This first appeared on Splice Today. The time references are a little old, but I think the overall issues are still relevant.
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“Barack Obama is the food-stamp president,” Newt Gingrich declared last week on his way to the South Carolina primary. Some have called this a racial dog-whistle. Others might argue that, given its quintessential Newt subtlety, it is more of a racial slime-trail. Either way, you still apparently can’t go wrong in South Carolina by equating black people with big government. John Calhoun is no doubt chuckling with senile glee on his traitor’s dung heap in hell.
Andrew Sullivan made the argument recently that libertarianism is not inherently racist. He argues that he would not legislate against private expressions of racism…but that is not because he supports racism, but because he believes that such legislation would backfire, resulting in less freedom for all.
The social power of homophobia and hetero-sexism in a free culture is crushing. I oppose it; and recognize it. I have spent a great deal of my life pushing back culturally and intellectually and morally against it. But I do not want to compel it into submission. I want to persuade it into toleration. And that is the core difference between power exerted by the state and power exerted by non-state actors: the former is ultimately backed by physical force deployed by the government; the latter by public opinion, economic and social power, and the willingness of minorities to buy into the ideology of their oppressors or haters.
Sullivan’s certainly right on the philosophical point; there’s nothing structurally or logically that says that a desire for small government has to coincide with racism. Indeed, you can imagine societies — say, apartheid-era South Africa, or Nazi Germany — where opposition to government control and opposition to racism would be entirely congruent.
The problem is that those societies are not the society in which we live, and that history matters. Tim Wise makes this painfully clear in his brisk new book Dear White America. Addressing his fellow white people (like me!), Wise not so gently informs us that most of our presumptions and self-congratulatory musings on race are bunk. Barack Obama’s election has not ended racism (he lost among almost all white demographics except the young.) Asian Americans are not a model minority (they’re relatively high income is because they are concentrated in high-income cities; adjusted for location, their poverty rates are double those for whites.) And in America, where “state’s rights” was used as a rallying cry for slavers, fighting against the central government does in fact have something to do with racism. Which is why when Ron Paul says, “South Carolina is known for its respect for liberty,” it’s hard not to think that he’s speaking not for all people, but for white people in particular.
Along these lines, Wise points out that Tea Party activists who oppose high taxes and big government are not actually interested in going back to a time when government was really small — to the nineteenth century, for example, when there were no regulations preventing children from working in industry (even the pro-child-labor Gingrich isn’t agitating for us to start chucking ten-year-olds back into coal mines — at least not white ten-year-olds.)
Instead, when Conservatives say they want to roll government back, they generally mean back to a time before the 1960s. Of course, as Wise says, tax rates in the 1950s were exponentially higher than they are today — the highest was ninety-one percent. But there was something different in the 1950s. There were big government hand-outs…but they were restricted to whites. White folks, Wise says, supported the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave Indian and Mexican land to white people. White folks supported the New Deal programs of the 1930s. They supported the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration Home loans which were largely responsible for creating the affluent American middle class. “In other words,” Wise says
government had always been big for people like us, and we were fine with that. But beginning in the 1960s, as people of color began to gain access to the benefits for which we had always been eligible, suddenly we discovered our inner libertarian and decided that government intervention was bad, perhaps even the cause of social decay and irresponsible behavior on the part of those who reaped its largesse. [….]
Doesn’t it seem convenient that growing opposition to government intervention in the economy, the housing market, the job market and other aspects of American life parallels almost directly the racialization of social policy, and the increasing association in the white mind between such efforts and handouts to the undeserving “other”?
