"Politicizing" and the Rhetoric of Reaction

“Regardless of where anyone stands on the gun-rights debate, however, we will encourage everyone to try to refrain from politicizing the tragedy in Connecticut.” -- Conclusion of statement by Michigan State House of Representatives' GOP Caucus Press Secretary Ari Adler, asking the Governor of Michigan to sign a law to expand concealed carrying of weapons in Michigan (including in schools), December 14, 2012.

"A Tragedy Like Newtown Should Be Politicized, But Changing Anything Will Take Different Politicians" -- Headline of a Time magazine article by Mike Grunwald, December 17, 2012.




Following Friday's school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, calls for a debate about gun policy were predictably met by the objection that we shouldn't "politicize" such a tragedy.  Whether or not we have a serious debate about gun policy, let alone a change in that policy, as a response to this mass shooting and the larger series of mass shootings that have taken place this year, at first glance, it seems that raising the specter of "politicization" will not, in and of itself, shut down discussion.  That, at least is a good thing.  The notion that dozens of people losing their lives in an act of violence in a public facility should not be an object of political reflection is truly bizarre. So where does this notion come from?

This post won't be a comprehensive history of the idea of "politicization" in the pejorative sense that those urging us not to politicize the Newtown shooting use the term.  But it's at least a preliminary attempt to sketch the outlines of what such a history might look like.  As best I can tell, this usage goes back to the 1960s and was largely created and cultivated by the political right.  And I think it might be productively connected to what the late Albert O. Hirschman called the "rhetoric of reaction."*



According to the OED, "politicize" entered the English language in the mid-18th century as an intransitive verb meaning "to engage in or talk about politics."  You don't see this usage much anymore, though you can see it in the word's first appearance in the New York Times, in Jo Ranson's June 11, 1950, review of Ralph Foster Weld's book Brooklyn is America:

"Brooklyn is America" builds up such a convincing case for local supremacy that a goodly number of the town's intransigent politicos, reminded of the borough's 300 years of culture and industrial acclaim, may again politicize that it is high time Brooklyn stopped being a tail to Manhattan's kite and threaten to secede from New York City.

But we're interested in the second, the transitive meaning of "politicize": "to make political, esp. to make (a person, group, etc.) politically aware or politically active."  This meaning according to the OED, dates back to 1846.  And it's far and away the more common meaning today.

If Google's ngrams are to be believed, the verb rarely appeared at all in print until the 1960s, when its usage took off, especially in that decade's second half.

It's thus fitting that the second appearance of "politicize" in The New York Times involves the second meaning and was published on March 23, 1969. Better yet, it occurs in a statement by President Richard Nixon, that font of the culture wars, concerning the ur-culture war topic of dissent and political violence on campus.  The Times published a long statement by President Nixon on this issue alongside a letter that his Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Robert Finch, had sent to university presidents pertaining to a new series of federal laws regarding crime on campus.  Here's the relevant passage from Nixon's statement:

Increasingly, it is clear that this violence is directed to a clearly perceived and altogether too conceivable objective: not only to politicize the student bodies of our education institutions, but to politicize the institution as well. 

Anyone with the least understanding of the history of freedom will know that this has invariably meant not only political disaster to those nations that have submitted to such forces of obfuscation and repression, but cultural calamity as well.

It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die.

Following Nixon's statement, the word "politicize" appeared over and over again in the pages of the Times. Almost always it appeared as a pejorative and, through 1970, in relation to higher education.    An October 20, 1969, editorial entitled "Free Universities--Or Captive?," decrying protests led by Black students at Dartmouth against an appearance by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and infamous eugenicist William Shockley, concludes, "Pressures to politicize the universities--often in the name of high-minded goals--are pernicious because they imply that the institution henceforth will be held responsible for what is said and thought in its classrooms and lecture halls. It is a trend that must be resisted, whether the pressures come from the right or the left, from blacks or whites. What is at stake is not the structure, but the heart and mind of the campus."

In a December 11, 1969, article outlining Spiro Agnew's views on education (he thought there was too much of it), the Times quoted the Vice President: "denied political participation in the real community, the youth seeks to politicize the only community he has, the academic one."

