A few years ago I wrote a piece for MoJo that concluded there was little danger associated with Democrats taking an aggressive approach to racial justice issues. However, the evidence on this topic was thin at the time, so I've continued to follow it ever since. Needless to say, it's become a far more pointed subject ever since the George Floyd murder and the subsequent summer of BLM protests in 2020.
Yesterday Jon Chait pointed to a new study that offers a warning: "Telling subjects that a proposal would reduce racial inequity makes them less likely to support it," he says. But that's not quite right, it turns out. Here's the chart:
The first thing I noticed was at the bottom: these effects are on a 7-point scale, which means a difference of 0.1 is fairly small. But what does that mean in language easily understood by us lay folks?
Luckily, the authors do something unprecedented and actually tell us straight out:
To contextualize this effect, we can convert the seven-point scale into a binary measure of policy support, where any degree of support is coded as 1 while any degree of opposition or undecidedness is coded as 0. On this binary measure, we find that the class frame increased policy support by a statistically significant 2.1 percentage points....On the other hand, neither the race nor the race-class frames have any detectable effects on policy support.
In other words, emphasizing racial equality has no effect, while emphasizing class (i.e., poverty and income inequality) raises support by about two percentage points.
I have long been a fan of emphasizing class over race, so I'm happy to see research that supports this view. However, this study supports it pretty weakly (that's the authors' word, not mine). Race, it turns out, does no harm, and class arguments make such a small difference that they're probably swamped by the specifics of the issue at hand and the wording of the message.
As it happens, I'm less convinced by my own argument now than I was when I wrote it in 2018. However, this is solely because the liberal/Democratic emphasis on racial justice has gone much further than I ever guessed it would. My read of the evidence at the time was that talking about racial justice would do no harm, so Democrats should go ahead and do it. But what's the effect when racial justice almost literally consumes the entire public discourse? I don't know, and I think we're now in uncharted waters. There's certainly an argument to be made that it hurt Democrats across the board in the 2020 election, turning what should have been an easy win into a nailbiter. And it sure gave Fox News plenty of fodder. On the other hand, there's not yet any firm research evidence to back up the notion that it hurt Democrats. So for now I'm on the fence.
I'm guessing policies that help rural communities devastated by meth will help inner cities neighborhoods devastated by drugs, and vice versa. In both places, the rise in gun violence associated with the drug trade is killing those communities.
The lack of opportunity for the kids in those communities leads to despair and desperation.
The broadband access proposed by Biden helps both urban poor and rural areas. We need more of that type of thinking and programs. The lack of economic opportunity has hollowed out many rural towns. Farming and mining are more efficient, so need fewer people. And coal has collapsed. Clean up and renewable energy can help those areas. For Dems to regain votes in rural areas, job and population loss in those places needs to stop. Why emphasis on rural areas? Dems need to win back state houses to help everyone.
I'm more inclined to increase population loss in rural areas.
So you can generate ever more over-represented geographies or from an ignorantly naive idea that this will reduce rural electoral overweight power in Congress?
Helping people to relocate from places where they have no hope and no future and which have no possibility of improvement of any kind, would be a program that could harm only the corrupt and ugly who are already holding them captive.
Meet the Anerican Ratko Mladic.
There are limits to what are possible in redistricting, even Wasserman acknowledges that.
You can do both...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Merge_Left/ScKODwAAQBAJ?hl=en
https://majorityreportradio.com/2019/10/07/10-7-merge-left-fusing-race-and-class-winning-elections-saving-america
Joe Biden should pardon Derek Chauvin. Or the Next Trump will.
Why would they care??
Chauvin was convicted on state charges. No president can pardon him, and no governor should. Jail is the right is the right place for the vicious murdering little obscenity.
Also, regardless what the Squadratic Evasion, & their allies in the DEFINITELY NOT GQP ALIGNED Brand New Congress, & Justice Democrats & #OurRevolution, are shilling come the election, be it the racially tinged ACAB or Obama's stab in the back of affordable universal health care, gimme elections for Democrats will become nailbiters, if not losses, because the Controlled Opposition spearheaded by Always On Camera & her mentors Bernie & Jane O'Meara Sanders wants Democrats to lose.
"Should Democrats Emphasize Racial Justice? Or Class Justice?"
No.
They should emphasize accountability, and point out the consequences of unaccountability and the fact that everything going on today occurs in the context of a societal -- perhaps civilizational -- revolt against accountability.
We got where we are by letting people off the hook.
Once a group (professional, religious, ethnic) has been made unaccountable, that group is spoiled, in the most literal meaning of the word. Grants of unaccountability cannot be clawed back. Accountability cannot be incrementally restored: it requires a complete break.
