It's kind of funny to watch Tea Party boosters descend into a furious rage over signs of an inverse sense of racial entitlement among some political figures in Washington, D.C. Here's Matt Welch from Reason getting spitting mad over Courtland Milloy's recent column (Milloy, whom I cited yesterday as an example of an element of racialized anger in D.C., actually lives in Maryland):
Go ahead and tell me how terrible it is that an anti-masturbation sub-Palin has an outside chance of being one of the few of the 100 senators who you could pick out in a police lineup. I will counter with a less-sexy story about how, in the city where I choose to live, where I pay hefty local taxes, where I have sincere hopes about placing my daughter in a public school system (as Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee do, but Barack Obama does not), where I have witnessed stunning changes for the better in just two years of interacting with the local elementary school, one of the country's foulest and most powerful special interests, the overwhelmingly Democratic Party-financing American Federation of Teachers, just spent $1 million large to make sure that the last glimmer of reform for this famously bottom-of-the-barrel school district gets snuffed out, in a wave of anti-Stuff White People Like spite.
This is your mainstream Democratic Party, people. It knows how to speak in complete sentences, it knows how to masturbate, and it knows how to destroy expensive education systems. I hope you fucking enjoy it.
Truly, is there a man life has wronged more deeply than Welch? Last time I checked, Fenty and Rhee were Democrats, and Democratic President Barack Obama's administration had just given them $75 million in federal money to implement their agenda. But whatever, political speech is for independently wealthy types who can fund magazines and think tanks, not for school teachers organizing on behalf of their own interests. I suppose I hope that in addition to being familiar with masturbation, basic grammar and how to destroy education in America, the foul Democratic Party also knows how to use Google.
Milloy's column, with its rage against professional elites disdaining the groundlings, followed the basic right-wing script, except its racial resentment was directed at whites rather than blacks, which is why it made Welch and any number of other D.C.-based white folks on the right so angry. But it's a single column. If I want to hear some right-wing figure attacking librul elites and minorities for not being Real Murrikans I need only turn on the radio on any given day. Milloy's column was wrong and reprehensible, but as far as being an example of an elite media figure using racial resentment to manipulate genuine feelings of economic frustration in service of an ideological agenda, he's not much of an exception to the rule.
UPDATE: One final point: While I do hope that someday, the DC public school system is the kind of place where Welch would want to send his kids, if it isn't, his children won't really be the ones to suffer for it. It'll be the kids who don't have family with the means to grant them a quality education elsewhere.
