Although the issues are hugely important and the positions of the candidates highly individuated, the 2008 election has thus far been one less about policies than about prejudices and personalities. The economic crisis may reverse this emphasis. But the fluidity of the polls—up today, down tomorrow, or vice versa, depending on your candidate—suggests instability in political preferences, with relatively minor occurrences having major consequences. If current economic worries subside or new foreign or military fears emerge, voters’ preferences may well reverse again. Some of the reasons for changed preferences are typical of presidential campaigns; however, the degree of instability, especially among Independents and in some areas, is unusual. But, of course, the candidate of the Democratic Party is unusual.
Four out of five Americans agree that the country is heading in the wrong direction (they do not agree on the right direction). A sizable majority prefers Democrats on policies, as a party, and down the ticket. Nevertheless, Barack Hussein Obama has, at least until recently, been running close—a few points up, a few points down—to John McCain. I am not going to argue merits here; I am going to begin with one fact and build on it. The fact: Obama is black. The conclusion: he will win or lose if he overcomes or fails to overcome, respectively, some atypical factors in play, including and starting with his race.
A sizable minority of Americans, most, but not all, of them white, is operationally prejudiced against blacks (different by degree from the casual racism latent in many Americans of all races). Those in the South were once Democrats but, since the Civil Rights Movement, are now Republicans. Those in the North are those who otherwise vote Democratic: white, blue-collar families in West Virginia; white, blue-collar families who migrated from the South to industrialized northern cities in the 20s and 30s; and urban, ethnic, Catholics whose origins are mainly eastern or southern European. Paradoxically, West Virginia seceded from Virginia because its residents had no interest in defending a slave-based economy which did not exist in its six counties, but its racism transcended its economics.
The minority’s racism transcends religion. Southern Baptists constituted the membership of the White Citizen Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. Those who moved north left when racism was virulent and lynching commonplace, and brought their racism with them. Catholic immigrants to the northern industrialized cities of the Rust Belt and the upper Midwest—Buffalo, Erie, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Warren, Akron, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Flint, Milwaukee—attended churches which have long ignored or tolerated the prejudices of their congregants, and did little enough during the Civil Rights Movement. Racism still prevails in these white populations born or bred to racism, unredeemed by religion, and demoralized by a lifetime of economic decline.
Of course, racism defies religion. For Christians (and Jews) who oppose Obama because of these their prejudices against blacks disobey fundamental religious injunctions to love one’s enemy (or respect the stranger). I would argue, admittedly presumptuously, that indulging prejudice defies God, Who would be unlikely to love (or forgive) those deliberately rejecting His injunctions. I would mention and invoke the meaning of the unfashionable and “uncomfortable” notions of The Second Coming (or Day of Judgment). I would also argue that people acting on prejudices reject one of the central tenets of American democracy as articulated in The Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal.” How such people, if challenged, would justify their apostasy to their professed religious and political allegiances I cannot imagine.
Although racism may be the most important factor in any explanation of persistently close contests in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, it is not the only one. Age itself is another, on both sides of the ballot. First, Obama is relatively young, but a few years older than Kennedy was when he ran in 1960. Second, a disproportionate number of racist voters are older ones, for whom change is not something likely to appeal, especially since they are settled, however marginally and morosely, in once stable but now deteriorating neighborhoods into which blacks or other minorities are moving and from which so many of their children are departing, physically and often politically. Thus, growing southern and western states—Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada—verge on tipping from red to blue in this election.
The Republicans’ Southern Strategy reflects, not racism indigenous in the South, but racism imported to the North. It arose as a response to defeat. In 1948, after the first election after Roosevelt’s death, Republicans learned that they could not win presidential elections with former Dixie states and a belt of plains and mountain states only. In 1968, in the full tide of the Civil Rights Movement, George Wallace demonstrated the appeal of racism to these northern blue-collar workers, and Ronald Reagan attracted them, the “Reagan Democrats,” a dozen years later. So Republicans learned that the demographic facts-of-life in these northern industrialized areas could serve as the basis of an appeal to race if the race card was carefully played. Such has been the Republican strategy in every presidential election and many congressional elections for 40 years.
Tags: ku klux klan, michael l. hays, obama, prejudice, race, racism, stereotypes, voting blocks, white citizen council
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