David Brooks argues today that the heated opposition to Obama has nothing to do with race, but rather diverging American instincts that originate with Hamilton and Jefferson. Brooks:
The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.Fascinating, isn't it, that Brooks--despite arguing that the debate has nothing to do with race--manages to produce a definition of populism that defines "ordinary people" as the ones from "small towns" not "financial centers." In other words, despite the fact that Brooks insists it's "not about race" he's managed to invoke a definition of ordinary people that just happens to be mostly white and isn't really all that ordinary. Bed-Stuy is a universe away from Wall Street, but New York is a "financial center" so it's just another city full of "urban elites" right? "Ordinary people" in Brooks' definition also, apparently, do not include auto workers or people who don't have health care.And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.
In the past eight years, Ron Brownstein reports, "While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked." As Tim blogged a couple of weeks ago, the top 1 percent of the population is making a quarter of total income, more than at any time since the 1920s. If we're simply talking about health care, Ezra Klein wrote earlier this week that "over the past ten years, premiums have increased by 131 percent, while wages have grown 38 percent and inflation has grown 28 percent." "Ordinary people" are paying those premiums, not making money off them.
In other words, if Brooks and the protesters he's describing were really all that "producerist" and worried about the fruits of their labor being "sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites," they'd be pretty pissed about the past eight years, during which Barack Obama was not president and the rich got richer while everyone else got poorer. In fact, the "producerist" argument, on the right, essentially boils down to "rich people should keep all the money they make off the backs of workers, because if workers really worked, they'd be rich" not "workers shouldn't have to pay for those who don't work."
We also see a xenophobic right making a "producerist" argument almost exclusively within the context of a shadowy, undeserving, and immoral other--the uninsured--neither has the right been shy in defining that other as nonwhite.
I'll actually agree with Brooks that to the extent that most Americans are concerned about, or do not support health care reform, doesn't have all that much to do with race. That's a separate question from whether the argument against health care on the right has a racial subtext to it--and one of the real problems with dealing with race in this country is that there's no understanding of degree when it comes to racism. Good people can succumb, or be manipulated into indulging their prejudices, and not all acts motivated by race are the same or motivated by malice. What's disgusting is when political parties have no compunctions about manipulating people in this manner--or how it affects the country in turn.
-- A. Serwer
