“segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever”

However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

--Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, “Getting Away with It,” New York Review of Books,”  July 12, 2012. 

Paul Krugman must be given a great deal of credit for his constant efforts in the pages of the New York Times to get policy makers to listen to reason and take the steps necessary to turn the American economy around.  For those sympathetic to his view, however, there has been frustration about his reluctance to, shall we say, name names, to allow himself to even speculate in print about why it is the Republican Party has resorted to its gridlock strategy.   Now, in a review titled “Getting Away with It,” in the current New York Review of Books, (NYR), Krugman has gone on the record.  Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, herself a respected economist and journalist, co-authored the article.  What they have together produced is a devastating indictment of Republican ideology and tactics.

As one reads their article, it becomes clear why (as they do in the first line of the excerpt above) the authors choose the euphemism “awkward” to describe the position they and their colleagues are in when it comes to candidly describing the wellsprings of  Republican strategy.  In a word, it is all about race.   Outright “dangerous” would probably be a more accurate word to describe the position one puts oneself in this country for merely suggesting that racism is a lingering cancer in America.  It must have taken considerable courage for Krugman and Wells to write this piece.  They are to be commended for it.

Ever since Barack Obama took office, right wing opposition to him and to his policies has become more and more virulent.  Such zealotry and fanaticism, such eye-rolling, hair-pulling and submission to raptures has not been seen in this country since the Civil War. Here is what I wrote in “A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power” on June 17:

The passivity of the Democratic Party in recent years, its willingness to "compromise," (particularly since Arkansan Bill Clinton, supposedly the "first Black president," invited serious inroads into the hard-won protections of the New Deal such as the tearing up of Glass-Steagall), created an ideological vacuum which allowed heretofore unheard of incursions of what were once considered uniquely Southern manifestations such as "Bible Belt" evangelism and the generalized notion that the working class, even if it could not literally be enslaved, should be overseen by an aristocratic, neo-plantation-owner class that would keep them in line.  Thus, while, their darkest fantasies aside, no one would accuse the right of planning to reinstitute black slavery, a case can be made that some form of wage slavery would be just fine.   A nation which once fought a war (in which casualties by latest estimate numbered over 700,000 of its citizens) ostensibly not to end but to stop the spread of slavery outside of the deep South, now stands by as the values of the deep South threaten to engulf the entire nation.

 The NYR piece is a review of three books:  Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists, (“an inside account of Obama’s economic team from the early days of the presidential transition to late 2011”), Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire (in which Frank describes the current crisis as “something unique in the history of American social movements: a mass conversion to free-market theory as a response to hard times.”), and Thomas Byrne Edsall’s The Age of Austerity.   It is Edsall’s thesis, namely that the divisions we are seeing are a consequence of scarcity, that finally prompts Krugman and Wells to retort that:

    The truth is that the austerity Edsall emphasizes is more the result than the cause of our embittered politics. We have a depressed economy in large part because Republicans have blocked almost every Obama initiative designed to create jobs, even refusing to confirm Obama nominees to the board of the Federal Reserve. (MIT’s Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate, was rejected as lacking sufficient qualifications.) We have a huge battle over deficits, not because deficits actually pose an immediate problem, but because conservatives have found deficit hysteria a useful way to attack social programs.

So where does the embittered politics come from? Edsall himself supplies much of the answer. Namely, what he portrays is a Republican Party that has been radicalized not by a struggle over resources—tax rates on the wealthy are lower than they have been in generations—but by fear of losing its political grip as the nation changes. The most striking part of The Age of Austerity, at least as we read it, was the chapter misleadingly titled “The Economics of Immigration.” The chapter doesn’t actually say much about the economics of immigration; what it does, instead, is document the extent to which immigrants and their children are, literally, changing the face of the American electorate.

As Edsall concedes, this changing face of the electorate has had the effect of radicalizing the GOP. “For whites with a conservative bent,” he writes—and isn’t that the very definition of the Republican base?—the shift to a majority-minority nation [i.e., a nation in which minorities will make up the majority] will strengthen the already widely held view that programs benefiting the poor are transferring their taxpayer dollars to minority recipients, from first whites to blacks and now to “browns.”

