Max Fisher wrote another thoughtful article over the weekend, The Murder of Ahmed Al-Jumaili in Texas Should Be a Front-Page Story. It’s about the mysterious murder of a recent Iraqi immigrant. But I think Fisher was being a bit sarcastic when he wrote, “But it seems odd that Americans, who pride themselves on inclusiveness and tolerance, would be so blithe and so uninterested [in this story].” As Fisher’s article documents, Americans embrace their intolerance. While Americans may pride themselves on their tolerance, they don’t practice it. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. During World War I, we persecuted Germans, so we took a pass and moved onto the Japanese in World War II. Now it is the Muslim’s turn. In fifty years, we will be onto some new group having not learned any general principles.

No one knows if Al-Jumaili was killed because he was Muslim. He seems to have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time — but it could very well have been a premeditated act. The fact remains that Dallas — where he had immigrated to just three weeks earlier — is a hotbed of Islamophobia. Fisher described recent anti-Muslim protests over a program designed to foster tolerance, “Stand With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate.” This brought out people who said charming things like, “We don’t want them here” and, “We’re here to stand up for the American way of life from a faction of people who are trying to destroy us.” Just like them Japs, am I right?!

But let’s suppose that Al-Jumaili was just killed in a random act of violence committed by a small group of men. What does it say about our country that a man flees violence in Iraq and gets gunned down outside his home within three weeks of coming to America? It is ironic that Americans are so concerned about the Islamic State when it poses effectively no threat to them. At the same time, they are absolutely fine with people roaming the streets with guns. In 2013, over a thousand people were murdered in Texas. (Generally, about 75% of all homicides are committed with firearms.) But these people not only want to go to war with the Islamic State, they want to kick Muslims out of the country. Maybe that would be doing the Muslims a favor.

Fisher put this particular murder into modern American media context in a way that I find frightening:

In this particular case, I don’t mind that it hasn’t gotten much coverage because it is more bizarre than anything. But it does bother me that Fisher has nailed this. If a Muslim had killed some non-Muslim as he stood outside his house with his wife taking pictures of freak Texas snowfall, the media would be all over it. It wouldn’t matter that we didn’t know the motivation of the shooter. It wouldn’t matter if there was no indication of motivation at all. It would be big news. Obama would be expected to make a statement about it. The right wing would be going crazy.

And that’s my takeaway from all this. The problem is not that the media don’t care when Muslims get killed. The media in general don’t care when anyone gets killed — there are almost two per hour: dog bites man. The problem is the media freak-out whenever a Muslim kills someone. This is the very definition of prejudice: being skeptical of a particular group of people. Given the freak-out when a Muslim does kill someone, we know that it is actually rare. But it isn’t reported that way. Instead, it is reported as if it were the leading edge of an invasion. We’ve seen this before: again and again and again. And every time, Americans have had their reasons for why it was the right way to think. And we have our reasons now. And they are no better than they were in the past.

Jonathan Chait published an “exit interview” with Dan Pfeiffer, On Learning to Ignore Republicans and How the White House Gave Up. It contained some interesting quotes that I’ll get to in a moment. But despite Chait’s claim, the interview wasn’t that revealing because it only reinforces something I’ve known for some time: that the Obama administration got all the way to the Debt Ceiling crisis of 2011 before realizing that they couldn’t negotiate with the Republicans. I thought they were naive to ever think that. But certainly after all the Obamacare negotiations when not a single Republican voted for the law should have told Obama and his team everything they needed to know.

Instead, they had to wait until the Debt Ceiling crisis to learn this. And think about that. If we had (and I certainly don’t rule out our doing it in the future), it would have done untold damage to the world economy. Keep that in mind as you read the following quote from Pfeiffer about what he now thinks about the Republican leadership:

I think this is entirely correct. And these are the guys that the Obama administration allowed to almost crash the economy. And we are still living with this. It isn’t just Boehner who is worried about solving the immediate problem. I’m already thinking of the next time that Boehner and his hoards are going to hold the world hostage over the debt ceiling. Coming this Fall at a capitol near you!

