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Dear George, I read Sen. Webb's column in the Wall Street Journal with incredulity. It seems to me an op-ed of grievance, not careful analysis, certainly not of solutions to an intractable yet almost willfully ignored economic structure that still rewards white males disproportionately to their numbers in the population — let alone, the Senate! I don't think that's what Sen. Webb means by 'fairness,' however. I can't make out what his real argument is, though, because he's strung together a disparate set of pronouncements, historical factlets, some statistics, and — I have the troubled feeling — a 'dog-whistle' call to white-father resentment because populations that should have remained subordinate (women, 'people of color,' Asians, and so on) are doing better than “we,” the aggrieved whites, are doing. His statistics about the South are appalling. But does he really mean to imply that poverty, poor education, and low levels of accomplishment exist because 'affirmative action' caused white Baptists and Protestant Irish — and so many others — to fall low? Does he not recognize that this class-based region's consistent, long-nourished hostility to taxes and to public funding of the common welfare — such as for good public schools, better roads and infrastructure, safety-net social funds, stringent mine safety regulations, mandated environmental responsibility toward land and resources, unemployment benefits, aid to the poor (whose numbers have grown since 2000) — have historically deprived those very people of the government-enabled attainments he wishes for them? He writes: "Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith." This is not only historically untrue*, but is based on (to put it most kindly) a category error. "Fungible" is an economic term, not a sociological one, and he mis-uses it to make what I read with sinking heart as a deeply-historical, race-based argument. If Sen. Webb had wanted to advance his cause for the afflicted people he rightly champions, he might have turned solidly-based, critical social and economic analyses into straightforward language, and talked about the hard situation of (middle and lower-middle class) working people without the protection of unions, extended (government) unemployment and disability programs, affordable universal health care, better schools, access to good college education without the shocking debt required for it. He might have decried the deep, long-term damage our foreign wars have inflicted on the military, their dependents, and the local communities in which they live. He might have drawn indignant attention to the huge disparity of wealth in this country — including the South, including Charlottesville — and its social costs. He might have reminded his readers — in the Wall Street Journal! — that he voted to break the GOP filibuster against an extension of unemployment benefits, and that he published this: “This legislation provides needed relief to help the thousands of Virginians who have lost their jobs to get back on their feet and rejoin the work force.” He might have gone further, and said, In order to have an on-their-feet work force, we need another, very big stimulus. We need massive government spending for local jobs. We need serious regulation of financial institutions. We need to allow the Bush high-end tax cuts to die. We need to fund more and larger programs for veterans. We need to act seriously about the strategic threat to this entire planet from global warming. And so on. But rather — whether or not he intended to do this — what Sen. Webb did, I think, is call up the grievance and resentment of a not-so-disparate aggregation of people who identify themselves as white, and who see their world changed in ways over which they have had no control, and who blame all of it on those who shouldn’t have had it better than they do. As it happened, I read this in "The Hotline" of The National Journal (7/23; subs. required, unfortunately):
The other day, Ross Douthat had a column in the New York Times, in which he too appealed to a sense of white victimization as if the social and economic sufferings of white, working-class men were equivalent to the violent, generations-long, institutionalized racism endured by African-Americans. There are many ways politicians can — should, must — bring forth government action on behalf of the people Webb stands for. But Webb’s call sounds rather too close, to my ear, like Douthat’s — and Douthat’s sounds creepily like Pat Buchanan’s Southern Strategy. Sen. Webb ends: “Memo to my fellow politicians: Drop the Procrustean policies and allow harmony to invade the public mindset. Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away.” So: it’s the politicians who prevent that fabled harmony that we, the people, surely feel among ourselves, from entering the “public mindset.” Fairness will happen, and bitterness will fade away. Rather, perhaps, as slavery would have “faded away” if only those aggressive Northerners hadn’t pushed so hard and caused a war against the Southern way of life. I don’t like Webb’s political call-out, George, and I think we’re in for more campaign ugliness than we can even imagine. Regards, Katherine McNamara (Electronic Mail, July 26, 2010)
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