The Country's Looking for New Solutions, Not Racism, Sexism, or Meaningless Platitudes

Both Parties Need to Play the New Ideas Card.

JD Vance may sound like he’s lost yet more of his mind as he defends his 2021 statement to Tucker Carlson that women without biological children are “childless cat women” with “no direct stake in America” and are “miserable” to boot.

But Vance hasn’t suffered a stroke or started telling incoherent, EV boating/electrocution/shark-attack stories. No, Vance apparently has most of his marbles, so what he says and repeats is no accident. Moreover, every word he’s now spouting is surely being carefully scripted by political handlers based on focus-group testing.

Politicians are perennially playing cards to scare voters about their opponents. Republicans have a long history of playing the race card. Take, George H. Bush, who used the race card to considerable advantage in defeating Michael Dukakis for the Presidency in 1988. To quote the Times,

Mr. Horton was an African-American prisoner in Massachusetts who, while released on a furlough program, raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend. Mr. Bush’s campaign and supporters cited the case as evidence that his Democratic opponent, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, was insufficiently tough on crime.

Tucker Carlson’s “Great Replacement Theory” is the latest Republican race card. The “theory” has a long despicable history that traces back to eugenicists, the Nazis, the Klu Klux Clan, and, well, the list is horrible and horribly long.

Carlson’s appropriation of the “theory,” without proper attribution to Emperor Constantine, Tomás de Torquemada, Spain’s first Grand Inquisitor, Sir Francis Galton, founder of the Eugenics movement, Father Coughlin, with his 40 million American anti-semitic followers, or Adolf Hitler, history’s foremost racist, claims that Democrats are trying to replace white folk by expanding immigration.

Is Carlson a racist or simply a plagiarist as well as a card-copying political lackey? He sure hates Critical Race theorists, but seems to love being a born-again racist theorist.

JD Vance can’t, for domestic policy reasons, use the race card. His wife is Indian American. So, he’s playing the female card — Democratic women are, he implies, replacing native Americans with foreign immigrants by opting to have cats over children. They should be given less weight when it comes to voting. After all, they have less value than child-bearing Americans.

Actually, maybe they should have no vote. Perhaps they should be compelled to procreate in a baby factory (a white baby factory?) a la Himmler’s Lebensborn policy This, at least, is my best version of his female card.

Democrats, by the way, have a far darker history than Republicans in playing the race card. In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt opposed a federal anti-lynching law to garner votes from Southerners. In 1942, an election year, Roosevelt sent close to 1000 Jews to death camps in Nazi Germany on the pretext that they were all a threat to national security.

The race card is nominally about racism. Broadly defined, American racism references hatred for Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, native Americans, Asians, and any other ethnic group that is outside the Anglo Saxon tribe. The female card is nominally about sexism — male prejudice against females marked by stereotypes about female behavior, qualifications, abilities, and genetic responsibilities.

But let’s think a little deeper about the source of our nation’s racism, racial xenophobia, and misogyny. Let me channel my uncle, Charles Herbert Stember, one of the great sociologists of his day. His book, Sexual Racism: The Emotional Barrier to an Integrated Society, was too hot to handle when it was published in 1976. It’s too hot to handle today. One reviewer summarized its principal argument as follows:

Stember concludes that the emotional component of white male resistance to integration is based on the knowledge that the black male's sexual gratification potential is higher than the white male can ever achieve with the socially valued white female, because the black male's social distance from her is greater, his desire for her is stronger, hence, her potential response may be greater than her response to the white male. In our present social arrangements, as long as black males are socially inferiorized, their sexual threat will be real to white males, for the very social inequality that puts distance between the black male and white female gives him the added increment of sexual gratification through conquest. Indeed, if either blacks or women are given full psychological social equality this potential relationship would change. In maintaining racial discrimination, sexism, and segregation, the white male creates the very conditions that cause him the greatest distress: Maximal sexual gratification between his sexual competitor, the black male, and his desired sexual object, the white female.

Let’s assume my uncle had this fully or mostly right. It tells us that there is something deeply innate about American racism and misogyny as well as racial and sexual discrimination that has been and continues to be ignored or missed, be it by Supreme Court Justices, conservative public intellectuals, or the general public.

Certainly, racists and misogynists are obsessed with sex. The second largest cause of lynchings involved allegations of rape, attempted rape, and sexual assault. To Kill a Mocking Bird features white sexual anger, front and center. When President Trump began his 2016 campaign describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” sex was at the top of his card. (At the time, JD privately compared Trump to Hitler.)

Willie Horton was the perfect race card because he was a black man who raped a white woman. Tucker Carlson’s replacement theory is, at its core, a directive to keep white woman from having sex with non-white men and to, if needed, force them to reproduce — have sex as their main social duty. White women having sex with aliens, white women using birth control, white women having abortions, white women leaving the bedroom to run the country — this is Vance’s underlying female deplorables card.

The question for Trump and Vance is whether playing their race and sexism cards is turning off more voters than it’s turning on. White males comprise less than 30 percent of the population. And the Trump/Vance cards don’t resonate with most men, let alone their partners, many of whom may have the “wrong” complexion or ethnic background. This is not to mention a jury’s determining that Trump engaged in sexual abuse.

Nor can these guys play their cards straight. Trump has Jewish grandchildren and Vance has dark-complexed children. It’s all very confusing for their racist supporters. The far right is now attacking Vance’s wife for not being a pure blood, whatever that means.

For Harris, the question is whether to respond to race and sex baiting or to let her surrogates ask Trump and Vance penetrating questions, like Which of history’s top racists and sexists do you most revere?

High Time for Both Sides and the Press to Focus on New Answers to Old Problems

The established press is forever focusing on mud fights, which is why it’s losing so much market share to social media. When was the last time you heard CNN or Fox News hold an in-depth, fact-filled expert discussion of Social Security’s impending cash-flow crisis, our nation’s long-term fiscal insolvency, how we can use on-line education to equalize education nationwide, the potential loss to the country of climate change, our decades long practice of locking the poor into poverty via confiscatory marginal taxation, the need for fundamental tax simplification that gives all Americans the same incentive to work, the balkanization of American healthcare that leaves us spending the most and getting close to the least, whether tariffs on China back fire, and … ? The list of important things to discuss in the next 100 days is long, indeed.

I recommend both parties read and re-read this free book that lays out fundamental reforms that I and other economists feel are needed to truly make American great again. The first side that starts talking policy, in detail and with a modicum of intelligence, is likely to win. Frankly, people are sick and, indeed, bored to death of the hate, the culture wars, and the platitudes. It’s time to talk turkey about America’s future.

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