Post-Political Politics, #slatepitch Edition

Tanner Colby has a strange Slate piece arguing that affirmative action doesn’t work. In fairness, he’s not exactly saying that it doesn’t work — “millions of people do well under affirmative action” — but rather that it’s not “an answer to economic discrimination and structural inequality.” This qualification has the advantage of being more accurate, but the disadvantage of countering an argument that for all intents and purposes nobody has ever made. Who thinks that affirmative action was a policy that could completely eliminate structural racial and economical inequalities, as opposed to something that could marginally alleviate them?

Inevitably, this leads to the most essential aspect of any centrist contrarian policy argument, the ol’ “proposed grand bargain that can’t be enforced with other parties that don’t exist”:

Right now, the Democratic party and the racial justice movement are sitting on a junk heap of racial preference programs that aren’t doing anyone much good, and they lack the substantive programs they need: a true, New Deal–style reformation that repairs the infrastructure of our cities, ends mass incarceration, provides access to early education and paid family leave and job training and other programs that put all of black America on more solid footing. Since Republicans seem to want affirmative action gone so badly, if it were me, I’d be out horse trading. Just as the Obama administration is letting Washington and Colorado opt out of federal marijuana prohibition, let state and local governments opt out of affirmative action mandates, but only in exchange for opting in on universal pre-K and other things that working families actually need.

Yes, what a great idea! While we’re at it, in exchange for eliminating affirmative action, we should also get a repeal of the Hyde Amendment, single payer, and a median Supreme Court justice who can’t be to the right of Pam Karlan.*

To state the obvious, the conservatives who want affirmative action gone so badly they’d embark on a massive jobs and education program in exchange for getting rid of it don’t exist. Any state government that would enact any of these policies could enact them while maintaining affirmative action. Considering liberal policies that might be more effective on net than affirmative action is an interesting parlor game, but in the context of American politics it’s no more than that. In the context of federal policy, the argument is as useless as the “we should oppose the ACA because policy x that has no chance of being enacted by the United States Congress is better” silliness. What you will actually get in exchange for eliminating affirmative action is “nothing.” Universal pre-K and jobs programs are good idea on their own merits, and they should be defended as such. But using them to attack affirmative action is silly and counterproductive. These kinds of hypothetical grand bargains aren’t how politics actually works.

*And as Sly notes in comments, arguing that we need more “New Deal style” economic programs to combat racial inequality represents a rather remarkable ignorance of history, which helps to make it clear why he thinks massively difficult policy changes can be enacted as a matter of simple “horse trading.”

A painful case

Although Clarence Thomas is still only 65 — i.e., practically a youngster by the late Politburo-style demographics of the contemporary Supreme Court — he seems to be moving into the Abe Simpson period of what is likely to be (check out these SSA demographic tables) a 40-plus year tenure on the SCOTUS.

Yesterday he regaled an audience at a college in Florida with these sociological observations:

“My sadness is that we are probably today more race and difference-conscious than I was in the 1960s when I went to school. To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up,” Thomas said during a chapel service hosted by the nondenominational Christian university. “Now, name a day it doesn’t come up. Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out.

“That’s a part of the deal,” he added.

Apparently it wasn’t until Thomas left his old Savannah home that he encountered real racism, at the hands of Northern liberal elites:

“The worst I have been treated was by northern liberal elites. The absolute worst I have ever been treated,” Thomas said. “The worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia.”

This is just sad. As Jon Chait points out:

Maybe the reason race came up so rarely was not that the racial situation was better in 1960s Georgia. Maybe the reason race came up rarely is that the racial situation in 1960s Georgia was extremely terrible.

For instance, for the first 14 years of Thomas’s life, Georgia had zero African-Americans in its state legislature. Majority-black Terrell had a total of five registered black voters — possibly because African-Americans were so satisfied with their treatment that they didn’t see any reason to vote, or possibly because civil-rights activists in Georgia tended to get assassinated.

I wish I could say it’s incomprehensible to me that an African American man who grew up in deep south in the 1950s and 1960s (Thomas was 16 when the Civil Rights Act was enacted) could talk about racism in this country as if it were primarily a matter of “slights” and “hurt feelings.” But unfortunately it’s all too comprehensible, in a world in which old men become parodies of the young men they once were, and in which we are taught from the earliest age to lick the hand that feeds us.

Note too the bottomless anti-intellectualism of this sort of social analysis by autobiographical anecdote. Let’s assume that Thomas actually did encounter more racism at Yale Law School, at the EEOC, before the Senate Judiciary Committee etc., than he did in Jim Crow Georgia. What relevance would this purported fact have to a discussion of the changing role of race in American life? Clarence Thomas has reached a point where he is making Ronald Reagan sound like Malcolm X. This sounds like hyperbole, but compare:

When I was your age, believe it or not, none of us knew that we even had a racial problem. When I graduated from college and became a radio sport announcer, broadcasting major league baseball, I didn’t have a Hank Aaron or a Willie Mays to talk about. The Spaulding Guide said baseball was a game for Caucasian gentlemen. Some of us then began editorializing and campaigning against this. Gradually we campaigned against all those other areas where the constitutional rights of a large segment of our citizenry were being denied. We have not finished the job. We still have a long way to go, but we have made more progress in a few years than we have made in more than a century.