I can’t deny any of that. Which makes my own flirtations with libertarianism (including reading Andrew Sullivan and kind of liking Ron Paul) somewhat embarrassing. Wise turns the screws further in a recent blog post on Ron Paul in which he points out that racist shithead David Duke opposes imperialism abroad and the government security state at home, just like Paul. He adds:
And yes, I realize that Ron Paul — this election season’s physical embodiment of the broken clock — is not, literally, as bad as David Duke. Yes, he supports all those incredibly ass-backwards policies rattled off above (about welfare, immigration, abortion, taxes and education), but he is not, like Duke, a Nazi. He is supported by Nazis, like Stormfront — the nation’s largest white nationalist outfit, which is led by Don Black, who’s one of Duke’s best friends, and is married to Duke’s ex-wife, and is Duke’s daughters’ step-dad — but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Surely it’s not because Paul wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, and allow companies to discriminate in the name of “free association.” And it couldn’t have anything to do with those newsletters that went out under his name, with all kinds of blatantly bigoted commentary about black people being IQ-deficient predators, at a time when he was promoting those very newsletters (and so, presumably, reading them), and not objecting in the least.
Ouch.
And yet, while I am chastened, I’m not necessarily convinced. Yes, it’s true that libertarianism, freedom, and self-determination in this country have all been soaked in racism. You can’t use those terms in reference to the United States without taking part in the history and ideology of white supremacy. Wise is right about that.
But…the problem is that the alternatives to libertarianism, freedom, and self-determination aren’t exactly pure either. As mentioned above, Wise himself points out that most big government interventions, from the Homestead Act to the FHA housing subsidies, were explicitly white supremacist in intention and in effect. Slavery was enabled by large-scale government intervention. So were our many, many big government, racially inflected imperial adventures — from Columbus’ extermination of the Arawaks which kicked off white folks’ control of this continent to our current bloody slog in Afghanistan. So, for that matter, is the drug war.
There certainly have been anti-racist big government interventions. The Civil War was one. Civil Rights legislation was another. But, by the same token, there have been anti-racist anti-government movements as well — such as the Civil Rights movement. But the Civil War doesn’t excuse our adventure in Iraq from its racist imperial tradition any more than the Civil Rights movement excuses the Tea Party from its racist libertarian tradition.
The difficulty in America (and not just in America, but America is where we live) is that there is no ideological path you can take that isn’t tied to the history of racism, because racism is our history. This country was built on the genocidal elimination of Native Americans and on the enslavement of Africans. It wasn’t built on only those things, but still, those things were pretty important. And when a President — even a black President — sends drones halfway across the world to intentionally kill terrorists and happens to kill other people who don’t look like us, that history is implicated, and implicates us.
The point here isn’t that Paul and Obama are equally racist, or that their supporters are equally hypocrites. Rather, the point is that it behooves every white person, whoever they support, to think about their ideologies not just as abstract systems, but as living histories, with all the bloodshed and compromise that that implies. Wise is doing God’s work when he vilifies the racism of Conservative libertarianism, but I wish he’d found it in his heart to spend a bit more time vilifying the racism of bi-partisan big-government as well. I guess white people, to no one’s surprise, find it easier to see the beam in the other person’s eye. That’s why whites need to follow Wise’s example and check each other.
How exactly was the Civil Rights movement, which repeatedly sought the intervention of the Federal Government to promote and protect equality, anti-government?
(The Civil Rights movement, for example, supported the Civil Rights Act an the Voting Rights Act, it didn’t view them as Big Government Interventions. Meanwhile, the Tea Party objects to Government programs and laws, regardless of whether they support the outcomes of those programs and laws.)
The Civil Rights movement was a grass roots movement objecting to government policies.
I wouldn’t say it’s analogous to the tea party in all ways — but I don’t think it’s opposed in every way either.
Maybe John Brown would have been a better example, though.
I think the right analogy is the black power movement, which really was an anti-government movement. Stokely Carmichael specifically said that the rest of the civil rights movement was corrupt for trying to appeal to the Federal Government and that the existing system should be destroyed.
It might be interesting to sort of think about Black Power as a reflection of the Nixon era (or the whole thing as a reaction to the imperialism-fueled Great Society)– Nixon carried forward the war, as well as various civil rights programs, but largely took on urban blacks as the enemy, initiated the modern prison state and spoke for the disgruntled white man. He was able to swing George Wallace voters, and thus was a monumental postwar Republican.
