Obviously old people are the worst, but I can think of a couple of other structural reasons that might explain the same shift. Over the past thirty or forty years (fifty?), there has been a huge drop in the organization-man model. If you started working for a company or school when you left college and are running it when you are sixty, you might feel more willing (obligated?) to defend it against all accusers than if you were plunked in at the top six months in a lateral move after tanking the shareholder value of American Aerosol Cheese and Hors D'oeuvre. Plus, I think it may be starting to sink in that covering up a sexual crime is going to result in far more damage to the person running the organization than allowing the accusation to be aired.
Anyway, ever since I watched how quickly open racism jumped back into the political discourse, I'm leery of the idea that generational shift is a reliable source of improvement.
Some organizations will have MRA people climbing the ranks.
How much of this current thing is media-driven? Everybody knew (I knew, for Chrissakes) what Bill Cosby and Louis CK were up to long before these became issues of public concern. My guess is that harassment, rape, etc., are covered up until people realize there are a lot of others who are similarly situated who are willing to come forward. There's a kind of collective action problem: The first dozen Cosby accusers aren't enough to prompt action; they just get held up to public ridicule. But the next dozen bring you to a tipping point. You can see at Montgomery Blair, there are several hundred victims and witnesses.
Maybe communications among victims -- via the media, via the Internet -- are better than they used to be.
Old people are the worst, though. The sooner my generation dies off, the better.
(Don't be the change. We'll miss you.)
I went to one of Blair's rival high schools and would expect nothing less of them.
Of course it's media-driven. It took a long time but the media now is willing to talk about harassment and rape, which makes more victims realize it's okay to speak up, which causes more media coverage, etc. The real question is what made the media start paying attention. One word: Trump.
I went to one of Blair's rival high schools and would expect nothing less of them.
So did I! I was confused because this didn't sound like the Montgomery Blair High School that I remembered. It turns out that the science and math magnet program at Blair started the year I graduated from high school. I'm so old!
Also just found out that it's named after a person named Montgomery Blair (the losing lawyer in the Dred Scott case). I had always assumed the Montgomery was referring to the county.
To reflect a new era of new beginnings they will be changing the name to Montgomery Burns High School.
Okay, did I go to the same school as DaveLMA, or peep, or both? I have to say I was relieved, after reading "nationally famous magnet school near DC", to find out that it was one of the *other* ones.
Not that I have any reason to think this couldn't have or didn't happen at mine.
The real question is what made the media start paying attention. One word: Trump.
To which I suppose the answer is: why wasn't that one word "Clarence Thomas"?
11.2: Too many words.
10.1: Walt Whitman.
11: Because in 1990 all the leaders in both parties, as stated in the OP, were older men who even if they were gentlemanly themselves, had lots of friends who enjoyed sexually harassing.
If Chris "Ted Kennedy's partner in crime" Dodd was still in the Senate today he probably wouldn't be in the Senate anymore.
11: For the same reason that Thomas didn't lead to giant protests the day he was sworn in.
14.1 is exactly my thinking. And more broadly, that for Thomas, it wasn't a black box -- the old guys who didn't think it was a big deal did it in public. But for a lot of complaints that get to "Everyone knows! Why aren't there any consequences? Why does he still have a career!" that it's plausible that the decisions on consequences and on what happens to people's careers are generally made quietly by the people in the top levels of organizations, who tend to be old.
And this is a cohort, not an age, argument -- it's just easy to forget how long ago the attitudes of people still in the workforce were formed.
The time passed from Clarence Thomas to Bob Packwood isn't enough for generational replacement. Packwood was stupid enough to keep a diary and let people know about it. I think that shows some evidence that the mechanism wasn't necessarily people in power thinking it wasn't a big deal, but just refusing to believe women without other evidence.
Or refusing to admit they believed women unless forced into it.
But my impression was that there was a huge fuss about sexual harassment at the Thomas hearings, and whatever the Senate thought about it, it certainly made the media sit up and start paying attention to the issue. So how does that sit with 7? Did the media just go to sleep again?