Pfeiffer contrasts what people who have worked in the Obama administration have learned compared to what former Clinton staffers took from his presidency. The Clinton people came into the administration thinking that the Republicans could make deals. Well, that was doubtless true in the mid-1990s. But this also shows why it might have been a good idea if Obama hadn’t filled his administration with a bunch of Clinton New Democrats. After all, they are all people who — when they are alone with them — agree with Republican politicians on economic matters. They are all one big happy neoliberal family, even if the Republicans claim to be something else to their voting base.

And this relates to the ultimate lesson that Obama has learned: that it is a fool’s game to try to appeal to the supposed middle between Obama’s moderation and the Republicans’ proto-fascism; going progressive is what works best. Here’s another great quote from Pfeiffer:

But then one has to wonder why the administration was ever listening to the Villagers? I’m not brilliant and I haven’t followed politics closely for very long. But regardless of what side, it has been clear to me that these Very Serious Fools don’t know anything. I was saying the same thing after the 2012 election when they were all claiming that the Republicans needed to change. I wrote again and again that there was no reason for the Republicans to change and in the end, the Republicans did not change — at least not in the way that the Villagers wanted them to.

The Villagers are involved in a kind of dream magic. They think that if they talk about their dreams of Tip and Ron having drinks together, their collective “centrist” — actually socially liberal, economically conservative — wet dream will come to pass. What kind of naivete does someone have to have to think that the world actually works like this?

Well, there was one telling quote:, “[Obama] had hopes of being able to change the polarization, not just in the country, but in Washington.” So changing polarization in Washington is harder than in the country? Washington isn’t part of the country? I think it is that kind of thinking that is the root of the problem with the Obama administration. They are involved in their own kind of dream magic. But I’m glad they’ve grown up a bit.

There was one moment in the oral arguments for King v Burwell that stood out to me. Alito and Scalia were from the beginning arguing for the plaintiffs. At one point, Alito entered into some grand apologetics for how the states themselves could fix any problems that the conservatives so want to create in the healthcare law. And then Scalia came in with a brilliant point, “What about Congress? You really think Congress is just going to sit there while all of these disastrous consequences ensue?” This led to a big laugh when Solicitor General of the United States, Donald Verrilli responded, “Well, this Congress, your honor?”

The point is that Alito and Scalia want to kill the law and then claim that it isn’t their fault — the legislature could fix the problem if it wanted. But the point is that the legislature doesn’t want to fix the law. It wants to kill the law, but it doesn’t have that power. And so the conservatives on the court are only too happy to help out. They already did that when they made the Medicaid expansion optional. And they think they have the final blow here. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the conservatives on the court would just admit to the fact that they are nothing but political hacks in robes.

But notice the reasoning here. Scalia is basically demanding that Obamacare be passed twice. And he does this knowing that getting it passed once was an amazing example of legislative ballet. My understanding is that those ominous four words that this case is all about would have been changed if it hadn’t been for the fact that Teddy Kennedy died and they couldn’t make changes. So Scalia is helpfully traveling back in time and performing a filibuster to destroy the law.

I understand the annoyance of conservatives. The kind of majority that the Democrats had during the first half of 2009 was amazing. They got to do a couple of things they actually wanted. But Republicans have had the same ability in the past, but they have used it almost exclusively for evil. We Democrats haven’t spent the last three decades looking for ways to undo Reagan’s union busting. (Sadly, only too many Democrats seem to think it was great.) And no one talks about raising the top marginal tax rate back up to 75%. We move on. But that seems to be something that Republicans — and conservatives more generally — can’t do.

These are the people, after all, who still want to destroy Medicare and even Social Security. They want to take the United States back a hundred years to when the country faced a decent chance of revolution. What’s Glenn Beck’s big issue? Social Security? The income tax? No! Direct elections of Senators. That’s right: the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. How terrible that the people actually get to elect their Senators rather than leaving it to the corrupt system of bribery in the state legislatures. So conservatives never give up. Even if we went back to John Adams’ aristocratic vision of the country, they would want to go back further. “The Magna Carta is a socialist document!”

