The Republicans look to magic

Much has been made of the candidate for Republican National chairman, Chip Saltsman, circulating a CD with the song, "Barack the Magic Negro": maybe it's racist, it's certainly bad taste. But most of all it's a sign that a party that has become a largely Southern/rural Western regional party has no inclination to change. Today, Paul Krugman writes about the larger collapse of the Southern Strategy and how Republicans still haven't realized the magnitude of their failure.

I'm fascinated by what we might call The Strange Case of Mark Sanford. The South Carolina governor was prepared to let 77,000 of his fellow citizens go without (meager) unemployment benefits, refusing to ask for $146 million in assistance from the federal government. He finally relented, with only hours to spare, under pressure from citizens, politicians and those still-important newspapers. This case tells us more about the prevailing Republican mindset than Saltsman's song.

It would be easy, and perhaps even accurate, to dismiss Sanford as another heartless, cynical Republican pol. Yet the incident may be more instructive if we accept that he operated out of sincerity — shaped, of course, by his world view. The New York Times reports:

For weeks, Mr. Sanford, newly elected as head of the Republican
Governors Association and known for being a fierce free-market foe of
government spending, stuck to his stand, questioning the probity of the
South Carolina Employment Security Commission and demanding a new audit
of the agency.

He has said in the past that he did not trust
the commission’s calculation of the state’s unemployment rate, though a
spokesman at the Bureau of Labor Statistics said it was calculated the same way as in every other state.

South Carolina has the nation's third highest unemployment rate — and remember, the actual rate is always significantly higher than reported; the official stat doesn't count the people who aren't checking in regularly at the unemployment office because there just aren't jobs for them. The state's textile and apparel industries, which for generations provided decent jobs in a state with low educational outcomes, have been devastated by China. Its poultry operations, where African-Americans could find work in a state with much remaining subtle racism, turned to cheaper immigrant labor (illegal and otherwise).

The ruling white gentry for decades pitted poor whites against poor blacks, claiming a zero-sum competition for jobs. Divide and rule. The overt racism of the past was coded as anti-government, anti-tax rhetoric by native son Lee Atwater (fatally stricken, Atwater would have an epiphany, writing "My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood"). De jure integration provoked massive white flight to de facto segregated sprawl suburbs. Even now, some white South Carolinians will tell you those black former poultry workers really wanted to be on welfare — apparently oblivious to welfare's draconian cutbacks and restrictions (and why did generations of blacks prefer to work in the horrendous conditions of those plants until the wave of illegal immigration allowed bosses to pay even lower wages to a new set of workers?). Forget Kansas — the white working poor and falling white middle class here votes consistently against its self-interest, fueled by fear of "the other." Such is the mindset of this reddest of red states, a bastion of the regional party that was once the Grand Old Party.

For Sanford, understanding how the other half lives must be even more difficult. Sanford grew up in comfort, part of the time on a plantation. He went to Darden for an MBA and became a wealth real-estate developer. In Congress, he was one of two members of the House to vote against preserving sites linked to the Underground Railroad — this from a representative of a state with a particularly odious history of Jim Crow and lynchings, not to mention provoking the Late Unpleasantness at Fort Sumter. Liberals might say he's a devil. I say he just can't — won't — get it.

So comes the row with the state unemployment agency. In the world of Sanford and other true believers (one also thinks of Arizona's Jeff Flake), these bureaucrats much be making this "negative" stuff up. How can so many people be out of work when I'm doing fine (lifted by generational wealth, position and the housing bubble)? How can this be when the miracle of the free market works — all we need to do is get government out of the way, which has certainly happened in South Carolina?

Similarly, this agency, among others, must be wasting and hiding millions, nay billions of dollars. How else could we and other states be facing shortfalls, or seeing (when I peek outside my world view) a collapsing economy? Government isn't the solution to the problem, government is the problem! So what if conservatives have been in charge for decades, relentlessly defunding and cutting taxes. Those bureaucrats are wily, and the media are liberals.

And the facts have a liberal bias. In reality, the entire body of ideas that undergirds conservatism has been laid bare as lies. We all are now struggling with the consequences and coming back won't be easy, particularly at the state level. But the Republicans who run the party — Sanford is new chair of the Republican Governors Association — just can't accept that their gods have failed. Now their only hope is to try to ensure that Barack Obama does the same, so they can return on their magic carpets of resentment and fear.