Meanwhile, we just voted out Celebritard El Jefe Maximo de Maralago from the presidency, but New York City looks poised to choose Andrew Yang as mayor while Caitlyn Jenner is angling to be GQP favorite in the Newsom recall, meaning our largest & most economically important city state will have governments by Kardashianism.
We are fucked.
City ***&*** state.
"Kardashianism. We are fucked."
Decades of tireless effort will bear fruit eventually.
Ironic or not that Terry Crews, known better as President Camacho, likely will end up supporting Yang & Jenner, much as he supported El Jefe?
Never heard of him. I am sure his support will be decisive.
I would have put it in a breakdown or failure to abide the usual dispute resolution mechanisms.
But your way is just as good 🙂
Simply campaign more with "white" areas dialectically driving turnout and votes in November. Democrats got away from that after 2012(really 1998) and it's showed. 2022 election's going to be fought over white voters mostly, in the key spots.
Sounds like you would support Elise Stefanik, Abigail Spanbeger, Conor Lamb, & Sharice Davids, but you don't. Oh my God, you don't.
Most aren't populist enough for me. The point is Democrats over estimated the non white vote, which with blacks has essentially stopped growing and Hispanics don't like being stereotyped. Yes, the party bosses took notice and have deregulated candidate choosing functions back to the states.
I wonder how you would assess Wilkinson's "Caste"--it seems a frame which differs in some degree from both race and cla
This is a study on the wording of questions, not on how people actually feel about the questions. Overall as Kevin says there is very little effect of different wording, which apparently only comes in after the main question is stated. This may be of interest to politicians who pay consultants big bucks to word their proposals just right (they probably waste their money), but it does not tell the politicians what issues to actually stand for or to emphasize. We know how biased people are on racial issues, for example, because while the majority of Democratic voters think that non-whites are discriminated against, the majority of Republicans think it's the other way around. It certainly can't be claimed from this study that emphasizing racial versus class issues (not just using different wording) makes no difference in how people vote. The study has little bearing on Kevin's headline question.
We also know that there are effects of different wording. For example responses are different when a proposition is stated in the abstract or universally, and when it clearly spells out how the pollee will be personally affected.
"This is a study on the wording of questions, not on how people actually feel about the questions. "
Yes. And a little too meta for my taste.
“But what's the effect when racial justice almost literally consumes the entire public discourse?”
My own anecdotal experience is that the effect is bad. I feel like a cliche when I say that I haven’t changed, it’s the Dem party that has changed (and drifted away from me). I have gone from being one of the most liberal people in my own circles (as a kid) to being someone who would be an outcast if he spoke his mind among DEMs/Lefties today: and race is more or less the reason.
I’ll go ahead and commit a modern form of heresy by admitting that I don’t think every situation in our country boils down to a question about race. I personally feel that people and societies are more complex than that. If I were to say this out loud at my job (in my liberal city), I suspect pretty strongly I could wind up with an HR complaint logged against me. I’d also almost certainly wind up at odds with my immediate manager who seems to do backflips in order to accommodate the most Left-leaning ideas out there (probably because he’s terrified of the Leftists).
No: I have no plans to run off and join the Republican Party. And yet I do not feel at home in Lefty world these days. The ACLU, for goodness sakes, now sends out tweets demanding justice against cops the moment a shooting has happened. So much for a civil rights organization that is supposed to believe in “innocent until proven guilty.”
And I am increasingly unable to put up with supposedly “neutral” media like NPR. The last year of nonstop racial justice coverage has quite honestly come to feel like indoctrination. God forbid a contrary view should ever be heard. Just about the only media I can listen to these days is the BBC. And I can’t tell you how nice it is to turn on a station that isn’t trying to force every story through a racial justice lens.
For the record: of course we need racial justice; but, we’re not going to obtain it with asinine slogans like “defund the police.” And god forbid a Democratic congress actually passes a reparations bill. Do I think African Americans are entitled to reparation? Quite possibly so. But in this fallen world in which we live, passing such a Bill might be the greatest recruitment tool that was ever gifted to the Republican Party.
Slow and steady progress is the only hope for change without a terrible backlash. In other words: Liberalism. But god forbid I should admit to being a Liberal these days. I might get stoned by the “liberal” party.
MLK Jr. had some thoughts on white moderates like you.
In regards to my anecdotal experience that the current over-emphasis on racial justice has an overall negative effect: I think you may be proving my point? Unless, that is, your comment was meant in a sarcastic manner (it's hard to tell when we're not in person).