Blacks can thus hardly be blamed for adopting a defensive stance, in a way that allowed an America-specific critique of power, history, and identity that had and has resonance now. But integration for the poor seems like something of a lost cause.
again… what’s imperialist about the Great Society? How is it “fueled” by imperialism? It was done in by imperialism, undermined and sacrificed by our folly in Vietnam.
The Great Society was big government. I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that the same impulse which fueled that push for big government at home was linked to the overreach abroad.
In fact, the history of big government liberalism suggests that it is almost always linked to big government imperialism. Unfortunately.
Which is why ethical enlightened progressive whatever is such an eternally frustrating stance. We want government to protect but not oppress the weak, to chasten but not prop up the powerful. It will always do both. Is liveral democracy the best system for creating a stable and responsible government? Probably yes– which means that to love government is to love democracy, and when you despise government, you can’t really love democracy. Autocratic states, if they are truly not responsive to their constituents, will be unstable and temporary. Ditto with micro-syndacilist solutions– except that the actual structure of government causes them to ignore their shared interests.
Sorry, “liberal” democracy. I was wandering into some weird political theory of the humours there.
Also…a lot of libertarian anti-imperialist rhetoric comes out of the south’s experience in the civil war. The Great Society was willing to impose the central government’s will on the southern states…which is kind of imperialist. (Which, again, is to show that imperialism can be anti-racist and isolationism can be racist…as well as vice versa.)
It’s only imperialist if you buy into a state’s rights frame, or to put it another way, if you don’t believe in federal representative democracy. By that logic, the Bush tax cuts are imperialist because i disagree with them and live in a blue state.
No; it’s imperialist by the logic that history matters, and the regional divisions in the U.S. matter. Which seems like a fairly reasonable position to me.
It’s the same logic whereby French actions in Algeria were imperialist. Or U.S. actions against Native Americans, it seems like.
I mean, the difference is that Southern regional identity has been historically based on racism, and as a result is evil and wrong from just about any perspective.
The south also isn’t a different country. You’re also equating the white southern experience with the entire south.
The south was almost (at least in theory) a different country. It still has different culture, customs, laws. The Federal government, in an ironic way, seems to actually have represented the North’s interests pretty consistently, both because there’s lots more money up north but also more democracy. Any idea that a region that consistently has disenfranchised a huge number of its constituents is truly democratic is, I argue, total crap.
Isaac, I’m quite aware that the non-white people in the South have different interests. So did the French people living in Algeria. It’s a common situation. The difference is that the South’s anti-imperialism is racist, not that the south’s anti-imperialism isn’t anti-imperialism.
I find the idea that the South was a “different country” to be hinged on a bizarre idea of a homogeneous state as the “proper” state. It’s driven by the idea that having multiple large and historically different cultures under the same state apparatus creates conflict and is therefore bad (which I thoroughly disagree with.) I find the idea of autonomous “self-determining” historically-based homogeneous cultural states to be a nationalist fantasy of the 20th century, whether it’s Fanon or Hitler dreaming it up. It belongs in the same scrap pile with “plausible protectionism”.
I buy into what Zizek says about imperialism; the idea that the original culture was somehow a “people” that had some sort of vaunted integrity before the conquerors invaded that they must now recover is fairly naive. If anything, the invasion of the conquerors creates solidarity in the people that didn’t exist previously. But, I am a white, history-less straight man in America, so that may have something to do with it.
Put more slightly, the idea that a “uniform” culture is a historically true or desirable culture is very ugly to me, no matter what the packaging is.
Post-war Europe doesn’t suggest that big government and imperialism always goes hand in hand, quite the opposite perhaps. Maybe you’re right when it comes to American history but I don’t know if that means you have to wait for the US’s geopolitical importance to fade into irrelevance to get big government without imperialism.
Owen, I think deconstructing identity to the point where the idea of imperialism has no moral force is pretty problematic, inasmuch as it doesn’t give you much purchase to deal with the ways that imperialism oppresses people. On the other hand, I think the experience of the South suggests that imperialism isn’t always the greatest evil, or even necessarily an evil in all situations.