And that’s the message of Rick Santelli’s rant, right there.

      This is, of course, by no means the first time that undercurrents—or, more often, outright paroxysms of racial conflict have changed the political landscape of the United States.  The Civil War dealt the Confederacy a crushing blow, but it changed few hearts and minds in the South.  The rights and freedoms given the former slaves after the war through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments (the so-called “Reconstruction Amendments”) vanished as soon as the U.S. army of occupation left the South.  As late as 1963, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation,  George Wallace could still make the blood of Alabamans boil when he talked about the “infamous, illegal fourteenth amendment. (The great state of Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1995.)  A rigged presidential election in 1876 put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, ended Reconstruction and initiated a century-long reign of terror imposed on Black Americans—replete with Klan robes, lynchings, Black Codes and Jim Crow laws.   Even now, in the twenty-first century, many of the gains and accomplishments made by Black Americans during Reconstruction have not seen their equal.  In 1963, just a few months prior to Martin  Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream speech” on the steps of the Lincoln monument, the good citizens of Alabama greeted George Wallace’s inaugural speech proclamation, “segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever” with enthusiastic applause.

     Wallace's inaugural address is well worth reading in its entirety.  Nearly half a century later, it may be read essentially as the philosophy and program of the 21st- century Republican Party.  The so-called Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and '70s was in effect a second Civil War.  It is easy for many Americans to forget that it was only the use of Federal troops in the South that finally forced change.  There is little reflection either on the hundreds of American cities that had erupted into insurrection during that period, with tanks rolling down American streets a common occurrence.  But just as the South responded to the Civil War and Reconstruction through terror, there would be push-back to the reaffirmation of our laws that was accomplished through the Civil Rights Act.  Wallace had issued the call:

Hear me, Southerners! You sons and daughters who have moved north and west throughout this nation . . . . we call on you from your native soil to join with us in national support and vote . . and we know . . . wherever you are . . away from the hearths of the Southland . . . that you will respond, for though you may live in the fartherest (sic) reaches of this vast country . . . . your heart has never left Dixieland.

And you native sons and daughters of old New England's rock-ribbed patriotism . . . and you sturdy natives of the great Mid-West . . and you descendants of the far West flaming spirit of pioneer freedom . . we invite you to come and be with us . . for you are of the Southern spirit . . and the Southern philosophy . . . you are Southerners too and brothers with us in our fight.

     It would take until 1980 for the reorganized forces of Southern reaction to finally have their way.  Wallace's call to like-minded citizens outside of the South would finally be realized.   Following the Civil Rights Act, the South abandoned the Democratic Party and became solidly Republican.   The election of Ronald Reagan signaled a fundamental redrawing of the political map.  Barack Obama is not only the first Black president, he is the first Northerner to take the White House since John F. Kennedy.  With the exception of Gerald Ford, an accidental president, Sun belt and Bible belt have dominated now for half a century.  Southern politicians stashed their white suits and Panama hats and went to Brooks Brothers for their pin-stripes while the Northern white working class--frightened, frustrated, often forced out of their homes through block-busting--cleaved to Ronald Reagan as their savior, abandoning the Democratic Party wholesale.  The premium placed on suburbanization and the assault on unions would permanently alter the character of the Democratic Party.

     There are those on the left who demur from laying the blame for what has happened in this country to race, insisting that it is all about class.  While they proceed to split hairs, the end result has been that few if any Americans will frankly confront the cancer that has festered in our nation since its inception.  Some may feel, (including our Black president), that the issue is too volatile, a skeleton best left in the closet.  Better to be polite and hope that reason will prevail.  Even our Black citizens are wary--and this in spite of the fact that they have suffered more than any other Americans through the recent crisis.  One analyst stated that it would take 500 years for Black America to regain the wealth that it lost after 2008.