One of the things that you should always do is ensure that you are working with a set of logically consistent standards, and not just being a partisan or ideological hack. In yesterday's post, I gave a somewhat more nuanced discussion of politicians and blackface than one might have expected, and I didn't just say that Northam has to go. If you are a Democrat, or just left-leaning, you might find yourself cross-pressured, and not quite go as hard on Northam as you might on a Republican who once wore blackface. I wasn't exactly kind to Northam, and I applied an argument from a book I published in 2011, but there's a real question here.
And Republicans ask it all the time. Are Republican politicians treated differently when there is an incident involving race?
Yes.
Imagine two different hypotheticals. Imagine a tape being uncovered of Nancy Pelosi saying the n-word. Now, imagine one of Kevin McCarthy saying the n-word. Notice that I am avoiding any of the Steve King contingent of the GOP. I'm not even using Steve Scalise, who once described himself as David Duke without the baggage. Just Kevin McCarthy-- Nancy Pelosi's current counterpart.
One of these two hypothetical n-word tapes would be treated more harshly than the other. And you know it.
The simple explanation is that Pelosi is a Democrat, and McCarthy is a Republican, and Democrats get cut a lot more slack on race than Republicans, but it is more complex than that, and it gets into some of the subtext from yesterday's post. In yesterday's post, I talked about the concept of public office as a job, and just doing the job, based on my first book. This gets into the basic question of policy actions and policy positions, which are strongly related to party. That wasn't always the case! It is now, but it wasn't always. Back in the mid-20th Century, party and policy positions weren't very closely related. Back in those days, there were liberal Republicans, and conservative Democrats. Oh, and those conservative Democrats? They were southerners. And they were really, really racist.
Hmmmm…
Anyway, if the hypothetical, Pelosi n-word tape came out, she could apologize profusely, and point to a record of policy that the African-American community could see as working towards their interests. Would they have a legitimate gripe about dehumanizing language? Sure. Enough that they'd rather have a non-n-word-using Kevin McCarthy as Speaker? Ummm…
So let's turn to the hypothetical n-word tape of Kevin McCarthy. Would that be harder to forgive? Remember my rule on language. I don't care about Carlin-speak. I care about things like racial epithets because they convey at least implicit threats. From the perspective of the African-American community, a significant piece of the Republican policy agenda for several years has been the enactment of barriers to voting that disproportionately disenfranchise minorities based on the false premise of widespread voter fraud. The Supreme Court struck down the pre-clearance section of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County ruling, and the Republican Party has not only failed to write a new version tailored to the Court's instructions, but has, at the state level, gone hog-wild with new restrictions. Add to this the party's recent history with birtherism and... lemme just stop here. Kevin McCarthy? Where does he fit in here? Mostly, he is a weasel. He tries to figure out which way the wind is blowing. He's a coward who doesn't want to do anything that either goes against the current direction, or risks alienating people if the winds shift. His name is "Empty Vessel." From the African-American community's perspective, then, Kevin McCarthy is whatever the current direction of the GOP is. Right now, a big part of that is policy like voting restrictions that disproportionately affect the African-American community based on the false premise of voter fraud. I could go on, but this is part of my area of expertise.
Anyway, if this guy says the n-word, that's a little different from Nancy Pelosi saying it, not just because he has an R after his name, but because of the policies associated with that. This person would not be treated the same way as Nancy Pelosi if the hypothetical n-word tape came out.
Extrapolate, then. Take a hypothetical Republican who advocates the typical supply-side tax platform, but deviates on voting rights, stood up to the party when it went into the birther fever swamp, and so forth. Would that Republican get cut the same amount of slack as a Democrat? Maybe. Maybe it's not party. Maybe it's policy. They are closely intertwined.
This is the tricky thing about what's happening with Northam. He is a Democrat. Were he a Republican, he would almost certainly face more pressure than he is facing now. Why is that? Is that because of an intrinsic party bias in how things like blackface play out in our political environment? Or, is that because of the relationship between the parties and the policies they advocate, as they relate to race and civil rights? In order to test that, social scientifically, we'd need a hypothetical Republican who a) takes the kinds of positions on race and civil rights that are currently taken in the Democratic Party but not in the Republican Party, and then b) says or does something really stupid and vile on race. Condition A doesn't get met anymore. That's part of the polarization and sorting of the parties on issues of race that took place as the old Dixiecrats died off or switched parties, and that makes this really hard to test.
Anyway, food for thought. Just make sure that if you are cutting Northam slack, your thought processes are clear.
The Michael Jackson thing? Stupid at best. That photo? How much slack would you cut a Republican for that? Make sure you ask yourself that question.