But, in regards to MLK Jr., I think it's a fascinating question to ask what he would think of the current emphasis on identity (mostly racial identity). He did, after all, seem to advocate - at least at times - for a different approach. He did speak about his dream in which we lived in a world where we were not judged by our identity (or the color of our skin) but rather by our whole being (or the content of our character).
In fact, this point was brought up last year by UCLA Professor Gordon Klein. A student wrote him an email asking (as I understand it) for students of color to be given a different set of rules for dealing with the final exam. Klein wrote an email in reply in which he referenced MLK Jr's emphasis on character over skin color. And the result? He was placed on administrative leave. I strongly doubt that MLK Jr. would approve.
And that's all you got -- some vague and sweeping pronouncements that don't even rise to the level of testable hypothesis, backed only by your anecdotal and idiosyncratic experiences.
Your point is moot. Racial justice is a delusion of the mind. Blacks have a lot more freedom from racism than 50 years ago, but aren't taking advantage of it like Latins. The interior culture is bad and driven by anti-social machismo.
If my pronouncements seem anecdotal, it’s probably because, as I point out several tunes, they are anecdotal. I’ll add, however, that your comment may be yet one more such anecdote against our current over-emphasis on racial justice.
It should be possible to actually discuss these issues. And, if and when a movement explicitly or implicitly incites people to denounce any contrary voices, I would say that’s pretty clearly a bad sign.
They seem anecdotal because they are anecdotal. Class dismissed ... though I will note that Shootie doesn't know the meaning of quite common words. Words like 'moot'.
FWIW, you are commenting on a blog that is mainly focused on how data informs public policy choices. The commenters here are focused on that, too, at least in part. So anecdotes don't get very far here without being challenged, and I think that's a good thing --I've learned a lot from the commenters here. My background is in history, and the varied backgrounds of some of the commenters have enriched my knowledge.
MLK, Jr. had a lot to say about racial identity. For example: "…The American Negro is neither totally African nor totally Western. He is Afro-American, a true hybrid, a combination of two cultures."
You can find more here: https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/education/002/worksheets/ushistory/mlk/doubleconsciousness
Again, you can learn a lot from the comments here, as they lead you to more sources of accurate information.
That is because it isn't a lefty world. Your first mistake. The real left is in degrowther ecological movement. Which makes sense in that class war which birthed socialism with its focus on resource management.
Matter of fact, classical liberalism drives the racial justice scam more than socialism. Something conservative morons won't admit, instead slobbering cultural Marxism despite socialism not supporting the issue.
> haven’t changed, it’s the Dem party that has changed
You're right. The Nixon strategy worked and the racist Southern democrats left to join the Republicans.
> god forbid I should admit to being a Liberal these days.
You aren't.
Well said. I agree and some of the subsequent replies only strengthen your argument. FWIW, I am a republican and I feel much the same way you do regarding my party (i.e. I haven't changed but the party has moved to the fringe).
Blacks have a real internal cultural problem of anti-social machismo racism that makes them feel they should rebel against society by not going to school, joining gangs for the guns, girls and macho lifestyle. Which underneath it all is driven by racism and a illusion of spitting on "white society". Which breeds a culture of degeneracy, resisting arrest/detainment ,which leads to police shootings, gang fights, potential wasted. How about a Democratic candidates who run for federal office in Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina have the guts to say that. Because truth is how you expand your voting totals.
How is KD still allowing shooter 3.1 to keep posting on his blogs?
???
The guy sounds and talks like Shooter. Unless you are unable to ban him, I don't think he adds any value to your blog. He just spews borderline racist crap.
Kevin:
I don’t know to what extent you read your comment section other than your photo posts which you do seem to follow. But a person who posted as “shooter 242” was a troll who commented often to your posts at Mother Jones, particularly during the Disqus era. At some point he changed his name to Shooter 242.2 (or something like that). He was an idiot troll who some seemed to enjoy replying to.
I don’t know who this “Midgard” troll is but he is a depraved racist who is polluting your comment section. Some people here liken him to “Shooter” but I don’t know if it’s the same person or not. Personally I find Midgard to be more offensive than “Shooter” was. It’s bad enough that he seems to enjoy juvenile name calling, but his comments are often racist and anti-Semitic. He is far more suited for the comment section of Fox News than he is your blog.
He does remind me of somebody but I can't just put my finger on it.
Fox News??? Bourgeoisie humping globalist they are. You still don't get it.
Unlike Kevin, I am not at all on the fence over the..."race v class," justice issue. The current emphasis on "Black Lives," exclusively may be a good temporary palliative, but eventually, and maybe sooner than anyone can image, it will be the death of Democratic Party and any liberal/progressive hopes of moving the Progressive Agenda forward...at all, money and power will win, egalitarianism will be ground into dust.