So the people voted in a whole lot of Democrats in 2008, and regardless of how it has been spun since then, they did more or less what the people wanted. The conservatives want a do-over. Now that the political landscape is to their advantage, they want another opportunity for an Obamacare vote. And Alito and Scalia (and I assume Thomas) are eager to give them one.

I haven’t seen any of Whitney Dow’s Whiteness Project videos. To be honest, I’m a little afraid. For one thing, I expect to feel a lot of pena ajena while watching them. But there’s also the fear that I will just embarrass myself. But I did read an excellent interview with him by Jenée Desmond-Harris.[1] But before facing the videos, I want to talk — in my overly analytical way — about what it means to me to be white. But I do think we have to be careful. The truth is that race is something that is outside of us. It is a concept. It is a way that we have of dividing up people into groups. And it is a function of our xenophobia. So it would be more correct to say that it is racism that is inside us and not race itself. On the other hand, our society is so defined by this concept of race that it is hard not to talk about it as if it were real. Ideas — even wrong ones — matter.

I self-identify as white. And what that means is that the society at large sees me as having no race. The way that society looks at race is the way the doctor looks at your chart. If you don’t have any diseases, you are healthy. In our society, if you don’t have any race, you are white. And that’s why the concept of race is so pernicious: it is thought of as a kind of contagion. This is why white supremacy is so caught up in issues having to do with purity. We see this in old terms like “quadroon” (one-quarter “black”) and “octoroon” (one-eighth “black”). The idea was to define the race of a person by the faction of “impurity.” White is pure and it is contaminated by racial impurity. The definition that these people have of the “white race” is “no race.”

This gets to the very heart of what it is to have white privilege. I have the incredible luxury of being treated by default as an individual. Yes, of course people make lots of assumptions about me. A glace is enough to tell, for example, that I’m a book worm. But if I were to go out and rob a bank, no one think, “A book worm robbed a bank!” And more to the point, no one would think, “A white guy robbed a bank!” It would just be “some guy.” People might decide that I was a “low life” or whatever. But no one would blame my actions on the white race. And that’s an amazing benefit that I get by being white.

Now look at this from the other side: it is just as good to be white. If I’m watching the local news and they report that a man robbed a bank, I don’t need to cringe when I see that the guy is white. So what? It doesn’t reflect badly on me! Because society has decided that he isn’t white. Rather, he is just another human being. And I can’t be held responsible for what some other human being does.

Other than this, I am as related to other whites as any given African American is to the African American community as a whole. And this is where it gets tricky. I’m hugely biased toward a particular cultural tradition of American whiteness — namely the liberal European tradition. I might spend much of my time complaining, but the truth is that I’m obsessed with Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and so on. And this makes me as white as the people who watch 19 Kids and Counting. Also that’s part of this blog and this article. Who the hell do I think I am? Actually, that’s a question some of my friends have asked me: why do I think that anyone cares what I have to say? But it generally doesn’t even occur to white men like me to ask the question. We see ourselves the way lords saw themselves in 18th century England.

At the same time, I have the most vulgar racist instincts. I’ve been very open about that while writing here. I fight it, and I think largely tame it, with my higher brain functions. But it’s there and it poisons me like a low-grade infection. And I’m not sure how it manifests. The truth is I see white people say really ignorant things about race that show clear blind spots. The most obvious is the claim, “I treat everyone equally!” Yeah, I don’t go around screaming racist epithets either, but I’m aware enough to realize that doesn’t prove anything. But by definition, I’m not aware enough to know the things I don’t realize. But even this understanding has at least a whiff of aristocracy to it — the great man trying to understand what the little men suffer.

Of course, my whiteness is geographically dependent. When I was a kid, my family went on one of those horrible car trips through Texas. At a diner in one town, two good ol’ boys had a very loud and threatening conversation with each other about the race of my father. They couldn’t decide if he was Mexican or Spanish. They eventually agreed that it didn’t matter. And then after we left, they followed the “colored” man with his white wife and mulatto kids to the county line. I wasn’t white that day and it had nothing to do with what was inside me.