A July 16, 1970, editorial entitled "Crisis on the Campus" begins, "The efforts to politicize American higher education, along with the demonstrations of student unrest, have dominated public thinking about the nation's universities and colleges."

A September 5, 1970 story entitled "Hester Warns N.Y.U. Won't Tolerate Disruptions" describes NYU President James Hester's issuing "a strong warning yesterday to faculty and staff members and students that the university would not tolerate efforts by extremists to 'politicize' the school during its coming academic year."

An October 6, 1970, op-ed by Princeton historian Frederick Starr defended his institution's new plan to give students a one-week recess prior to election day against attacks, largely from conservatives.  One of the objections Starr cites is "The recess will 'politicize' campuses." Starr replies that "[m]any are already politicized, thanks in part, at least to President Nixon," before continuing to argue that, in fact, the recess was designed specifically to keep the campus politically neutral and to encourage students to pursue their politics off-campus (unlike, Starr notes, Northern Illinois' decision to offer a course on "Fieldwork in Political Campaigning," which is "precisely the situation that the Princeton Plan seeks to avoid"). 

An October 16, 1970 editorial entitled "The Angela Davis Tragedy," on the occasion of the FBI's capture of Davis, takes us (with Davis herself) off campus...but the topic of course still involves academia:  "Already attempts are under way by her defenders to politicize her case, and to deflect attention from the specifics of the charges against her to the merits of the causes she espoused."  (The thought that the Davis case was not already politicized, let alone that it would be inappropriate to do so, is pretty laughable.).**

A November 14, 1970, article entitled "Kent Coach to Resign Over Campus 'Fatalism,'" details outgoing football coach Dave Puddington's decision to quit following "negativism on campus" in the wake of the Kent State killings.***  "The fatalism around us and the current tendency to politicize every fact of life--even sports--has certainly affected the young men in our football program," Puddington is quoted as saying.

Starting in 1971, the term's appearance in the Times seems to move beyond the walls of academe, to cover other areas of concern.  The AFL-CIO, for example, worried in the fall of 1971, about attempts by the Nixon administration to "politicize" the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  And positive uses of the term even show up occasionally (in January 1972, the Rev. William Jones, at an event honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., is quoted as saying "Blacks and other minorities must politicize their numerical strength and collectiveize [sic] their economic power.").  

But the conservative, culture-war quality of those 1969 and 1970 appearance of the term set the tone for the most common political uses of "politicize" in ensuing decades.

In recent years, death has been as prominent a realm as higher education when it comes to conservative arguments about politicization.  The October 29, 2002, memorial service for Paul Wellstone, killed on October 25 in a plane crash, was immediately and rather ludicrously denounced by conservative talkingheads for "politicizing" his death and has been used, ever since, as a kind of template to discourage Democrats from talking politics when prominent Democrats die (Media Matters for America did a nice piece on this around the time of Ted Kennedy's death).

The idea that deaths, especially untimely violent deaths like Wellstone's and those of the Newtown victims, should have a politics-free zone built around them is somewhat different from the notion that colleges and universities should be politics-free.  Yet, the two arguments share, I think, at least two things beyond the word "politicize."

The first is the sense of a threat to the core values of civilization.  Back in 1969, Nixon very effectively articulated the idea that "politicizing" campuses might lead to "cultural calamity." Similarly, accusations that liberals are showing an insufficient reverence for the dead fits into a larger narrative of dangers of relativism and secular humanism. 

The second similarity is where Albert Hirschman comes in.  In The Rhetoric of Reaction (Belknap Press, 1991), Hirschman argues that, going back to the French Revolution, conservative critiques of progressive social programs have tended to employ three typical arguments, which he calls the perversity thesis ("any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy"), the futility thesis (attempted social transformations will simply not work), and the jeopardy thesis ("the cost of the proposed change is simply too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment").  Obviously all three of these rhetorics are employed against gun control:  if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns (perversity); prohibition never works (futility); if assault weapons are banned, schools will be safer but we will have lost our freedom (jeopardy).  In a sense, arguments from the right against "politicizing" things from campuses to mass shootings, are a kind of shorthand for these rhetorics of reaction.  Some things need to stand beyond politics because sometimes--very often, in fact, according to conservative rhetoric--politics cannot work.

