edition

Jonathan Chait has a very good post (as most of his are, though I'm not actually sure I agree with him in his recent spats with Matt Yglesias about college football and the impending war in Syria) about how conservatives are wrong that racism is over. The basic point he makes is that, while the conservative stance on racial issues is a lot less horrible than it was 50 years ago when Martin Luther King marched on Washington, it's still a good long way from perfect, in some ways that are genuinely pretty blameworthy even though it's genuinely not as bad as it used to be. It's sort of continuing on his earlier post about Republican voter suppression efforts, saying that while they're legitimately not as bad as Jim Crow disenfranchisement, they're still pretty bad. And while I agree with the substance of his posts, there's something I'd like to add.


I am, in general, of the opinion that it is better to judge the policy platforms of political parties not on the absolute substance of their proposals but on how they would or wouldn't like to change the status quo. So terms like "progressive" or "conservative" or "reactionary" get at this sense very well, although since the future is unknown to the present it's never as well-defined what the first of those means as it is what the last two mean (see this post for an expansion of that point, which is irrelevant to my arguments here). This is a thought I originally had in response to the idea, which is not entirely a worthless partisan political argument for the Democrats, that the modern Republican Party is too conservative for Ronald Reagan. This, I argue, relies on erroneously assuming that someone's policy proposals in a given electoral campaign or at a given point in history reflect their own personal vision of ideal public policy. Given, however, that politics is difficult and that, even in a country like the United Kingdom where the governing party actually just gets to govern, you don't get to sweep away the status quo entirely and implement exactly the solutions that you'd like, and that politicians know this in advance (even if voters don't always), it makes sense for campaign platforms to reflect as much of a step in the direction of ideal policy as a party thinks it can realistically get. Actually the fact that voters don't always remember that politics is hard gives parties an extra incentive to temper their proposals, because if you say you'll do exactly what you'd like to do and then get 30% of the way there from the status quo you're a failure but if you only ever said you wanted to go 25% of the way there, not only will you get extra points for being a "moderate" but you'll be judged a sweeping success.

Now let's apply this principle to conservatives and race. It doesn't look good for modern conservatives. The basic insight is that at every turn conservatives have been against anything that would improve the lives of black people or would reduce the extent of their oppression and adamantly in favor of retaining any and all aspects of the status quo that are disadvantageous for black people. That was true in 1913, it was true in 1963, and it's true today. Over that time, and especially during the second half of that period, conservatives have lost spectacularly on this particular issue, along with a number of other socio-equality issues (feministy stuff, LGBTQ stuff, generally-letting-people-do-whatever-the-hell-they-want-even-if-that's-sex stuff, etc.). De jure political discrimination against black people has been essentially eradicated, and while there's still, as Chait details in his post, a lot of de facto private discrimination it has basically been established that this is bad. If you don't acknowledge that discrimination against black people is a bad thing, on some level at least, you don't get to be a public figure, certainly not a political one. You might be able to get by in the Rand Paul fashion, saying that private racial discrimination is a private moral transgression but that you don't think the government should interfere with it for some weird libertarian reason, but you must must must include the bit about how it's morally wrong or you're cooked. There are simply too many people in this country, even the most racist parts of it, who are not remotely okay with that kind of racism to be politically successful like that.

Given all of that, is it surprising that conservatives don't have as horrible a racial agenda as their ideological forebears did fifty years ago? No, of course not. If they did they'd lose every election ever. Or, let's put it another way, a slightly Bayesian way: is the empirical evidence of the modern Republican stance on racial issues remotely inconsistent with the hypothesis that at least many Republicans are, in their heart of hearts, just as racist as most members of the Conservative Coalition were in 1963, and regret the developments in race relations over the intervening half-century? No, it is not. If that hypothesis were true we would see, I think, exactly what we do in fact see in the behavior of the Republican Party toward black people. Now it's also exactly what we'd see if the stuff all the conservatives say they believe is actually true, and they do think that MLK was a hero and Lyndon Johnson was a hero and Strom Thurmond et al. were deeply deeply wrong to resist the civil rights movement but nonetheless it's still true that in 2013 racial affirmative action is wrong and gerrymandering that's at least accidentally racist is cool if it helps you win and the government should do less to stop private racial discrimination and also we should cut spending on any government programs that give any of their money to any black people. It doesn't really help distinguish between the two hypotheses. And that's being kind: there are several little peripheral indicators, like the fact that the current version of conservative racial policy is basically just the continued evolution of anti-black-people conservative racial policy that keeps losing and then saying "okay, we lost, but let's not lose any more, okay?" and the fact that the substantive position current Republicans outline is a lot more substantively bizarre than the rather simple "let's do all we can to keep black people down" position, that suggest the more cynical hypothesis is the correct one. Oh, and there's also the whole "not all Republicans are racists but nearly all unreconstructed racists are Republicans" thing, which suggests that the relatively small (~10%, I think?) contingent of unreconstructed racists in the national populace would probably have outsized influence over the Republican Party.

But that's a more ambitious claim than I really need to make right now. The main point is that, while Chait is completely correct that the substantive content of right-wing racial proposals is a lot less hateful than it was fifty years ago, that fact does not actually tell us that the deep-down racial attitudes of the right-wingers making those proposals are any less hateful than they used to be. The modern Republican Party is, basically, what a party dominated by a dwindling minority of unreconstructed racists who can't wear their hate on their sleeve anymore and be politically competitive but aren't happy about the whole racial equality thing one tiny little bit would look like.