Lilla, Pro and Con

On August 12 we wrote about a Wall Street Journal article by Mark Lilla which argued against Democrats' identity group politics and, at least implicitly, in favor of an economic or social class basis for their politics. Very clearly this was going to stimulate considerable push-back from those committed to the status quo.

Washington Monthly runs an article by Nancy LeTourneau which argues, with some justice, that racism is not simply color-coded economics. She writes:

In a rational world it is hard to come up with a logical reason for racism—especially if you are looking for one true explanation. A lot of (mostly white) people solve that problem by suggesting that it is a result of economic disenfranchisement. There is a layer truth to that.

There are a whole host of questions that such a view doesn’t even begin to address. For example, how does it explain racism among the upper classes? How does it explain the persistent discrepancy of outcomes in everything from criminal justice to employment to education to health that tend to be systemically rooted and persist regardless of the economic plight of white people?

All of this is to say that Lilla has identified but one layer on which the construct of racism has been built. If he stops there and assumes that enough white people will dispense with racism when their economic plight is improved, he is very badly mistaken.

True enough, racism is more than economics. It exists wherever multiple "types" of people exist side-by-side. We've recently written about racism in China, it is well-known in India, the Japanese practice it with gusto, the Arabs against Africans, etc. Tribalism is more of the same, and it's ubiquitous.

At its most primitive, the behavior is the defense of "our" DNA and those like ours against the DNA of "others" however defined or recognized. A pessimist would be tempted to hypothesize racism is hard-wired into human genetics, a battle to be fought surely, but never won.

While Lilla may be wrong about the underlying construct of racism, he may nevertheless be correct in his Rx for the Democrats, assuming they want to win elections. Doing so requires the votes of large numbers of the white majority.

Read Lilla as advocating a political strategy, not necessarily as a scientific explanation of racism, genderism, or whatever discriminatory process is the focus. I believe he is trying to design a "tent" big enough to cover an electoral majority of Americans.

Economics may be the practical way for Democrats to accomplish that larger "tent," FDR certainly thought so. Hating on whites has the opposite effect, it shrinks the electoral "tent."