Count me in with the folks who see a Trump backlash as being key. In 2007 (going back to our last Republican president), and especially in 2005 (going back to the Republican Congress) I think the Clarence Thomas nomination goes basically the same as it did in 1991.
It's hard to draw bright-line distinctions. But I think what gets lumped under 'not believing women' usually incorporates a big chunk of not so much disbelieving them about the general outline of what happened, but disbelieving that their interpretation of it as a real problem was reasonable. Like, I would bet that a lot of people who supported Thomas through the Hill hearings both thought that he probably talked about sex some in the office, and thought that Hill was maliciously misrepresenting the interactions as harassment rather than just uninhibited. That gets combined with straightforward disbelief on particular facts, but 'sure, something like that happened, but not in a bad way' seems to me to usually be a big part of it.
Like, the teacher in the post. He wasn't abusing girls secretly, he was hassling them in class -- not acting there had to have meant more thinking it was NBD than really disbelieving that anything happened.
20 It (we) got a shiny new object in the form of a lovable rogue who was governor of Arkansas. Scold could scold but the people who'd pooh-poohed Hill couldn't be as loud as they'd have been if Thomas had withdrawn (rather than, as I believed at the time, committed perjury).
The Thomas hearings were going on while I was in college, and I definitely recall a wave of "Now finally everything is going to change!" sentiment in a lot of media (no hash tags back then, thank goodness). And then it just sort of fizzled.
As noted in 2, the narrative of continuous forward progress may be more comforting than accurate.
22 I think the fairer characterization is 'NBD in the context of his various virtues.'
I do think calling out "Racism!" made some on the left hesitant to pull the trigger. I think the same thing happened with Cosby, and that's why the story didn't really explode until a black comedian called him out.
25: "The Year Of The Woman" in the next round of Senate elections, right?
But back to Thomas: he lied because he had to lie, and people pretended to believe him because they had to pretend to believe him. It was a step in the process, but obviously not the final step.
26: Something about the word 'fairer' in that sentence makes me want to bury my head in my hands and weep softly for about a year.
26 So, maybe not even NBD in context, but 'not sufficiently egregious to toss his ass out' might be more accurate. Babies and bathwater.
30 I don't think people thought is was nothing. I think they thought they were making a trade-off. I can't prove it, but strongly suspect that at any time in the past, a lower caste/value man wouldn't been tossed aside for even the mildest of these things. This is why NBD isn't accurate.
It was wrong to tolerate so much, I'm not disagreeing with that. But the standard wasn't 'girls are fair game' so much as 'if you're a star they let you do it.'
20: Thomas was genuinely a different case than Trump.
1. The accusations weren't as grave against Thomas as against Trump;
2. Thomas never bragged that the allegations were true, and the multiple accusers of Thomas were largely silenced (Thanks, Joe Biden!)
3. Thomas didn't become president of the United States by finishing second to the first woman to win the popular vote; Anita Hill only went through a few months of public abuse for being ignored. Hillary had decades of public abuse culminating in a humiliating defeat engineered not so much by Trump as by the Patriarchy writ large.
4. Thomas was skillful in manipulating the real history of false sexual assault allegations against black men.
He had various virtues but most men only have one.
34 Thomas lied so he could sit in Marshall's chair and undo as much of Marshall's life's work as he could. People who wanted that result pretended to believe him.
25: I remember this basically the opposite way: Now we know what powerful men can do with impunity.
But what made him a star was that he was good at developing and nurturing talent in students. If he was fucking over students generally -- directing them away from prestigious programs, telling them they were categorically unfit to succeed in his field, making them uncomfortable in his presence -- that wouldn't be an irrelevant side issue, that would be the very core of doing his job. If that were his relationship with students, he wouldn't have been a star.
Someone thinking "He's got a problem with girls, but to be fair he's fantastic at developing students, we can't give that up" is someone who thinks that real students are boys, and what happens to girls that might end up in classes with them is a peripheral issue.
It's not that hard to be a great teacher when you get all the best students.
(Thanks, Joe Biden!)
That reminds me of another big shift in the political environment. In 1992 there was a gender gap in voting, but not so large as now. That shift has encouraged elected officials in the Democratic Party to be attentive to women's views to a greater extent than even twenty years ago. It's like the positive flip side of Trump not being willing to denounce openly professing Nazis.
