Original Sin
I am gratified that Atrios has posted about this book by Alesina and Glaeser that discusses the relationship between race and social welfare. They know their stuff. Buy the book.
I wrote a long and boring mostly unread post about this a few months ago when we were all in the midst of discussing the Dean campaign's strategy in the south, in which I argued that one simply could not separate race from Americans' hostility to redistributive economic schemes and government social services. Indeed, they have been intertwined throughout our history. If I may be so bold as to quote myself:
The question has always been, why don't southern working class whites vote their economic self-interest?
In this paper (pdf) Sociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard (bio), who has long been interested in the question of America's underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question --- "Why Americans don't care about income inequality, which may give us some clues. Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, "Why Doesn't the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?" (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001) he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy goes back to the beginning of the republic. But what is interesting is that both he and the economists offer some pretty conclusive evidence that the main reason for American "exceptionalism" in this case is, quite simply, racism.
"Racial fragmentation and the disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities among the poor played a major role in limiting redistribution.... Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs."(p. 61)
Glazer goes on to point out how these attitudes may have come to pass historically by discussing the roles that the various immigrant support systems and the variety of religious institutions provided for the poor:
But initial uniformities were succeeded by a diversity which overwhelmed and replaced state functions by nonstate organizations, and it was within these that many of the services that are the mark of a fully developed welfare state were provided. Where do the blacks fit in? The situation of the blacks was indeed different. No religious or ethnic group had to face anything like the conditions of slavery or the fierce subsequent prejudice and segregation to which they were subjected.
But the pre-existing conditions of fractionated social services affected them too. Like other groups, they established their own churches, which provided within the limits set by the prevailing poverty and absence of resources some services. Like other groups, too, thedependentpendant on pre-existing systems of social service that had been set up by religious and ethnic groups, primarily to serve their own, some of which reached out to serve blacks, as is the case with the religiously based (and now publicly funded) social service agencies of New York City. They were much more dependent, owing to their economic condition, on the poorly developed primitive public services, and they became in time the special ward of the expanded American welfare state's social services. Having become, to a greater extent than other groups, the clients of public services, they also affected, owing to the prevailing racism, the public image of these services.
Glazer notes that there are other factors involved in our attitudes about inequality having to do with our British heritage, religious background etc, that also play into our attitudes. But, he and the three economists have put their finger on the problem Democrats have with certain white Southern voters who vote against their economic self-interest, and may just explain why populism is so often coupled with nativism and racism --- perhaps it's always been impossible to make a populist pitch that includes blacks or immigrants without alienating whites.
So, we are dealing with a much more complex and intractable problem than "southerners have been duped by Nixon's southern strategy" or that liberals have been insulting them for years by supposedly devaluing their culture. Indeed, even the nostalgia that Howard Dean professes for FDR's coalition is historically inaccurate. A majority of whites have never voted with blacks in the south. (In the 30's, as we all know, southern blacks were rarely allowed to vote at all.) In fact, FDR had an implicit agreement with the southern base of his party to leave Jim Crow alone if he wanted their cooperation on other economic issues. The southern coalition went along out of desperation (and also because they were paying very little in taxes.) But, as soon as the economy began to recover, and Roosevelt began to concentrate on programs for the poor, the division that exists to this day re-emerged.
I quote myself at length here, not because I love the sound of my own words, (although they are delightfully boring yet somehow dull) but because I think this work by Glazer, Graezer and Alesina contains an important insight with which Democrats simply must come to grips if we ever expect to create a government that provides a decent enough safety net to maintain a solid middle class and thus a stable and thriving society.
This ancient attachment to racism in this country is going to finally bring us down if we do not force it out of the body politic once and for all. The need is urgent, not just on a moral basis --- the moral case is always urgent --- but on a pragmatic, survival basis as well. The American frontier is closed, our total dominance of the world economy is rapidly diminishing and globalization and technology are pressuring the middle and working classes of this country in ways that we are only now beginning to see. This path of ever lower taxes and higher deficits in service of a nonsensical insistence on the ruination of public schools, a refusal to endow universal health care, a systematic destruction of social security and the combined devastation of rolling back workplace regulations while destroying unions is based on a theological belief in unfettered capitalism and American "individualism." This romantic notion manifests itself as modern Republicanism but, in fact, it is nothing more than the same phony excuse for opportunism and racism that has existed since the founding. (It fueled the more virulent forms of anti-communism, as well.) Unless we commit ourselves to keeping this country's education and health care systems secure, ensure that workers continue to have the opportunity to thrive and achieve in the workplace and provide a decent safety net for those who cannot work, we are shortly going to find ourselves living in a high tech banana republic.
The power structure of the modern GOP is centered in the south and they cannot achieve victory without it solidly behind them. These studies reveal that there is no mystery as to why its philosophy of low taxes and minimal social services finds such loyalty among people who should logically believe the opposite. Democrats must recognize that this correlation between racism and the resistence to a fair and equitable redistribution of wealth is why populist appeals will not work for us in the south or among other demographics in which this correlation is salient.
And that means we must accept, once and for all, that our commitment to civil rights cannot be separated from our commitment to reasonable taxation in service of a stable society. In our culture they are inextricably bound to one another and we will never achieve one without achieving the other. As I wrote in my earlier post on this topic, racism is America's original sin. Until we politically and socially emasculate it, we will continue to be shackled by a fantasy of individualism and a Hobbesian worldview that can no longer be ameliorated by an endless frontier or global economic dominance.
The worst impulses of American culture are drawn from racism and those malevolent impulses are taking us into a highly competitive future without a safety net. There might be dumber reasons for a once great society to crumble but I can't think of any.