Matthew Yglesias comments on yesterday’s post about conservatives and race:
I think that’s basically true, but in some ways it misses the point. American political behavior is heavily shaped by racial attitudes in ways that are much more fundamental than the race of the candidate. Just look at the extraordinary racial gap in voting behavior that occurs clearly and consistently every time a white Democrat faces off against a white Republican. Or look at how nominating Michael Steel didn’t make African-American Marylanders suddenly love Republicans. Stephanie Mencimer found a good example of this in the American Values Survey when she observed a big partisan gap in the answer to the question of whether or not discrimination against whites “is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”
I wouldn’t disagree with that at all. My basic perception of how each party views race in politics is that Democrats think that the welfare state would be more popular if it weren’t for latent racism and racial resentment, and Republicans think more minorities would vote Republican if Democrats weren’t constantly calling them racist. Given that the greatest expansion of the American welfare state occurred in the midst of an explicit Faustian bargain between liberals and white supremacists, and that the latter fled the Democratic Party and suddenly discovered their opposition to activist government around the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, I think the former observation is true and the latter one is basically bullshit.
Conservatives have tried to use the Dixiecrats to suggest support of activist government is racist, but the data flagged by Mercimer that Yglesias points to basically confirms that racial attitudes shape people’s partisan voting behavior. In theory there’s nothing about being supportive of “small government” or social insurance that has anything to do with race, in practice it turns out that it often does. But for all those reasons and the ones Yglesias mentions I think simply saying that conservatives oppose Obama because he’s black obscures more than it clarifies.
