In the main, I generally find that I admire and agree with columns by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. His offering from the day before yesterday, August 6, 2009, "The Town Hall Mob," is no exception. In that column, he laments the Nazi tactics of opponents of health reform, shouting down members of Congress and apparently using physical intimidation, given that their position has no logic to it. He relates an episode in which an "activist" asked how many in the crowd were opposed to any form of "socialized medicine." Predictably, most in the crowd raised their hands. The member of Congress who had called the meeting then asked how many present relied on Medicare for their health insurance – nearly half raised their hands.
He also reports the claim of Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) that many of the most vocal opponents of healthcare reform are also "birthers." As I recently indicated in this space, I believe the birther movement is nothing but garden-variety racism. The birthers just can’t believe that a black man is president of the United States, so they respond to the constant barrage of news that he really is by finding a way to claim that he really isn’t. Again, these folks are mostly Christian conservatives, so their commitment to empiricism is suspect (see much earlier column on that topic).
And this is where Krugman makes one small but very important error. He writes: "Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized thathe could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites."
Actually, the practice by corporate/conservative political interests of using racism to prevent much-needed reform has a much longer pedigree in the United States than that. It started in the years immediately after the abolition of slavery, when the Populists began to build an effective, reformist political movement in part by joining white with black farmers, pointing out how their common economic interests were far more important than differences of race. They enjoyed great success for a few years, but pretty much fell apart after the 1896 presidential election, in which their famous perennial candidate, William Jennings Bryan, who was also the Democratic candidate that year, lost to Republican William McKinley, of Spanish-American War fame – sort of the Iraq of the late nineteenth century, although it didn’t last nearly as long.
The Populists fell apart because conservative white political leaders deliberately exploited racism to perpetuate their own power. Historian David Fort Godschalk describes this process in his recent book on the 1906 Atlanta race riot. We tend to forget that, before the 1960s in the United States, "race riot" meant an event in which white people attacked black people. It happened with frightening regularity until 1925, when the Tulsa race riot proved to be the last.
The Populists pretty much got the last laugh, as most of their major reforms would become law in the United States by the 1930s. They wanted direct election of U.S. Senators, voting via secret ballots, currency inflation, a graduated income tax, and, nirvana for farmers, federally sponsored crop warehouses to support the prices of agricultural commodities. We don’t do it exactly the way the Populists wanted, but farm subsidies are now an untouchable component of the federal budget, even if much of the money now goes to huge corporations rather than individual farmers.
Over the long run, then, Americans usually get the reforms we need, once a critical mass of the population becomes sufficiently disgusted with the corporations and other conservatives who oppose reform. Whether we’re at such a moment now or not remains to be seen. Insofar as race and racism have always been key components of the conservative opposition to reform, our election of a black president is a hopeful sign that a critical mass of white Americans is now immune to the appeal of racism as a political tactic.
We can only hope.