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!

There is a common complaint among conservatives that African Americans should just “get over” slavery. In fact, I think that they have gotten over it. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has noted, systemic oppression of African Americans is much more recent than that, and it continues to this instant. What I think is that southern whites need to get over the Civil War. And the rest of us need to get over pandering to their hurt feelings over having lost their treasonous rebellion. I’ve discussed the issue a number of times. For example, No More Confederate General Bases! And, Southern Pride Rotting Our Republic.

With the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we have yet another example of this problem. Edmund Pettus was not on the right side of history. He was a Confederate general in the Civil War — and very much in favor of slavery and the Confederate cause. And like almost all of those guys, after gleefully committing treason against his country, he was welcomed back by that very same country. He went back to the life he had before the war. And eventually made it into the United States Senate (when it was still a corrupt appointed gig). God bless the US, because if you are rich and white, it doesn’t matter what you do — they will treat you like a hero.

But the other notable thing about Pettus is that in 1877, he became Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. And this was no secret. In fact, when the bridge was named after him in 1940, this was probably a selling point. It is part of that whole sick southern inferiority complex that claims that only things Confederate constitute the true soul of the south. And for 75 years, the name of a bigot and a traitor has been displayed proudly on that bridge. Perhaps it is time to change the name.

This morning, Jenée Desmond-Harris at Vox reported on a group of students who are trying to do just that, Inside the Fight to Strip a KKK Leader’s Name From Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. It is about a Change.org petition, Remove Selma’s KKK Memorialization: Rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The message is clear, “It’s time for the state of Alabama, the city of Selma, and the National Park Service to remove a KKK leader’s name from the historic bridge.” Of course, this isn’t the first time such a request has been made and nothing has changed yet.

I think this really ought to be an issue for whites — but I say that as a white person. I know that power concedes nothing without a demand. But is there no shame among us? Must we be beaten over the head about every obvious offense? The name on that bridge should make every white person cringe. And trust me, I know what many people will say, “You want to hide our history!” But that’s not it at all. I am fine with our history — it is what it is. But I have a major problem with celebrating men of history like Edmund Pettus.

Indeed, Tony W Harris of the Alabama Department of Transportation made exactly the same “history” argument. And a white resident of Selma said, “I think it’s going to be more divisive than unifying.” But I think it is really just a matter of people accepting the fact of past wrongs. Bloody Sunday will always be associated with the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And changing the name of the bridge would be a nice continuation of that — an acknowledgement that treasonous KKK leaders are not people we honor.

Have you seen the great jobs report this month? The economy added 295,000 jobs. The unemployment rate went from 5.5% to 5.3%. Wow! Happy days are here again! There is literally a chicken in every pot. Unfortunately, most Americans lost their pots when the bank foreclosed on their houses. All right, maybe not. It isn’t a bad jobs report. It’s a mixed bag. That 295,000 number is impressive, but it is still less than the number of people who gave up looking for a job last month. And it is still true that we need a lot more months of job growth like this to get back to our pre-crash levels of employment.

Job reports these days are very much a double edge sword. We want to see good numbers — more job growth. But the better the numbers, the more it brings out all the austerity fools who claim that the Federal Reserve must raise interest rates because inflation is going to increase. This is said based entirely on theory. There is no indication that inflation is actually increasing. As I’ve noted many time before, the reasoning here is that it is better to deprive workers of jobs than to allow the rich to face even the threat of inflation.

So the lower the unemployment rate gets, the louder the screams from the finance types will be that the Fed must raise interest rates. But here’s the thing: the Federal Reserve has a 2% inflation target. I think this is too low. It is basically just something that Alan Greenspan pulled out of the air. And now it has become some kind of iron law of economics — which should tell you a lot about just how scientific economics is. But the target is 2%. The problem is that more and more it isn’t even a target — it is an upper bound. In a really good blog post yesterday morning, Paul Krugman cautioned the Fed:

He is making the case that inflation that is too low represents a much more serious threat to the economy than inflation that is too high. But it is pathetic that he has to remind these people of this. If the Fed’s target is 2%, then it should be above 2% about half the time. But that hasn’t been the case since 2009. And the power elite love this. It’s just a reflection of the fact that working people are doing really poorly. But the rich don’t care about that. Their piles of money are worth a lot and they want it to stay that way. Deflation would be even better for them.

This is the problem with an oligarchy. Our leaders are not, in general, doing what is best for the economy. Or at least, not what a reasonable person thinks is best for the economy. They’ve defined what is best for the economy as what is best for the rich. And so every month we have this fight about the jobs report. If it’s good, the rich tell us the Fed must do something because they will get very slightly less rich. And if it’s bad, well, it’s bad. Of course, even when it is bad there are some who argue for raising interest rates. Who cares if American workers have jobs? Have you seen the price of yachts recently?!