40: "Great" should probably be in quotation marks.
38 Yes, devaluing girls as math students was definitely an element. Probably a lot of dying off is still required to fully urge that one.
43: Perhaps it is atypical here (because of below-market wages?), but it feels like everybody doing what I do is now either a woman or older than dirt or me.
And why "what I do now," I mean that statistics part, not the being an asshole on the internet part.
not the being an asshole on the internet part.
Men still dominate in that field!
In addition to what everyone else has said, there are also some specific-to-high-school issues that come up. I've been watching some related issues unfold at one of my high schools as formerly beloved teachers are discovered to have been "problematic" or worse and have noticed:
1. Until, I think, social media, "sweep things under the rug and solve the immediate problem" was an obviously attractive strategy for high school administrators; the illusion that you could deal with a problem "privately" was great and the risk of being caught up in a viral storm seemed low. And you can easily understand from an administration perspective why it might seem better for everyone involved to deal with something "privately." This seemed "workable" until the modern age of viral information-sharing.
2. The weird power dynamics of high school. High school is this autonomous fiefdom in which the faculty is in charge and plays by its own rules and various purported "traditions are important; it's a weird dynamic, and gets worse as the high school gets fancier.
3. Related to 2, a general tolerance for mild (or worse) faculty hazing of boys is a readily-available tool for male faculty to sexually exploit girls. In the case of my school one of the formerly beloved teachers/coaches was famously known to be "gruff" and "tough" and would say mean shit to boys all the time, until the kid demonstrated enough fortitude to become a favorite. Of course this "toughness" made many people love him. It turned out if you were a girl enduring the "toughness" meant enduring more explicitly sexual comments and that for some girls demonstrating enough fortitude (on a few occasions over a 40 year period) involved him demanding and receiving sex. In the case of this particular guy, I smugly feel vindicated in my belief as a 15-17 year old that the teacher was an arrogant asshole with a cult following, but "arrogant asshole teacher with a cult following" is often indistinguishable from "beloved superstar high-school teacher who changed my life for the better." Sounds like something similar was going on with this math coach.
Vaguely related, but I just got reminded what lovable anti-establishment hero Randle McMurphy, in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", was actually in prison for.
When I've been close to sticky situations in a university setting, it has seemed the overriding priority of those (administrators) making decisions was "how can I minimize what I have to do?" Not catering to the powerful, not devaluing girls, just shoving stuff under the rug or actively suppressing it to avoid discomfort and extra work. So, to "what has changed?" I would guess that metoo has just changed the calculus, changed the perceived cost/benefit of ignoring things. Temporarily. Until activists stop activisting.
"how can I minimize what I have to do?"
I say that to myself every morning when I wake up.
I sort of assumed it's why nobody ever lets me be in charge of anything.
53. 54: I knew we had something more in common than just Columbus and Unfogged.
50: Yeah -- I think that's a real thing about hazing as a way to identify 'toughness', that it is fundamentally unfair. I mean, unfair to girls, generally, but even between two boys, I'd bet that the way to differentiate between boys 'who could take it' and were successful from ones who hated it was going to be largely about who the teacher liked at first sight. The implicit claim that the reaction to hazing tells you something about the kid's character is usually going to be more about laundering the teacher's whimsical likes and dislikes.
Also related to hazing, I've heard that often the older women in an organization are the opposite of helpful in these situations. They survived worse harassment in their day and got to where they are, why can't you?
It's not because they suffered worse harassment, but because they never saw Sex and the City.
57: I am not going to say that that's never a problem -- it's definitely a problem sometimes. I do think there is a strong tendency to look at this sort of thing and try to find the nearest woman to blame, or to generalize that older women are a general problem: once they have any power at all, it's their fault for not having fixed everything. Why didn't Meryl Streep stop Harvey Weinstein?
Why didn't Meryl Streep stop Harvey Weinstein?
Russian trolls.