I wasn’t saying that imperialism should have no moral force, but what I was saying was that the proper response is likely not separatism. After all, imperialism is as much a part of history as the cultures involved are themselves. The idea of a return to a proper and true monoculture is what I take issue with. I clearly have no problem with people “fighting for their rights” or whatever.
Calling the South’s position in the Civil War anti-imperialism does seem like an odd use of the term, one which threatents to devalue it. I agree that there are some points of similarity, but surely there must be a better term to use that suggests the pretty stark differences.
I’d also say that your argument against Wise’s book is problematic in that it shifts the dynamic of the conversation back to the fallacious binary of small govt. vs. big govt. What Rice seems to be saying (from the excerpts and analysis you offer) is that very few people genuinely want a smaller government when it comes to the benefits they themselves derive from that government. Therefore, the conversation has to be about what government action can take to best ensure freedoms of all people, including anti-racist and anti-poverty measures. Aside from a small pocket of genuine libertarians or anarchists, the actual argument over whether or not government should intervene to better people’s lives just isn’t an argument — but it is brought out as one to manipulate the conversation and keep government action only benefitting the privileged. I do agree that we have to be vigilant about what kind of action the government is taking, as government action can of course be racist and imperialist and generally awful. But I think that keeping the small vs. big argument going in the way that it exists is one of the primary things keeping us from having the more important qualitative arguments over government action, when progressives have to spend all their energy merely reminding people that they do in fact want the government to help.
Walter Benn Michaels talks Southern anti-federalism as anti-imperialist. I think that’s a pretty useful way to think about it, precisely because it shows that in the US racism and imperialism don’t have to be linked; that, in fact, anti-imperialism can be racist.
I take your point about small and big government…but I think that it’s a bit too easy to basically say that anyone who wants a smaller government is a hypocrite. You could say the same thing about big government folks, right? No one wants the government to treat them unjustly; folks who advocate for government intervention may change their mind when government intervention goes against them.
The point is that historically there has been an ideological argument about big government vs. small government in the U.S. Wise is very good at showing the ways that the small government folks have collaborated with and been implicated in racism. He’s less willing or interested in seeing the other side; the ways that big government is implicated in racism. He sees small government as implicated in the racist history of Southern secessionism, but doesn’t see big government implicated in the racist history of Vietnam. I think that’s an error.
Or to put it another way — progressives are not in fact always correct that the government helping is a good thing. The government fucking sucks. I’m paying taxes at the moment so that Obama can spy on me and screw around in Syria and prosecute Bradley Manning. Libertarians are just not completely deluded when they point out that the government does lots of things that we’d be better off that it didn’t do.
There was a blog post on one of the Economist’s blogs that I like that pointed out that nativism and racism don’t automatically lend themselves to anti-big government political parties and that in fact, in Europe nativist anti-immigrant parties are very supportive of the welfare state in Europe, they just think that only native Europeans should qualify for those benefits. So there is nothing inherent about powerful central governments that makes them benevolent with respect to minorities (see also: China).
But this post is essentially a cynical version of Rand Paul’s speech at Howard University, where he argued that Abraham Lincoln and the founder of the NAACP were republicans, so never mind the history of race relations since the sixties and the Southern Strategy, there’s no reason minorities shouldn’t vote republican/libertarian. Except this is the HU, so everything’s framed in a negative guilt by association argument: Johnson expanded the Vietnam war, so therefore the great society is tainted and probably imperialist also, Obama has drone strike and torture guilt, so his other achievements are suspect, etc. So if you want to argue that the great society wasn’t racist and that big government, in America, has been historically linked with minority rights, like Isaac Butler (I think?) has, you have to somehow defend the Vietnam war because the two were historically linked, so therefore ideologically linked.