Against such a view, simply having a political discussion is a useful act of resistance.

__________________________________

* Hirschman passed away last week.

** This editorial is, incidentally, a textbook example of New York Times liberalism. It concludes: "Whatever the eventual outcome, the tragedy is that one who might have made a significant contribution to the nation's normal political debate and to its needed processes of peaceful change became so alienated that she finally went over to revolutionary words and perhaps even worse."

*** You really can't make this stuff up!

Obama and the Politics of Race in the 21st Century: On Ta-Nehisi Coates’s "Fear of a Black President," Part I

The following post comes from Carl Pedersen and will be published in two parts on consecutive days.  

Carl Pedersen is Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Business and Culture at Copenhagen Business School. He is the author of Obama’s America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). His article on Obama and race, "The Obama Dilemma: Confronting Race in the 21st Century" is forthcoming in Michael Ledwidge et al., eds., Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America (London: Routledge, 2013)

The announcement came at 11 pm Eastern time on November 4, 2008. "We can report history" intoned MSNBC. CBS echoed the sentiment. "This is an incredible milestone in the history of this country" exclaimed news anchor Katie Couric. "A century and a half after the Constitution abolished slavery and guaranteed blacks the right to vote, four decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, voters have chosen our first African American president." When Barack Obama came onto the stage at Grant Park in Chicago moments after havng been declared the winner of the 2008 presidential election, the euphoria in the crowd was palpable. Cameras dutifully panned to the civil rights activist and presidential candidate in 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson, who stood with tears in his eyes, overcome with emotion. This was indisputably an historic moment.

Ta-Nehisi Coates apparently thought so too. In his incisive essay on Obama and race in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic, "Fear of a Black President" (paraphrasing the title of the Public Enemy album from 1990, Fear of a Black Planet), he writes that the election of Barack Obama had "convinced [me] that the country really had changed." More than three years after the euphoria of Grant Park, the initial reaction to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida was, in Coates’s words, "trans-partisan." However, as soon as the president commented on the tragedy by pledging to get to the bottom of the case, "the illusion of consensus" disappeared and reverted to "something darker and more familiar—racialized political fodder."

His essay, not surprisingly, is bereft of the optimism of 2008. He laments that "[a]fter Obama won, the longed-for post-racial moment did not arrive; on the contrary, racism intensified." According to Coates, all Americans are left with more than half a century after the Civil Rights Act is a "compromised integration" that reveals "a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard."

Coates condemns the double standard in US politics, rooted in two conflicting facts: a "love of democracy [and] an undemocratic white supremacy" that excuse white resentment and anger but unequivocally condemn black rage and that force African Americans to be "twice as good" if they want to achieve anything resembling parity in US society. What Coates calls "the thoroughly racialized backlash" against Obama is indeed unrelenting. Coates cites the racialized discourse of conservative media personalities such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Republican politicians such as Joe Wilson and Newt Gingrich.

At the same time, he criticizes Obama for virtually ignoring race since he took office. As he puts it, "the myth of ’twice as good’ that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors." He points out that it was Obama himself, in his now famous speech in March 2008, who declared the US could not afford to ignore race.

It is incontrovertible that Obama has avoided talking about race as president. Coates sees Obama’s avoidance of the subject as indicative of his conservatism. His essay, however, has an inner tension between upbraiding Obama for ignoring race while underscoring the underlying constraints that could justify his reticence.

Coates is of course aware of the burdens of history that could impose restraints on a president who possesses a high degree of historical consciousness. Coates goes so far as to say that "[r]ace is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics." Yet, like Adolph Reed and Cornel West, he comes close to calling Obama a race traitor for refusing to address race both rhetorically and in terms of public policy.

