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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2010
The lasting myth of conservative bigotry F
race from B1
ed them to be. This alliance supposedly laid the foundation for a new American politics. As Dan Carter, George Wallace’s biog-
rapher, put it, “The Wallace music played on” in “Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon’s subtle manipulation of the bus- ing issue, in Ronald Reagan’s genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush’s use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich’s demoniza- tion of welfare mothers.” More recently, it continues through inflammatory cam- paign ads (“Harold, call me!,” a white woman beckoned a black candidate in 2006), offensive tea party signs, Rand Paul’s unusual-because-explicit skepti- cism about the Civil Rights Act — all the way to calls to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal im- migrants and to keep Muslim worship well away from the nation’s hallowed ground in Lower Manhattan. In this in- terpretation, core conservative princi- ples — limited government, tax cuts, wel- fare reform and toughness on crime — actually have race at their heart. This reading of the conservative move- ment presents problems of logic and his- tory, relying on assumptions that fall apart on close examination. First, it as- sumes that Republicans depended on white Southerners to become politically competitive in the 1960s. Second, it as- sumes that Republican presidents from Nixon forward swayed these voters by giving them the policies they wanted. Third, it assumes that the modern con- servative policy agenda is best seen as ra- cially motivated. Finally, it assumes that conservative positions on recent contro- versies are just new forms of that same white-heartland bigotry. These assumptions are badly flawed.
F
irst, Republicans did not decisively depend on white Southerners to create their presidential electorates
when the race issue was at its most polar- izing. The conventional wisdom is that the GOP had little choice in the 1960s but to seek out Southern white voters and tacked hard to the right on civil rights to do it. But Republican presidential candi- dates pried apart the New Deal coalition in the 1950s, with the performance of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and Nixon in 1960. This chronology has big implica- tions. From 1952 through the 1980s, GOP presidential candidates consistently beat or nearly matched their Democratic op- ponents, with the clear exceptions only of 1964 and 1976. Republicans did this mostly by crafting majority coalitions in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states, in the industrial Midwest and mid-Atlantic, and ultimately in Califor- nia — and only partially by realigning several Southern states. Moreover, these were the least “Southern” states, such as Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. This means that the GOP presidential coalition and much of the party’s modern policy agenda were forged not in the ra- cial heat of the 1960s South, but first in the 1950s and across the country. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) re- cently argued that race did not play a central role in the partisan shift in the South, saying the transformation was led by a younger generation of Southerners in the post-segregation 1970s. But the best evidence that things other than race mattered most in the shift was that it was an even older generation that moved to the GOP in the peripheral South states of Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and North Carolina. By the time Lyndon Johnson reportedly remarked that the Civil Rights Act would deliver the South to the Republicans for a generation, states representing nearly half the South’s electoral college votes were ei- ther extraordinarily competitive or had already voted Republican in multiple elections. The race-obsessed Deep South repeat- edly tried to be a presidential kingmaker in the 1960s but failed. Instead of re-
The
endurance of the
conservative- intolerance story explains why the party of Lincoln is so easily dubbed the party of Strom
Thurmond.
forming the GOP in its image, the Deep South’s white electorate was among the last to join an already-winning Repub- lican presidential coalition in the early 1970s. Wallace voters ended up support- ing Nixon, Reagan and other Repub- licans, but much more on the national GOP’s terms than their own. The Repub- lican Party proved to be the mountain to which the Deep South had to come, not the other way around. This explains why the second assump- tion is also wrong. Nixon made more symbolic than substantive accommoda- tions to white Southerners. He enforced the Civil Rights Act and extended the
Voting Rights Act. On school desegrega- tion, he had to be prodded by the courts in some ways but went further than them in others: He supervised a desegregation of Deep South schools that had eluded his predecessors and then denied tax- exempt status to many private “desegre- gation academies” to which white South- erners tried to flee. Nixon also institu- tionalized affirmative action and set- asides for minorities in federal contract- ing. Not surprisingly, white Southern lead- ers such as Strom Thurmond grew bitter- ly frustrated with Nixon. This explains what Gallup polls detected in 1971-72: A large number of white Southern voters preferred Wallace to Nixon. Only when the Alabaman was shot in May 1972 did Nixon inherit Wallace’s voters — not be- cause of Nixon’s policies on race but de- spite them. After the mid-1970s, school desegrega- tion and enforcement of the Civil Rights Act faded as the most decisive — or divi- sive — racial issues in the country. In the decades that followed, the conservative