In the future, we won't have to worry about old people dying off because technology will save us from sexism:
With their ability to provide tactile and verbal feedback, sex robots could serve as top-notch sex-education tools. (Bonus: Unlike a human sex-ed teacher, a robot also won't pass judgment.)
We're already used to using lifelike dolls to teach people important skills. What about Rescue Annie, the CPR doll who has "the most kissed face" in the world? She has taught over 400 million people how to perform this life-saving technique with little downside. And how many students leave their CPR classes thinking that women are just lifeless dolls needing to be saved?
One of the biggest tools that teenagers and adults alike need to be taught is consent. And what better way to teach it than within a simulated sexual situation itself? Instead of learning the fundamental rules of consent with a stranger in inebriated circumstances, where a misunderstanding could lead to arrest, you could learn with a sex doll imbued with artificial intelligence.
The CPR dummy in my high school was kind of horrifyingly grimy and gross.
I clicked on the article linked in 62 because the headline on my Facebook feed was "Why The #Metoo Moment Needs Sex Robots."
I mean what DOESN'T need sex robots.
63 - yes. And now feels grosser knowing that it was the "most kissed face" in the world.
I remember being taught that the first step in CPR was to snap off the removable arms and legs, because they get in the way. This might not have been something to generalize from.
Instead of learning the fundamental rules of consent with a stranger in inebriated circumstances, where a misunderstanding could lead to arrest, you could learn with a sex doll imbued with artificial intelligence.
You should probably still be drunk, state dependent memory and all.
Also, it's good practice for having sex with a limply non-resisting inanimate body. (Too soon?)
Wait, inanimate? What kind of lousy sexbots are we talking about? How are they going to implement an enthusiastic consent protocol?
It's only creepy if they can't figure out how to get the doll to be above room temperature.
The good news is that non-consensual sex is nearly unheard of in the future. The bad news is you need to assume all corpses are consenting in order to get this statistic.
In the future, the most common fetish will be for the uncanny valley.
Advanced directives, Moby. No assumptions required.
I mean, as long as my corpse is heated up and the limbs popped back on afterwards I'd be fine with it.
50.3
It isn't just high school: In the maestro's thrall
Very similar attitudes and tactics as the high school story, though more extreme.
(If it's paywalled for you, it's about James Levine, former music director at the MET.)
We definitely need a new mouseover. It's been too long, and it's too German.
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To British people: I am seeing a crescendo of discontent from British people on social media and in the press about "World Book Day" which appears to be a day when parents are forced to dress their children for school as characters from movies. Just to make it clear, since it has "World" in the name, and it seems like the sort of thing Americans might have come up with: Other countries do not do this! Britain alone is to blame for this specific nightmare of shallow consumerism. You can stop any time!
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In 2007 (going back to our last Republican president), and especially in 2005 (going back to the Republican Congress) I think the Clarence Thomas nomination goes basically the same as it did in 1991.
Sorry if this has been said, but: I think there's a lot to this, but that it's also not quite right. Why not? Women in the Senate.
During the Thomas hearings, there were exactly 2 woman Senators, one of whom was born in '32* and voted Yea. In '05 there were 14, and in '07 16.
It's not so much that none of those women would have voted for a Thomas--many if not all of the Republicans presumably would have--but that the whole tenor of the thing would have been different. Biden** would have been scolded behind closed doors for how he handled things, and when the nomination came to the floor, Def women would have been reading testimony from the women who corroborated Hill's testimony but were never called.
As I say, I don't think the original comment is totally wrong--harassment was clearly not taken as seriously just 10 (or 3) years ago as it is now, but the Senate in '91 was still a relic in terms of sexual politics.
* probably making her younger than the average and median
**you know what I mean
The Saturday Night Live sketch about the Thomas hearings that aired at the time was actually funny. Would that have been true in 2017?
Nobody can stay up late enough to see SNL anyway.
77 - I had never heard of this before your comment, but apparently the official title is actually "World Book and Copyright Day". The best day of the year!!
RH just busted out the booze and party favors at his office. "Who forgot to order the cake?"
"cake" should obviously be "layered meat dish".