However, it could be argued that Obama has made a conscious decision to temper his public comments on race while promoting policies that benefit the African American community.

II

If we look at the current state of race relations in the US through the prism of what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has called the Long Civil Rights Movement, it is clear that the election of the first African American president did not (and indeed could not) usher in a postracial society.

Hall outlines the ways in which the struggle for racial equality in the 20th century was countered by conservatives bent on preserving white privilege. The two-track system of unemployment insurance established as part of New Deal reforms in the 1930s excluded agricultural and domestic workers and relegated African Americans to means-tested programs. Coates makes no mention of Obama’s proposal to make the work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform act (the official title is Personal Responsiblity and Work Opportunity Act) more flexible by allowing states to fashion alternative ways of putting people back to work than the federal government mandated. The GOP interpreted Obama’s proposal as an attempt to get rid of the work requirement altogether. The underlying message of ads run during the summer of 2012 and at the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August essentially accused the first African American president of removing work requirements in order to accommodate lazy blacks. As Martin Gillens observes in Why Americans Hate Welfare, "the perception that blacks are lazy is consistently the most powerful predictor of white Americans’ opposition to welfare."

To say, as Coates does, that "Obama’s election effectively racialized white Americans’ views, even of health-care policy," is not the same as saying that racial attitudes did not impact views of health care in the past. Coates notes that President Bill Clinton’s health care reform proposal was not criticized as "reparations" and, quoting a study by Michael Tesler, racial attitudes had a greater impact on public opinion of Obama’s health care plan than Clinton’s. This is undoubtedly true, but it underestimates the degree to which health care reform has been racialized at least since the 1940s. Opposition to President Harry S Truman's proposal for national health care from southern politicians was rooted in the fear that it would mean integrating hospitals. In the 1960s, Mississippi Senate Democrat John Stennis proposed legislation that would allow states to give Medicare funds to segregated hospitals.

White flight from urban centers in the 1940s and 1950s, and blockbusting and redlining in the suburban real estate market spatialized race. Welfare and housing thus functioned as affirmation action for whites. African Americans were disproportionately affected by the implosion of the subprime lending market. It is no accident that Rick Santelli, in the 2009 rant that launched the Tea Party, cast the subprime crisis in terms of handouts to the undeserving poor.

Conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s articulated a colorblind narrative that equated equality before the law as the culmination of the Civil Rights movement and the triumph of American ideals. Any inequality could henceforth be explained away by references to black culture and deficiencies in black family structure.

Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy built on this narrative and targeted white middle class suburbanites and the white working class by attacking welfare, busing and affirmative action. The Southern Strategy first articulated by Kevin Phillips in a series of memos to Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968, later expanded in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips argued that  demographic trends such as suburbanization and population shifts to the South and West combined with resentment against federal government overreach were in the process of creating a constituency that would favor Republican candidates. Phillips made the case that government programs primarily benefiting African Americans imposed onerous taxes on the middle class. The Southern Strategy appealed to white voters through racially-coded language, anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric.

Rhetorically, Republicans increasingly used race-coded language to maintain and broaden support among these white constituencies. Ronald Reagan went to Neshoba, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan, to launch his presidential campaign in 1980 by talking of states’ rights. George H. W. Bush used the image of a black convicted felon to criticize his Democratic opponent’s record on criminal justice in the 1988 campaign. In the 1990s, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which linked the disproportionate number of blacks in poverty, prison and on welfare with their inferior intelligence, called for an end to the "custodial state" (i.e. welfare state).

At times, the racialized rhetoric would become more overt. In 2002, then Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, at the 100th birthday celebration of Senator Strom Thurmond, a former Democrat and now fellow Republican who had run for president in 1948 on the openly segregationist Dixiecrat ticket, declared that "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years."

