Hello, and welcome to another edition of...
...The dumbest column ever written! It just don't stop! Rabbi Marc Gellman is just so perplexed: "[Joe Lieberman] lost...because of the number of Jews who hated Bush and the war more than they loved Joe. That's why he lost, and I don't get it." But wait--there's more! "I am a professional Jew, and yet if you asked me to explain why Jews did not vote for Joe the way blacks voted for Barack Obama or Catholics voted for John F. Kennedy I would not know what to tell you." "He is principled and intelligent ... and he is one of us! What more do you want of the guy?" "So among reasonable non-rabid people, the differences over Iraq are just not that big. And for this we dumped Joe? It just makes no sense to me and it ought to be a huge embarrassment to all card-carrying Jews whether they agreed with Joe or not."
...
If a black person made this argument about a politician (and they sometimes do, especially in my home town--more on that later), they would be called a "reverse racist" or "guilty of playing the race card." (See, for instance, when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin made his "keep New Orleans a chocolate city" speech.) If a Muslim person wrote a column to the effect that Muslims should remain loyal to their fellow Muslims over other political considerations, he'd probably be targeted by the authorities. Of course, Muslims don't have to do anything to suffer a ridiculously high level of prejudice. According to Gallup: 22% of Americans don't want a Muslim as a neighbor. 34% believe all Muslims support al-Qaeda. 39% believe Muslims should carry "special ID cards." That's right, take your special ID card right here to your new "re-education camp"...
My beloved M-Town is no stranger to the race game. In the recent primaries, Tennessee State Senator Steve Cohen sought the nomination to replace Harold Ford Jr. as Tennessee's Ninth District U.S. Representative. (Ford, of course, is seeking Bill Frist's empty Senate seat and is the subject of many a journalistic "black Democrat in the South" underdog story.) In a controversial op-ed, black opponent Julian Bolton claimed that Cohen, if elected, would join the Congressional Black Caucus in order to "get money for Israel." A followup letter to the editor by local attorney Walter Bailey endorsed Bolton's view, saying that the 9th District's issues "demand a congressional voice that would be more inclined, by virtue of the personal experience of being black, to have the necessary commitment, passion, knowledge base and undivided loyalty." He says further that "blacks are unlike other ethnic groups that have at their command unlimited resources, such as wealth, industrial ownership and sheer numbers, to advance their interests." Normally this type of statement would be more or less true, but when your opponent is Jewish, and the problem becomes one not of class and race but of interracial antagonism, you done stepped over the line, buddy. Reader responses here and here.
All these examples obviously appear gross and simple-minded to most thoughtful people. But they push questions to the forefront about "real" interests, and how we evaluate them. While most of us would decry the notion that more politicians should be elected solely based on their race, I for one don't hesitate to say that it would be better if there were more blacks and other ethnic minorities in Congress--not just because we want it to be a more "colorful, diverse" tent, but because I minority politicians have something important to offer the American political system precisely qua their minority status and identity. The two ideas that 1) all the interests in America could "conceivably"/"theoretically" be represented by white Judeo-Christian men and 2) that President Bush is some sort of civil rights hero because he hired Rice and Powell strike me as lacking.
There is also the problem that while we tend to downplay racial issues, some people freely embrace class-based ones. Thus you get the Frankian "What's the Matter with Kansas" argument as well as the traditional leftist progressive view: if the working classes were given full political voice and were educated as to their "real" interests, we would see a definite leftward swing in America, perhaps even some sort of socialist revolution. But much of this argument is simply replacing one's race with one's class and obscuring other considerations--morals and defense, to name some obvious examples. But at this point the argument breaks down into a complex communitarian vs. liberal battle over what constitutes a person's "identity." In any case, food for thought...
...
If a black person made this argument about a politician (and they sometimes do, especially in my home town--more on that later), they would be called a "reverse racist" or "guilty of playing the race card." (See, for instance, when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin made his "keep New Orleans a chocolate city" speech.) If a Muslim person wrote a column to the effect that Muslims should remain loyal to their fellow Muslims over other political considerations, he'd probably be targeted by the authorities. Of course, Muslims don't have to do anything to suffer a ridiculously high level of prejudice. According to Gallup: 22% of Americans don't want a Muslim as a neighbor. 34% believe all Muslims support al-Qaeda. 39% believe Muslims should carry "special ID cards." That's right, take your special ID card right here to your new "re-education camp"...
My beloved M-Town is no stranger to the race game. In the recent primaries, Tennessee State Senator Steve Cohen sought the nomination to replace Harold Ford Jr. as Tennessee's Ninth District U.S. Representative. (Ford, of course, is seeking Bill Frist's empty Senate seat and is the subject of many a journalistic "black Democrat in the South" underdog story.) In a controversial op-ed, black opponent Julian Bolton claimed that Cohen, if elected, would join the Congressional Black Caucus in order to "get money for Israel." A followup letter to the editor by local attorney Walter Bailey endorsed Bolton's view, saying that the 9th District's issues "demand a congressional voice that would be more inclined, by virtue of the personal experience of being black, to have the necessary commitment, passion, knowledge base and undivided loyalty." He says further that "blacks are unlike other ethnic groups that have at their command unlimited resources, such as wealth, industrial ownership and sheer numbers, to advance their interests." Normally this type of statement would be more or less true, but when your opponent is Jewish, and the problem becomes one not of class and race but of interracial antagonism, you done stepped over the line, buddy. Reader responses here and here.