"layered meat dish" should be "fleshlight"
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I just saw a captioned photo for "The Darkest Hour", co-staring Kristen Scott Thomas, who I briefly thought was Kristen Stewart, and I boggled.
But then I was curious about relative ages and all that. Turns out that, for once, Hollywood wasn't being ridiculously sexist in the ages of the leads: KST is just 2 years younger than Oldman, where Churchill's actual wife was about 10 years younger. Meanwhile, Oldman was aged up about 6 years for the movie, meaning KST was actually a few years older than the person she betrayed.
I think this proves that sexual harassment is no longer a thing.
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Mr. Walstein - the guy in the OP - was my ninth grade geometry teacher. Huge asshole. HUGE! None of this surprises me, and yet I was not aware of any of it at the time.
The one story I do remember about him, which I heard a few years after, was that he got blackmailed by a hooker, didn't pay, and ended up getting divorced because of it.
That will have to be my two cents for now, though, because I'm about to get on what is likely to be a very barfy airplane ride back up to the Northeast in the middle of a cyclone.
Maryland must pay teachers very well or hookers very little.
We definitely need a new mouseover. It's been too long, and it's too German.
I agree. And, for German, it's far too short.
If the sexbot were equipped with a vagina dentata it might teach some really effective lessons about consent though possibly about anal sex as well.
OT: Wales people murder more entertainingly than.Scottish people.
I choose enthusiastic consent. You have thirty seconds to comply.
87: The president, now there's somebody with money sufficient to pay blackmail to a prostitute.
Somehow blackmailing a president seems more lucrative than blackmailing a teacher.
Let's all list our SAT scores and how many people we've paid for their silence.
Rory and I were discussing basically the same hypothesis put forth in the OP yesterday. She suggested it was unseemly for me to look forward to the imminent die off of a generation. But now that Rory is talking about the possibility of law school in a few years, what choice do I have?
You can't lock her in a tower just because she wants to go to law school.
If she goes to law school, she may wind up with a job that's effectively the equivalent of being locked in a tower.
She could be a small-town lawyer with a store-front office.
Of course, one of the bigger problems with rising inequality in America is that there isn't nearly as much money in taking small town divorce cases.
Most likely a tech company building AI sex robots would use some deeply limited training data, leading to deeply troubling results, and then under criticism claim the sex robots just mirror what people naturally want.
So I stayed up watching a randomly chosen string of episodes of BSG last night, which included the question whether non-consensual sex with a Cylon prisoner could be rape.
103: Deeply troubling results are probably inevitable because sex robots will be designed and built by the sort of people who would decide to design and build sex robots. I'm imagining them as some sort of insane extrapolation of the same people who are currently obsessed with making self-driving cars.
104: Even consenting sex with a prisoner would be problematic.
105: Hadn't we had a front page post regarding that book about the sort of people who design sex machines?
Deluge? I didn't read the whole thing, so I guess I don't know how it ended.
At my high school it was less than 50% girls, and when they first let girls in they were more academically qualified than the boys. I had one Latin teacher who retired around 1990 who assumed that all the girls deserved an A until they proved otherwise, and that the boys deserved a 60 until they proved otherwise.
He was also prone to throwing things - chalk, erasers - but mostly at the boys. I don't remember whether he rammed his cane on the desk or not.
I'm imagining them as some sort of insane extrapolation of the same people who are currently obsessed with making self-driving cars.
Such as a much missed ex-commentator here? I don't think so.
Self driving cars are at least potentially a valuable resource for people with certain disabilities or who are just too damn old, even if the rest of the world wants to carry on driving in the old fashioned way. Sex robots would be toys for millionaires who are too idle to masturbate.
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Very worthwhile article on the "racial liberal consensus", 1965-2016. Building on the theme of Trump as backlash to Obama, assembling more pieces, but also working in how Obama's tenure changed the left.
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Yeah, 115 is really good. I hadn't really thought in terms of a racial liberal consensus, but here it is:
One of the Civil Rights movement's most undisputed successes was in establishing the norm that overt expressions of racial animus were no longer politically or even socially acceptable in the United States. ... At the same time, however, resistance to school busing and the eventual roll-back of affirmative action programs resulted in clear limits on redressing system-level structural exclusions based on what was typically referred to as "the legacy" of racism and slavery.
