Ross Douthat's racial paranoia

[ProSense]

Ross Douthat's racial paranoia

Will "brown and beige" people abandon white seniors to poverty?

By Joan Walsh

Ross Douthat's New York Times column is often such a dizzying combination of purported rigorous logic and proud conservative bias as to be unreadable. Every once in a while, though, he gives you a scary but important peek into the conservative psyche.

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I'm still waiting for that one, but Monday's column featured another revealing Douthatism, this one about race. In a piece that purported to explain why we can no longer afford our commitment to the elderly, via Social Security and Medicare, Douthat suggested something the right rarely owns up to: that America's relatively stingy social infrastructure might have something to do with our racial and ethnic diversity. There's a long debate over this issue, and the real unanswered question is no longer whether diversity plays a role in our attitudes toward social spending, but rather, how large a role. But conservatives rarely admit it.

But here's Douthat weighing in on why a Western European social compact, along with higher tax rates, can't work here:

They could have ugly political consequences as well. Historically, the most successful welfare states (think Scandinavia) have depended on ethnic solidarity to sustain their tax-and-transfer programs. But the working-age America of the future will be far more diverse than the retired cohort it’s laboring to support. Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines.

There's so much bias wrapped up in that paragraph, it's hard to unpack. Douthat is actually making a point that's similar to something progressives have argued for a while: That white Americans have a stake in the education and employment prospects of non-white young people, because in the more diverse 21st century America, those black, Latino and Asian young people will increasingly be footing the bill for Social Security. I first heard that argument made at a conference on the future of California in 1987. Note how Douthat turns it on its head, though. Those brown and beige people are going to turn on white seniors and refuse to pay the taxes necessary to support them if we keep Social Security and Medicare robust.

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I think President Obama is smart to begin to talk more about our social compact with one another, as he did in his budget speech last Wednesday. Douthat seems to be saying we can't have a real social compact in a multiracial society; it only works in monochromatic Nordic societies. I think it would be the ultimate example of American exceptionalism to prove him wrong.

[alphafemale]

1. Because black and brown people don't have grandparents.

seriously

:wtf:

[The Magistrate]

2. After All, Ma'am, He Knows 'His' Conservative White People Would Not Blink At Starving Non-Whites

"Judging others by your owns standard doesn't work when you're an asshole."

[Igel]

3. I suspect he's playing off of some research published a couple of years ago.

It looked at civic engagement, charitable contribution rates, and "social solidarity" in a variety of neighborhoods.

"Social solidarity," IIRC, included things like the willingness to pick up a letter dropped near a mailbox and put it in--something that required minimal effort and zero cost to the benefactor, even if he didn't know the erstwhile mailer.

It didn't take much "diversity" for social solidarity to plummet.

If he is, then he's not making a racist statement, he's merely echoing an observation made, based on fairly good data, by others. It bears on race relations, to be sure. One can argue that something is needed but probably going to be lacking without saying that it's a good thing.

I think I'd argue that the research was facile. It looked at a relatively simple, easily identifiable kind of diversity. I think Fukuyama's work on social capital and trust is more to the point and subsumes the race-related work rather nicely, even though he focused on economics more han social cohesion per se. Then Douthat's point isn't so much rooted in a racial observation as one based on perceived shared values and trust or lack thereof. This strikes me as fairly accurate, making it a question of whether or not we're all in the same group. Look around at DU: There are enough people arguing for specific kinds of social factionalization to make one dizzy. Along with that factionalization comes calls not just for social justice--usually meaning "give me or those I empathize with stuff"--but also vindictiveness and revenge.