To which I would say ok, you hold a lot of civil libertarian positions – you’re anti-drug war, anti-drone strike and intervention abroad, positions popular with otherwise big-government liberals. Like many point out, while these civil-lib positions often overlap with beliefs of democrats, the Democrats in power have continued the drug war, intervened abroad, so on. This has been part of the status quo on the left since at least the Clinton years. Are you in favor of libertarian positions less popular with liberals as well, like tighter monetary policy, getting rid of food stamps and public employees unions, letting the private market take care of public schools in the form of charter schools, getting rid of food and drug regulations, all the rest of Ron Paul’s platform? If you are, argue for those positions, instead of arguing against arguing against those positions, if that’s not too many double negatives. So lets say that sure, Johnson’s great society was imperialist because he was for Vietnam and that imposing the great society on the south is analogous with how France treated Algeria (?!?) and that the civil rights movement was anti-big government (it wasn’t/isn’t, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson associate with the Democrats for a reason…but nevermind) Why do you think Ron Paul’s ‘no government except where absolutely, positively unavoidable’ is the solution, on balance, to what plagues America?
Or to bring it back to the comparison in my first paragraph, and your assertion that “In fact, the history of big government liberalism suggests that it is almost always linked to big government imperialism. Unfortunately.” how would you square that assertion with Europe?
I guess I’d just say in America it is? I was talking about America, pretty much (I say so repeatedly.)
I don’t really get why I should have to defend Ron Paul. I say in the post that he’s a racist, and that racism is an important part of libertarianism.
I didn’t say that anyone had to support the Vietnam War to support the Great Society. I said that the two of them have in America tended to go together, and that, in that context, suggesting that liberals who have some affection for Ron Paul are deluded fools is perhaps looking a bit too hard for the mote in the other person’s eye.
Arguing that on balance you prefer U.S. imperial racism to isolationist libertarian nativism is totally reasonable. I just feel like you should be clear that’s what you’re doing, rather than presenting the choice as one where one side is somehow untainted by America’s unpleasant history.
I take your point about small and big government…but I think that it’s a bit too easy to basically say that anyone who wants a smaller government is a hypocrite. You could say the same thing about big government folks, right? No one wants the government to treat them unjustly; folks who advocate for government intervention may change their mind when government intervention goes against them.”
But that is my point — you’re re-framing my argument in terms of “small” versus “big.” But no one is indiscriminately advocating for “big” government; no one blindly advocates for any government intervention. So, no, you can’t say the same thing about “big government” advocates, because that’s not really a thing in the same way that “small government” advocates are.
I don’t think that’s true, though. Obama and Clinton pretty consciously framed their policies in terms of arguing that government should help people; that government is a force for good, that intervention will help, that we need more police not less. The rhetoric is perhaps less extreme in large part because the right in this country has gone insane, but that doesn’t mean that the debate in question doesn’t exist. There are people who advocate for a larger role for government who don’t really seem to consider fully the ways in which government intervention is often kind of horrible, or paper over such problems by (for example) apologizing for Obama’s surveillance program, or rooting for intervention in Syria. I don’t think calling those folks big government advocates is a misnomer.
I still think context matters an awful lot, there…Clinton and Obama’s arguments have to be seen as largely on the defensive from the pervasive but ill-defined “small government” argument that has gripped this country since the 1960s…which is what Wise seems to be talking about? (I should probably stop bringing it back to his book until I’ve read it, but…) That the general arc of American political and government action has always been towards more government, regardless of who is in charge, but that once those programs started directly targeting racism, the specific slogan of “small government” started being bandied about with much more force. I sincerely doubt that the Clinton/Obama arguments would be phrased in the way that they are if they weren’t trying to counter-balance Ronald Reagan’s “I’m from the government, I’m here to help” line. Now, I see how that can seem as if they are actually in a debate over big vs. small government, but Reagan didn’t actually shrink the government or refrain from imperialist actions. So, no, I don’t see it as an honest debate between small and big government. I see the Clinton/Obama argument as a tactical necessity to shift perception back to the idea that government CAN help, that it isn’t ALWAYS a problem. And I do think that we as a country would have a much better time policing the immoral side of Clinton and Obama’s policies if we were honest about the level of government that both sides actually want, and discussed government action in qualitative, instead of quantitative terms. In a way, you’re right, then, that there are those on the Left who argue in favor of “Big” government, but it’s as a defensive, protective posture — we don’t feel as if we can engage the other side in an honest debate about government action, because they’re always going to point to the government itself as the problem en toto, which is crazy nonsense. I know that I’m always careful with how I criticize the current President, even though I think he deserves a lot of seriously heavy criticism for NSA spying, drone attacks, assassinations…because the conversation is still so weighted towards the “small vs. big” feint that anything I say about Obama becomes evidence in the case for libertarianism, whether I mean it that way or not.