All these examples obviously appear gross and simple-minded to most thoughtful people. But they push questions to the forefront about "real" interests, and how we evaluate them. While most of us would decry the notion that more politicians should be elected solely based on their race, I for one don't hesitate to say that it would be better if there were more blacks and other ethnic minorities in Congress--not just because we want it to be a more "colorful, diverse" tent, but because I minority politicians have something important to offer the American political system precisely qua their minority status and identity. The two ideas that 1) all the interests in America could "conceivably"/"theoretically" be represented by white Judeo-Christian men and 2) that President Bush is some sort of civil rights hero because he hired Rice and Powell strike me as lacking.
There is also the problem that while we tend to downplay racial issues, some people freely embrace class-based ones. Thus you get the Frankian "What's the Matter with Kansas" argument as well as the traditional leftist progressive view: if the working classes were given full political voice and were educated as to their "real" interests, we would see a definite leftward swing in America, perhaps even some sort of socialist revolution. But much of this argument is simply replacing one's race with one's class and obscuring other considerations--morals and defense, to name some obvious examples. But at this point the argument breaks down into a complex communitarian vs. liberal battle over what constitutes a person's "identity." In any case, food for thought...
posted by to scranton at 11:21 PM
1 Comments:
I think perhaps I should clarify the liberal vs. communitarian debate, because it seems to me there is a leftist/socialist third way. The common critique of the liberal view is that while people are certainly autonomous to an extent, they cannot magically self-create themselves to be a totally atomistic, free choice Individual with a capital "I." The communitarian critique makes the claim (among other things) that human beings naturally develop within an "ethnos" or smaller culture that irreversibly shapes their needs and interests. At the end of the day, it is impossible to totally abstract oneself from one's empirical, historically situated existence--therefore liberalism has some decided holes to fill. I wouldn't argue with this too much on a socio- and psychological level, because indeed many people don't critique their own existence enough or totally break with their cultural surroundings in order to achieve a state of perfect "liberal autonomy." Of course, this isn't really what liberalism claims to do, because it sets itself up as a standard to be approximated while keeping valid communitarian criticisms in mind. Most secular liberals in this day and age acknowledge that rights and liberties are largely historical and culturally created (in other words, they are no longer thought "self-evident" or "endowed by a creator"), but they still maintain that pragmatically affairs will be best off if we speak and act as if rights and liberties are more or less permanently in place and worthy of our reverence. Ronald Dworkin and Kwame Anthony Appiah seem to me textbook cases of this modern liberal view.
The socialist critique differentiates itself by attacking liberalism not for its epistemological defects (i.e. "no one could possibly mentally break free of their ethnos in the maximally liberal way") but for its obscuring of matters of class and material imbalance--in other words, while the basic rights of liberalism should be true in a perfect world, the language of liberalism hides the severe inequalities that continue (with its help) as a result of purely "political" freedom. Sure, everyone has the right to vote and the "opportunity" for work and success, but many people do not vote, in fact are more or less encouraged not to or even are directly hindered, the class structure sets up systematic inequalities in the realm of job opportunities, the media is owned by corporate interests, the State is a largely oligarchic and increasingly imperialistic entity, etc. Socialism (a stronger form, actually, I suppose Marxism, since "socialism" mainly means "state control of industry and a healthy welfare state" these days) rejects the "dirtier" bits of communitarianism, which seem to me to consist of the ideas that we can't extend outside of our upbringing and that groups are blocked (by virtue of their different ethne) from fully understanding or tolerating each other. In other words, socialism precisely aims at achieving the sort of "bigger picture" abstract knowledge that communitarianism denies us, while arguing against liberalism that class antagonism exists but that it can be remedied by the creation of classless society, in which case we achieve a sort of Enlightenment-standard free society of equals. (Then the state "withers away," blah blah thank you Dr. Marx.)
What we end up with, then, is a liberal ideology that I think is worth defending, held in check by some valid communitarian critiques which touch upon the social/psychological limitations of the liberal ideal, but which pose no substantial threat to liberalism itself. The socialist critique views itself as the "end" of liberal development, at least the sort of socialism I find admirable (Stalinism and big fat bureaucracy need not apply). I see some strands of libertarianism (of all things! I never thought I'd see the day) running through this line of thought which I'd like to perhaps devote a full post to. Before anyone criticizes the "implausibility" of my arguments here or their distance from potentially coming true, I think it's important to work out in our minds what sort of society we want a priori. (This sort of "idealism" necessarily excludes the teleological notion that the proletariat is the "historical class" that will inevitably recognize itself--scientific Marxism is OUT, bro.) Also what I've just said has nothing to do with my post, so forgive me. It also excludes pretty much all theory since 1968. FEEL the rejection of postmodernism, babay!
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