policy platform became the new focus of liberal cries of racism. Critics such as Thomas and Mary Edsall interpreted the Reagan agenda’s major elements as in- direct attempts to maintain white privi- lege: Tax cuts denied resources to a gov- ernment that could be an agent of social change and lift up the underprivileged. Calls to limit government, especially fed- eral power, stood to do the same. Rea- gan’s attacks on “welfare queens” empha- sized negative images of minorities and ultimately helped end an entitlement for the neediest. Campaigns against crime refreshed stereotypes of threatening Af- rican Americans and imprisoned mil- lions along the way. Criticism of affirma- tive action assaulted a major mechanism of workplace advancement for minor- ities and women. These policy positions remain central to the conservative domestic agenda, but calling them racist, the third assump- tion, presumes something very strange: that conservatives do not mean what they say about them. Welfare reform is deliberately anti-black (or anti-minority or anti-poor) only if conservatives secret- ly believe that welfare actually does help its beneficiaries and are being deceitful when they argue that long-term depen- dency devastates inner-city communi- ties. Tax cuts are part of a racist agenda only if conservatives do not believe that lower taxes will enhance economic growth and social mobility for all. Con- servative opposition to raising the mini- mum wage is anti-poor only if free- marketeers are feigning concern that in- creases will price less-skilled people out of the workforce (as when Milton Fried- man called the minimum wage “one of the most . . . anti-black laws on the stat- ute books”) and secretly agree with liber- als that increases will benefit the work- ing poor over the long term. By such reasoning, conservatives should oppose all government programs that they believe help minority groups. But at least one expansive policy area de- fies this expectation: education. Most conservatives, even as they turned against busing and welfare, continued to support large public education budgets. Many conservatives may support issuing school vouchers and shutting down the federal Education Department, but those positions concern which level of govern- ment should control schools — not whether government should pay for edu- cation for all. Overwhelming majorities of Republicans joined Democrats in 2007 to reauthorize Head Start, the early- education program in which well over half the students are from minority groups. And substantial majorities of whites (conservatives as well as liberals) have voiced support for “opportunity- enhancing” policies that would unoffi- cially but inevitably direct dispropor- tionate benefits to minorities. Such programs aim to give beneficia- ries not guaranteed incomes but better chances to succeed by boosting their skills. (It was George W. Bush, after all,
who insisted that academic achievement by minority students had to factor into measures of school performance.)
inally, there is reason to be skeptical of the latest assumptions of conser- vative prejudice. Conservatives
have taken the lead in two major recent controversies: opposition to a planned Islamic center near Ground Zero and support for Arizona’s law requiring im- migrants to carry their papers and re- quiring police to question those they sus- pect of being here illegally. Liberal critics swiftly labeled both positions bigotry: Is- lamophobia and prejudice against im- migrants from Latin America. To these critics, the racial resentment of past dec-
ades has simply been expanded into a more generalized prejudice against ra- cial and religious minorities. Of course, conservatives don’t see it
that way. A long-held conservative belief holds that a minimal amount of shared cultural content is required for a healthy American society. This content includes an understanding of the nation’s history and virtues, including the opportunity and social mobility it has offered so many. This helps explain, for instance, why conservatives were long skeptical of bilingual education, suspecting that it slowed assimilation. They have logically been concerned about large numbers of immigrants whose presence in the Unit- ed States is often transitory and whose relationship with the country is purely economic. And they have been cautious about high levels of even legal immigra- tion when it involves people who arrive in large enough numbers and in a con- centrated enough time and place to cre- ate zones in which pressures to assimi- late are mitigated. Most conservatives do not understand how Arizona’s move to enforce federal immigration laws can be deemed bigoted — especially considering that they have long supported crackdowns on law- breakers of all types. The planned Islam- ic center near Ground Zero raises alarms, in part, because the insensitivity of its developers to 9/11’s emotional lega- cy suggests their deeper distance from American sensibilities. Lest that position seem anti-Muslim, conservatives of every stripe, including those who have led the charge against the center, roundly con- demned the planned burning of the Ko- ran by a Florida pastor. They did so on the same grounds: Just because someone has a legal right to do something (build a center, burn a book) does not mean it is a wise, desirable or respectful thing to do. There is no doubt that the contempo-
rary Republican electorate contains some out-and-out bigots, just as the Democratic electorate contains people who dislike others on the basis of class or religion. These very real prejudices occa- sionally erupt into public expression, whether in remarks about Jews over the years by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton or, more recently, in shocking signs at tea party rallies.