Lott’s endorsement of Thurmond underscores how neoConfederate ideology permeates the conservative movement. Coates makes only passing mention of the Tea Party, which, as an NAACP report declared in 2010, is "permeated with concerns about race." References to the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary garb of many Tea Party protesters conceal the degree to which much of contemporary conservative rhetoric is informed not by reverence for the Revolutionary era, but is rather infused with the Lost Cause ideology of the post-Civil War era. Accusations of voter fraud, threats to nullify federal legislation, and giving more power to the states have an eerie resemblance to opposition to Radical Reconstruction after the Civil War and are part and parcel of a backlash of white resentment that is formidable and intransigent in its hatred for the first African American president.

III

"The political consequences of race extend beyond the domestic," writes Coates. I couldn’t agree more. However, Coates confines his comments on race and foreign to questioning Obama’s extensive use of drone strikes whose victims include American citizens by arguing that "a black president with a broad sense of the world" should be more sensitive to issues of citizenship.

There is a more useful way of adducing how race affects the conservative view of Obama’s foreign policy. Obama has been criticized by conservative pundits, most recently the Washington Post’sCharles Krauthammer, for returning a bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office during George W. Bush’s presidency. So persistent was the rumor that the White House felt compelled to issue a statement declaring the stories completely false.

The Churchill bust was removed from the Oval Office to the White House residence and replaced by a bust of Abraham Lincoln, arguably a more inspiring figure to the first African American president. That having been said, there may well have been another reason that Obama chose to move the Churchill bust. As Richard Toye recounts in Churchill’s Empire, the Churchill of stoic resolve against fascism during the Second World War was also an unrepentant imperialist who thought that the English were a superior race. Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was detained for his subversive activities during Churchill’s suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya. It is likely that Obama would rather gaze at the president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 than the imperialist dedicated to the perpetuation of the British Empire.

Whatever Obama’s feelings toward Churchill, it is nevertheless a leap to suggest, as does Dinesh D’Souza in his 2010 essay in Forbes, "How Obama Thinks," that Obama believes in the "anticolonialist ideology" of his father who taught him "to see America as a force for global domination and destruction." In the summer of 2012, D’Souza released a documentary, 2016: Obama’s Americaand companion book Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream (not in any way to be confused with my 2009 book on Obama with the same title) that elaborated on the essay by claiming that if Obama is re-elected to a second term, he will indeed make good on his message of change by remaking the United States into a weak and impoverished nation. Newt Gingrich, clearly taken by D’Souza’s theory, parroted his views during the primary campaign, calling Obama a "food stamp president" with a "Kenyan anti-colonial worldview."

Casting Obama as an anti-American subversive comports well with the segregationist critique of the civil rights movement. Indeed, accusations that Obama is a communist and/or socialist (the two terms are often used interchangeably on the right) stem not only from his purported redistributionist agenda, but from the Cold War era, when advocates of racial justice were routinely labeled communist.

During Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s rather hapless trip abroad in the summer of 2012, one of his advisors let slip that Romney understood the deep Anglo-Saxon ties between the US and Britain in contrast to Obama, who "didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have." Romney, who said he was drawing on David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, said that the economic disparity between Palestinians and Israelis could be explained by cultural differences. Diamond, in an op-ed in The New York Times, opined that he suspected that Romney hadn’t even read his book, or if he had, had misunderstood his arguments. Diamond’s study of is a broadside against racist biological explanations of human history. One could suspect Romney of drawing on other work for his worldview. Perhaps he’s been reading Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, which defends an Anglo-Protestant core culture threatened by demographic change, or Niall Ferguson’s Civilization that laments "the end of 500 years of Western ascendancy." This is the ideology of declinism (that also fits in well with D’Souza’s theory of a hidden Obama agenda) that stretches from the anxieties of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby worrying that "civilization’s going to pieces" to Pat Buchanan, whose latest book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025 is replete with his diatribes against demographic changes and immigration that would lead to "the end of America."

The US is thus faced with demographic transformation within and the decline of its influence abroad. The two are related and conflated in the conservative mindset. Obama, the African American of Kenyan descent, is the embodiment of both. His Republican opponent wants to reconstitute the neo-con vision of the US role in the world (and has employed George W. Bush’s UN Ambassador, John Bolton, to help him). The fear of a weakened US in the world is paralleled by a fear of a weakened (and increasingly nonwhite) US.