Good lord, that comment was entirely too long…I’m going to retire after that one, didn’t mean to spin this off into such a big thing.
It’s not that long by HU standards!
Again, I think it’s kind of too easy for partisans on the left to blame basically everything on the other guys. I think Reagan was a crook and a fool and a hypocrite…but that doesn’t mean that Obama and Clinton don’t believe their own balderdash. America is a huge imperialist power because left and right in power have largely agreed that the U.S. government should control the world. To suggest that that kind of consistent, decades old, bipartisan worship of big government is just a reaction to intemperate rhetoric on the right strikes me as wishful thinking.
I said I’d retire and I’m not going to really push back, but just wanted to clarify — I think in the mix here I’m misconstruing myself as an apologist for the sins of the American government. What I’m trying to say is not that those sins are the fault of “the other guys,” but that (and for the sake of clarity I’m going to say “right” and “left” here even though that’s too simplistic and not exactly what I mean) the terms of argument put forth by the right are dishonest and nonsensical, and make it more difficult to adequately address the sins of the left, which is something I am in fact very interested in doing. I can see your point that there may be a blind faith in “big government” that I’m downplaying too severely, but I really don’t see it as anywhere near as prominent and consistent a slogan or problematic single political position as “small government.” I think equating them on a single this-or-that teeter totter prevents us from really dealing with the practical problems of each. In my opinion, “small” is merely untenable, and “big” requires constant vigilance and outspoken dissent. Aaaaaand I wrote too much again. Oh, the internet, tempting me into hyperbolic discourse like so many other poor fools…
” really don’t see it as anywhere near as prominent and consistent a slogan or problematic single political position as “small government.”
The thing is, the slogan may be more prevalent, but the practical policies all go the other way. As an actual political program, small government and isolationism have just about no effect. The trend is always bigger, more intrusive government, pretty much.
I certianly think the right’s rhetoric is damaging and awful. But just because they’re paranoid doesn’t mean the government isn’t in fact spying on them.
I guess I would would say on balance I’m in favor of imperial racism, if that’s the binary. All Americans are American and are a part of American history. No argument there. My point was that there is a lot of overlap between civil-libertarian positions and leftist democrat positions, and with your review of the book and the comment thread you seem to be supporting a small-government libertarian worldview that goes beyond these civil libertarian beliefs. So if you are going to argue in favor of a libertarian government, you should argue in favor of a libertarian government, instead of simply reviewing the sins of big American government from Columbus onward while sort of maybe, kind of, suggesting that while small government advocates have a racist history, maybe everyone does, because you need a big government to commit genocide, so really, you can’t have a large welfare state without it being also warmongering, (in America) so maybe libertarians are the way to be.
Wise’s point was that there’s no small amount of sympathy for Ron Paul from white liberals that were proud of his consistent anti-war stance who don’t really care what would happen to America without a welfare state that now cares for non-whites, right? And your response is to say that the Federal government has, in the past especially, has not extended benefits to minorities, and big government has some sins to atone for. Like Columbus and the Arawaks.
So my response to your review is that if you’re going to engage in political discussions you should engage them from a coherent position as opposed to flinging mud at large targets of your choosing. You seem to be saying there should not be a powerful central government because it spends money on war or whatever, not really addressing what would happen to America without a welfare state that cares for non-whites. Which seems to be Wise’s whole point. You want to deny federal largesse to all because of various foreign policy issues. Although of course, attributing that position to you requires reading into your argument a position you never bring yourself to articulate.