The piece really captures both the appeal and the limitations of Obama, and places Coates in a context I hadn't fully grasped:
The central thrust of Coates's writings is that the reconciliation promised by the racial liberal consensus has turned out to be a sham.
115 is a good article, but I feel the need to quibble (in part because I just read this article yesterday -- using Ta-Nehisi Coates as a lens to talk about US poltics. I think it's a good article but I also think it's not particularly sensitive to the details. So while the article in 115 is better I still have some quibbles).
For example this is both correct and was obvious from the moment Obama took office -- it isn't a surprising conclusion.
These tensions gave the lie to the narrative that Obama's election was the culmination of the long march toward, if not equality, then at least racial reconciliation. On the one hand, his very presence in office, his blackness in the whitest of houses, was a daily affront to those who still prefer to see the United States as a white man's country. On the other hand, Obama's presence in the Oval Office in itself did little to nothing to end the stark disparities in life outcomes facing African-Americans.
Of course Obama's election didn't "end the stark disparities in life" but it was still a meaningful sign of progress. I think we can look at the rise of Trump and see that the progress is more fragile than it seemed at the time, but that doesn't mean that there hasn't been any progress.
[Compare Pankaj Mishra's noting with slight suspicion than, "Coates proprietorially notes the ethnic, religious and racial variety of Obama's staff. Everyone seems overwhelmed by a 'feeling', that 'this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing.'" One can understand why Coates would take pleasure in that feeling, without thinking it represents a sea-change in American politics]
So, similarly, this
One of the Civil Rights movement's most undisputed successes was in establishing the norm that overt expressions of racial animus were no longer politically or even socially acceptable in the United States. Despite grumbles about political correctness, new forms of racial etiquette and sensitivity training proliferated across the American educational and corporate landscape. At the same time, however, resistance to school busing and the eventual roll-back of affirmative action programs resulted in clear limits on redressing system-level structural exclusions based on what was typically referred to as "the legacy" of racism and slavery.
Seems like it represents real progress. It also reflects generations of broken promises and failures, but I presume that when he says, "Nor is it at all clear that we should wish for a return to the racial liberal consensus." that doesn't imply that he hopes that the diversity and sensitivity training will stop, and the attempts at racial etiquette will be abandoned. The goal is to retain those while also making a (renewed) attempt to alter the existing power structures.
One other thought that occurs to me, seeing the comment about "the Compromise of 1977" is that there's been a shift in demographics since that point. in 1980 non-hispanic whites made up 80% of the population and African-Americans were just under 60% of the non-white population. In 2017 non-hispanic whites were just over 60% of the population (61.3%), and African-Americans represented 34% of the non-white population. That has to change racial politics. I don't claim any expertise about what that change means but it seems important.
That was an interesting article. But I think "worthwhile" is supposed to be used only for links that bore you to tears.
I feel like the article makes some decent points but also deeply overstates the degree of consensus on these issues before 2008-2016 and is thus just not very good as history. The "consensus" trope is a rhetorical trick designed to make the present look more radically different than it is. The broader point that racial politics, along with politics more generally, are increasingly polarized on party lines in the US is surely true, but most of that is explicable by (a) blacks and the rainbow coalition becoming the dominant (and, unlike any time before 2008, nationally electorally viable) part of the Democratic Party, (b) the Republican Party increasingly becoming an identity-politics party for older and rural whites, and (c) most importantly, both parties becoming actual ideological parties with sharp and completely unmistakable positions.
which you can kind of track forward the August 3, 1980 rejection, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, of the Compromise of 1977.
Honestly, the line from Gil Scott-Heron's B-Movie to the Trump Counter-Revolution just isn't that hard to see.
The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can - even if it's only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse - or the man who always came to save America at the last moment - someone always came to save America at the last moment - especially in "B" movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at -like a "B" movie.
Except this time, it's not even a B movie.
Except this time, it's not even a B movie.
No, this time its a reality TV show.
the Republican Party increasingly becoming an identity-politics party for older and rural whites
I think that's just re-stating the thesis of 115.