But here in northern California? I’m as white as it gets — or at least well over whatever cutoff people determine for whiteness. And I’m very aware on a personal level how this benefits me. I see myself in very individualistic terms. I am, for want of a better term, a “curious fellow.” I go about my life as if I had no race. And I think that is, at rock bottom, what defines being white.

[1] That’s right: another Jenée Desmond-Harris article. What can I say? She’s really great, and I’m beginning to think that Vox is the best political website around. And yes, I think that is a pretty typical thing for a white guy to say.

Back on Monday, Matt Yglesias wrote an article that got a surprising amount of attention, American Democracy Is Doomed. It was based on the idea of Juan José Linz that presidential systems are inherently unstable. Linz argued that there is a tendency for them to turn into, well, exactly what we are seeing today in America. A good example is Mitch McConnell’s claim that the Republicans’ “top political priority… should be to deny President Obama a second term.” Check out the video of him saying it — he can hardly keep from laughing, he’s so pleased with himself.

I’ve lately heard “serious” political commentators claim that there was nothing wrong with saying that. It is what all political parties should do. I think it is important to note that this was said when the country was still in bad shape. What’s more, he and the rest of the Republicans had been acting that way from the very start when we were in crisis. I certainly think that that kind of behavior is understandable and expected. But not acceptable. The ultimate question for the Yglesias’ article, however, is whether it is inevitable.

Jonathan Chait wrote a response the next day, There’s a Chance American Democracy Is Not Doomed. That sounds like typical Chait snark, but based on the article, I would have to say that he means it literally. He’s arguing that we aren’t necessarily doomed, but most likely we are. This hardly makes me feel better. But let’s think about his argument.

Chait thinks that the problem is not the system but conservatives themselves. While I accept this, it doesn’t much help. If you look at the the following graph of filibuster use, you will notice something interesting:

The increased use of the filibuster was almost exclusively a Republican thing. But once the Republicans pushed up the rate of filibuster use, the Democrats followed along with it while they were in the minority. I expect that the Democrats will act the same way under the next Republican president as the Republicans did under Obama. So the Republicans manage to poison the entire political system. So I’m not too encouraged by the fact that it is primarily a Republican problem.

The ultimate American example of partisan dysfunction is the Civil War. Chait counters this idea by noting that the problem wasn’t what Linz described. I don’t think it much matters. We can expand the model. But I think it already is part of Linz’s model. The Civil War was not the result of a disagreement about slavery. Lincoln didn’t do anything about slavery — he only got elected. It was effectively just that the southern states had given up on democracy. I don’t see much difference between the way that the Democrats responded to the election of Lincoln and the way the Republicans responded to the election of Obama.

None of this means that the American system is doomed to fail. I happen to think that it is, but I’m not especially concerned about this mechanism. America is just well into its imperial phase and we are on the way out because we have too many vested interests with far too much power. The modern corporation doesn’t feel like it has to earn market share; it can just buy it through political means. But what’s going on with the Republican Party is quite frightening, and I can well imagine the US turning into a fascism long before our empire crumbles.

One thing is for certain. This argument of Chait’s will not save us:

This is a common fantasy of liberals. It is totally ahistorical. The definition of “white” is fluid. Once Italians were not considered white. Once Jews were not considered white. The Japanese may not be considered white today, but they aren’t used as an example of “those people” as they once were. Latinos may not be considered white, but certainly within two generations at the most, they will be. The conservative movement has always been great at slicing and dicing groups of people. It is more or less what their movement is all about. So increasing diversity will not save us from conservatives, because they will find a way to divide the people into the “deserving” and the “moochers.”

And in the end, Linz may well be right. There may be no way to limit this kind of racist power other than by allowing many political parties to flourish as they do under a parliamentary system.

Afterword

This has nothing to do with the rest of the article, but I thought it was funny. Chait wrote in his last paragraph, “It’s conceivable that the p.c. left, which refuses to recognize the legitimacy of opposing views, will one day take control of the Democratic Party (in which its influence remains marginal).” Still banging that drum! It’s also conceivable that the Marxist left will one day take control of the Democratic Party (in which its influence remains marginal). How ridiculous, Chait; let it go!