Isaac, you seem to be responding mostly to things you’ve decided I must be saying rather than to anything in particular I said.
Wise was saying that people who appreciate Ron Paul’s anti-imperialism are dolts who ignore racism. I was saying that one could actually have affection for Ron Paul, because his racism is really not the only racism on offer.
I don’t want to deny federal largesse to anyone. I don’t think there are very good choices within our political system. I don’t support Ron Paul; I call him a racist repeatedly.
I’m saying that jumping up and down and screaming about what would happen with the elimination of a welfare state doesn’t really address the fact that we’re bombing children, any more than pointing to dead children addresses our racism at home. I’m honestly not sure why this has freaked you out to such an extraordinary degree. But whatever.
Sorry; a little cranky I guess.
It always throws me when I say, “this has problems, and this also has problems,” and then people read it as some sort of line in the sand ideological defense of whatever position it is they happen to disagree with. I’m not sure why that happens; I mean, to me this review is clearly, clearly, quite sympathetic to Wise, and not an attack on him, nor by any means an unqualified defense of Ron Paul, who I say repeatedly is a racist.
Maybe, as you say, not having a coherent answer that fits neatly in our current political system just really throws some folks? I’ll readily admit that I don’t have a super coherent answer for all our ills, nor a one-step solution to resolving the extent to which racism has infected all our political ideologies. If you do, Isaac, I’d be pleased to hear it.
I find it a bit strange to plot a single axis of small-government nativist racists to welfare-imperialism as the only options. Isolationist racists have as little influence as the welfare-minded pacifists it would appear but another deviation from this axis, imperialists that would happily dispense with the welfare system seems to be quite a powerful faction.
So isn’t the issue more that America is imperialist no matter what. It would still be imperialist without a welfare system but if it weren’t imperialist the choice would revert to inclusive welfare versus small government racists.
Can’t those be separate but concurrent developments rather than inextricably linked features of American history. The English managed an empire just fine without a welfare system. Couldn’t the fact that the rise of big government and US imperialism coincides be explained simply by a general 20th century trend towards bigger government everywhere, in rising imperialist powers, old powers still clinging to imperialism, countries that were never imperialist or had to give up imperialism.
Well…it’s possible they could be separated, I guess. You look at Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK, LBJ, Clinton…the rhetoric of imperial expansion and intervention (albeit not always the practice) just seems really connected to leftist faith in govt, in the US.
Though there is a leftist anti-imperialism, of course. pretty much as impotent as the rightist anti-imperialism, unfortunately.
Noah, sorry if I caused any of your crankiness…I don’t think you’re drawing a line in the sand or that you don’t think Ron Paul is a racist. But I do think your last comment exemplifies the problem I’m finding in your argument. I think that the rhetoric and practice of imperialism has much more to do with the faith in American Exceptionalism than in government per se. And again, I think that pinning it on the ideology of “big government” rather than on the other ideologies that informed the actions of that government is fallacious and distracting.
However, all that said, I in noooo way think that you are actually arguing a “small government” position. I just think you’ve allowed them to colonize your argument with their unhelpful framework.
No, no; nobody’s fault for my crankiness. These things just happen sometimes….
Were Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes any less imperialistic than the democratic presidents? Maybe there was a split before WWII but after the US really assumed the great power mantle imperialism became entrenched in the political system I’d argue, no longer a partisan issue.
Eisenhower and Nixon were both pretty far left by our standards. Bush the later actually ran as something of an isolationist; he just lied, basically.
I’d say that there is in fact a broad interventionist centrist consensus, and you’ve got folks on the far right and far left who are more isolationist in various ways. So yes, it’s no longer a partisan issue — but I think one of the ways it ends up not being a partisan issue is that folks like Wise basically argue that partisanship should be organized around other issues (that is, that you’re stupid for voting for Ron Paul as an anti-imperialist measure because you disagree with him on other things — as opposed to entertaining the possibility that you might also disagree with, say, Obama, because you dislike some of his policies that in practice are quite racist.)