I agree with Midgard and Leo...we play this game too long to our utter detriment. I would say that this is only me that feels this way...but I largely live in a liberal bubble, maybe naturally, and to a person we are worried about this current emphasis of the Democratic Party.
This is not to say that any of us would vote Republican....but a lot of us are unhappy over this.
As AOC recently noted, Biden has so far turned out to be a VERY progressive President...which is good...but he also has to be a smart politician and not lose his white support across the country.
I fully know how terrible the above sounds...but it needs to said and said now, I think.
Best Wishes, Traveller
Midgard is an unrepentant soldier in Republican war on terror, both foreign & domestic, & a several decades alcoholic.
You should never agree with him.
Perhaps I am overly suspicious but I question that person who agrees with Midgard and chooses as his screen name the name of Lee’s horse is actually a progressive.
Robert E. Lee was only guilty of loving Virginia (which is for lovers) too much.
I question the premise. If Robert E. Lee Loved Virginia so much why did he wreck it with his soldiers? Nope what Robert E. Lee loved was the lifestyle that his plantation and slaves afforded him.
Lee was a servant to NM de Rothschild and the Knights of the Golden Circle. I think a lot of people get Lee mixed up with Sam Houston, who also a member of the circle, opposed the war before he died and supported a generational slavery dissolving plan in its place. Lee sorta did as well, but had short term considerations.
Lolz, you still don't get it. I mean, you can't be that ignorant. Republicans are globalist con men of the rich.
> I largely live in a liberal bubble
No you don't.
I'm a guy who when faced with a choice of moving the culture in a positive direction versus winning a particular election chooses the former. Mind you, it often doesn't differentiate much. Sometimes what you need to move things in a positive direction is to win elections.
At the same time, support for a lot of things like general gay rights, same-sex marriage, etc, etc, cost the Democrats votes, quite clearly. Obamacare cost them votes. I'm still glad they supported those things and did those things. The tactical maneuvering might have been better, but that's hindsight.
So, racial justice is a thing that matters to me and so is class justice. I don't think we can ignore racial justice in favor of class justice. I think understanding racial justice will help you understand class justice better.
And of course, as you point out, the difference isn't that big.
What is 'racial justice'? The fact that blacks commit 54% of the homicides and 50% of the armed robberies in the US, i.e. at 4x their percentage of population, yet are only twice as likely to be killed by cops? Is 'racial justice' a white, mentally disturbed man getting literally beaten to death by a multicultural gang of cops, with a Latino in the lead. And that death getting zero attention from 'progressive' Kevin Drum and his publication--Mother Jones.
Racial justice would mean whites being able to advocate in our interests. White victims of cops being given, oh, 1/10 the attention that black victims of cops are given.
What this comment seems like, to me, is that you are jealous of black people. Which is kind of messed up on the one hand, and maybe kind of understandable on the other.
Perhaps really crappy stuff has happened to you and nobody noticed at all. That's entirely possible. That stuff happens. The plight of some is invisible, and politics can only really cope with maybe 1 and a half topics at a time, and it's very hard to focus national politics on helping a group that's a minority. It's quite easy to focus politics on kicking a group that's a minority, especially if it's a very small minority.
In any case, whatever bad things that have happened to you deserve attention, but when you put that forward as jealousy of black people, it doesn't help anyone.
Jealous??? Are you kidding me. You didn't read a thing the post said. Black culture is toxic. It leads to many of the issues generally progressives prescribed as racism.
Give it up already with your BS. We know where you are coming from.
How about Justice for All?
What we seem to forget is that when the term "all men are created equal" we were not as partisan as we are today, we were certainly racist when those words were written, we were certainly misogynist, and we were xenophobes as well.
We had written words that seemed poetic and romantic to look back on but we din't follow those words for almost 200 years.
It took that long for women to gain "some sort of" equality. We are still working on treating blacks like equals.
"That all men are created equal" was uttered by men who owned slaves and believed women were not equal.
Can we correct all of that? We are trying but as we do our population has become politically isolated we don't talk, we don't listen and we darned sure don't compromise - and our anger gets out of control with lethal weapons too close at hand, ready to use.
We need to police our country to the words of the Founders, not their actions
> it sure gave Fox News plenty of fodder
it sure gave White Supremicists plenty of fodder.
FIFY.
Why not INDIVIDUAL justice?
50 years of group-based rights seems to have resulted primarily in endless conflict, and ever-mutating grievances which become ever more incompatible by the day, along with a scofflaw attitude to science whenever that delivers results that are incompatible with whatever this years group ideologies claim to be the one truth.
Maybe it's time to accept that this was a noble experiment that went horribly wrong, and try something different?