I mean, in theory you could do that without overt racism. It's just that it works so much better after adding the overt racism.
My working theory is that they like it better with overt racism because if a party or candidate gets racist enough, it can't turn to the center to get more votes after the win the primary or get in office.
The last time I came across the author of 115 he was trolling historians to the left of him, but not even that far left as left goes, on the subject of identity politics on a blog I used to read more often. It turned out he had real points he wanted to argue, but he only laid them out after provoking a bunch of people to anger and then yelling, "your anger only proves my point! You can't resist the red flag of identity politics, look at how smart I am to have confirmed my views, which I will now reveal."
I don't think you can call into existence a "racial liberal consensus" by repeating that phrase, but he sure seems to think so.
I think the epitaph on the Trump years, printed across a picture of his angry-man-taking-a-big-shit expression has to be "We're an empire now: we create our own reality"
Too literary. The epitaph for the Trump years will be "No, fuck YOU."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/west-virginia-labor-history-teachers-strike
128. I don't think this was the intent of the 115 link, but when I read "racial liberal consensus" it parses as "the consensus of liberals on the subject of race." In that case 115 is accurate. Liberals of both major parties pretty much signed on to it. It took a while but both major parties are now splitting in large part because big chunks of their membership don't agree with that consensus, attacking it from the left and the right.
There were always big chunks of the membership that didn't agree. The difference I see now is that the leaders of the Republican Party are seeking the votes of those who don't agree (from the right) and doing it directly (not dog whistling).
Of course Obama's election didn't "end the stark disparities in life" but it was still a meaningful sign of progress.
I think the way you pulled that quote out of context -- even after quoting it correctly in context, is revealing.
You're right that everyone knew that Obama wasn't going to "end the stark disparities in life." But did we really think he would do "little or nothing" to that end? Speaking only for myself, I was optimistic. And even you -- even now -- refer to his election as a "meaningful sign of progress."
The contribution of Gilman's essay, I thought, was to describe the terms under which that progress was achieved -- what it meant and what it didn't mean.
The "consensus" trope is a rhetorical trick designed to make the present look more radically different than it is.
It's always important, when talking about the discontinuity that Trump represents, to not underestimate the degree to which he is merely an extension of Republican orthodoxy.
I'm going to argue, though, that Trump really does represent a sharp break from, say, George W. Bush on matters of race. I liked the essay because it gave a name and a description to the thing that GWB had in common with Barack Obama, but that neither has in common with Trump.
128: I had a similar feeling about that article. I really wished the author had put the last paragraph at the top.
Endorsing 135.last.
I think people here are too eager to point out that the liberal racial consensus wasn't literally, 100% universal, which, duh.
But IMO the Lott story really is significant. I was reminded of it recently, and I honestly was taken aback, because it seemed unreal, even though I was a dedicated participant (commenter, second class) in precisely the blogs that wouldn't drop the matter. Not only would the Lott quote be no more than a 2-3 day story in the Trump Era, it wouldn't have been a big deal, let alone career-threatening. in 2015.
And the difference is in what GOP leaders are willing to put up with/think they can confront. No Republicans were eager to let liberals have Lott's scalp, but they also didn't feel they could go on CNN or NBC and defend the content of his comments. That absolutely changed post-W. And that's a huge part of what led to Trump.
The comment up above about Philadelphia 1980 is spot on--the trend line towards Trump started a long time ago--but its ahistorical to say that the equivalent of Trumpism was just a moment away at all times between 1980 and 2008. Pat Buchanan's notorious 1992 convention speech is an example: he didn't go nearly as far as Trump, yet establishment Republicans--not liberal ones, just establishment ones--were horrified and pushed back, even as the delegates on the floor had been thrilled (this smirking fratboy I knew from some little college in the South was tickled pink over it).
It was an elite consensus. The premise was that everyone observing the niceties would lead, eventually, to everyone being a little nicer. But white supremacy is a nastier beast than your great aunt whose no one cares for--you can't just smile and paper over differences.
Well, now the beast is out in the open, and the only thing to do is to defeat it or crown it.