But as a movement, conservatives
As a movement, conservatives have been less concerned with the “hardware” of people’s race or ethnicity and more concerned with the “software” of their values or culture.
have been less concerned with the “hard- ware” of people’s race or ethnicity and more concerned with the “software” of their values or culture. This is why the white Protestant core of the modern con- servative movement has not merely in- tegrated Catholic “ethnics” but also ral- lied behind the Irish American William F. Buckley and the Italian American An- tonin Scalia. Jews, women and Hispanics have been similarly integrated into both its ranks and leadership; indeed, many white conservatives swoon when mem- bers of minority groups proudly share their values. In the 2008 campaign, con- servatives were at least as roused by Oba- ma’s ties to the white former radical Wil- liam Ayers as the black Jeremiah Wright, both of whom seemed to make a living out of damning America. Liberal interpretations that portray modern conservatism as standing athwart the “rights revolution” of the 1960s are hard pressed to explain the growing number of minority and female candidates favored by the conservative rank and file. Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Susana Martinez, Brian Sandoval, Tim Scott, Ryan Frazier, Raul Labrador and Jaime Herrera are GOP nominees for the Senate, governorships and the House be- cause Republican voters preferred them over their white opponents. Allen West in Florida and Jon Barela in New Mexico were the consensus GOP choices to run for competitive House seats. Many of these candidates are well-positioned to win their races and help change the pub- lic face of modern conservatism. The old conservatism-as-racism story has outlived all usefulness and accuracy. November might be a good time to start a rethink.
galexander16@gmail.com
Our gray matter is gender neutral gender from B1
opposed to neuroscience or brain imag- ing; quite the opposite. But she is ardent- ly against making authoritative interpre- tations of ambiguous data. And she’s es- pecially intolerant of any intellectual leap from analyzing iffy brain data to jus- tifying a society stratified by gender. Hence her title, “Delusions of Gender,” which can be read as an intentional slur on the scientific minds perpetrating this deceit.
Fine gives these scientists no quarter, and her beef isn’t just with brain scan- ners. Consider her critique of a widely cited study of babies’ gazes, conducted when the infants were just a day and a half old. The study found that baby girls were much more likely to gaze at the ex- perimenter’s face, while baby boys pre- ferred to look at a mobile. The scientists took these results as evidence that girls are more empathic than boys, who are more analytic than girls — even without socialization. The problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it’s a lousy ex- periment. Fine spends several pages sys- tematically discrediting the study, detail- ing flaw after flaw in its design. Again,
cal discussion, but an important one, es- pecially since this study has become a cornerstone of the argument that boys and girls have a fundamental difference in brain wiring. By now, you should be getting a feeling for the tone and texture of this book. Fine offers no original research on the brain or gender; instead, her mission is to de- molish the sloppy science being used to- day to justify gender stereotypes — which she labels “neurosexism.” She is no less merciless in attacking “brain scams,” her derisive term for the many popular versions of the idea that sex hormones shape the brain, which then shapes be- havior and intellectual ability, from mathematics to nurturance. Two of her favorite targets are John
Gray, author of the “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” books, and Louann Brizendine, author of “The Female Brain” and “The Male Brain.” Fine’s preferred illustration of Gray’s “neurononsense” is his discussion of the brain’s inferior parietal lobe, or IPL. The left IPL is more developed in men, the right IPL in women, which for Gray illu- minates a lot: He says this anatomical difference explains why men become im-
why women are better able to respond to a baby crying at night. Fine dismisses such conclusions as nothing more than “sexism disguised in neuroscientific fin- ery.” Gray lacks scientific credentials. Bri- zendine has no such excuse, having been trained in science and medicine at Har- vard, Berkeley and Yale. And Fine saves her big guns — and her deepest con- tempt — for her. For the purposes of this critique, Fine fact-checked every single citation in “The Female Brain,” examin- ing every study that Brizendine used to document her argument that male and female brains are fundamentally differ- ent. Brizendine cited hundreds of aca- demic articles, making the text appear authoritative to the unwary reader. Yet on closer inspection, according to Fine, the articles are either deliberately mis- represented or simply irrelevant. “Neurosexism” is hardly new. Fine
traces its roots to the mid-19th century, when the “evidence” for inequality in- cluded everything from snout elongation to “cephalic index” (ratio of head length to head breadth) to brain weight and neuron delicacy. Back then, the motives for this pseudoscience were transpar-
KRISTIN LENZ
er education and, especially, the right to vote. In a 1915 New York Times com- mentary on women’s suffrage, neurolo- gist Charles Dana, perhaps the most il- lustrious brain scientist of his time, cata- logued several differences between men’s and women’s brains and nervous sys- tems, including the upper half of the spi- nal cord. These differences, he claimed, proved that women lack the intellect for politics and governance. None of this was true, of course. Not one of Dana’s brain differences with-
tion over time. And that is really the main point that Fine wants to leave the reader pondering: The crude technolo- gies of Victorian brain scientists may have been replaced by powerful brain scanners such as the fMRI, but time and future science may judge imaging data just as harshly. Don’t forget, she warns us, that wrapping a tape measure around the head was once considered modern and scientifically sophisticated. Those seductive blobs of color could end up on the same intellectual scrap heap.
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