Ronald Reagan, speech to the first Conservative Political Action Conference, January 25, 1974.

Gender Equality in Humor

I was watching a show a few months ago featuring an author who wrote a book about talking to boys. In her book she asked boys, essentially, “What’s important about being a boy?” Number 4 on the list–if I’m remembering correctly–was “being funny.” This author also wrote a book about talking to girls. I’d bet folding money “being funny” wasn’t number 4 on the girls’ list. In fact, I’d be surprised if it made the list at all.

I’ve gotten into flame wars before about the subject of women and humor. If you’d like me to die of a rage stroke please tell me that men are inherently funnier than women. No, wait, don’t do that: I have lots more mediocre jokes to tell on a somewhat well-known blog known primarily for covering politics and baseball.

Anyway, yada yada yada men and women are both funny. And I think they’re equally funny. But there’s probably never going to be the same quantity of funny women as there are men until we start valuing and encouraging funniness in women. Basically, we need to get “being funny” on our lists.

It’s something we don’t do now. We tell women they aren’t funny. We also tell them, “Hey, funny schmunny, lemme get a look at that AZZ.” So, girls tend not to grow up thinking “I want to make people laugh.” They grow up thinking “I want to attract people.” And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting be attractive. But I do think women are going to lag behind–ever so slightly–in the game of humor if they don’t start thinking about it almost as a competitive sport.

There’s also the matter of establishing yourself in the comedy world–it can be grueling. It’s not conducive to keeping marriages afloat and raising children. So for women (and women only, naturally), it often comes down to choosing between a career in comedy or having any sort of personal life. I watched a documentary about women in comedy and many of the comediennes said even dating was difficult. So until we have more egalitarian arrangements in our marriages and home lives, women will not have the voice in comedy that men have.

One thing I love about the internet is that so far as humor goes, it’s a decent equalizer. Yes, women are going to be harassed for being snarky and funny, but the bottom line is is that everyone can blog. So it’s heartening to me that some of the funniest voices on the internet are women’s. Perhaps being funny on the internet will translate to being funny everywhere someday.

Plus, Al Gore Is Jowly!

Yes, wingnuts are still making the “how can there be global warming if there’s snow today nyuk nyuk nyuk” arguments:

If you needed proof that God has a wicked sense of humor, look no further than the timing for the next big global warming hearing from Senate Democrats. The hearing, entitled “Extreme Weather Events: The Costs Of Not Being Prepared,” is scheduled to take place at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, February 12.

Yes, yes She does. Anyway, I would have to agree that all of the zero people arguing that snow will cease to exist have been proven wrong.

The End of the Extortion

Sargent’s analysis is exactly right:

So House Republican leaders are bowing to the inevitable and are going to allow a vote on a clean debt limit hike. In a statement moments ago, Nancy Pelosi said she’d provide Democratic votes to help it pass, which seems very likely.

The crucial point about this outcome, should it happen, is that it will be the direct result of the decision by Dems — in the last two debt limit fights — to refuse to negotiate with Republicans. That was a major course correction on Obama’s part in which he learned in office from failure. After getting badly burned in the 2011 debt limit showdown — which left us saddled with the austerity that continues to hold back the recovery — Obama recognized what many of his supporters were pleading with him for years to recognize: There was no way to enter into a conventional negotiation with House Republicans.

Obama played the last two rounds perfectly, but any praise has to be substantially mitigated by the fact that his bad choices in 2011 played a large role in creating the problem.

Are You Ready For Some Curling?

A handy guide to the second-greatest sport at the winter Olympics.

If Your Team Isn’t “Ready” For Michael Sam, Resign

I have a piece noting that the “it’s not that I’m a bigot, but I have to respect the desires of other bigots” argument has 1)always been used to justify discrimination and 2)is a really horrible argument:

Anyone familiar with the breaking of the color line in baseball, for example, will know these feeble tautologies and non-sequiturs. Even in a context in which substantial parts of the country were formally segregated, baseball’s elites would rarely defend the exclusion of African-Americans explicitly. The racist commisioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis farcically maintained that there was no policy of discrimination despite decades of lily-white rosters, and the owners followed his lead. As Jules Tygiel explained in his classic Baseball’s Great Experiment, “[u]nable to acknowledge discrimination, owners developed a series of rationales defending the necessity of separate competition. Wherever possible, they attempted to shift responsibility to other parties or to blame circumstances beyond their control.” Tygeil’s description applies precisely to the justifications for discrimination offered by NFL decisionmakers.

As Deadspin’s Drew Magary argues, the assertion that Sam is too much of a “distraction” to justify a roster spot is particularly silly. NFL games are not played in private, and extensive media coverage is something teams have to deal with and in some cases will welcome. You create a greater media “distraction” by drafting Andrew Luck rather than Brandon Weeden, and the Super Bowl champion Seahawks will face considerably more “distraction” from the media than the Jacksonville Jaguars will. Good organizations can deal with this if not use it to their advantage. The Brooklyn Dodgers were so distracted by Jackie Robinson’s presence that they won six National League pennants in his decade with the team, including in his rookie year. (Robinson’s 1953 Dodgers outscored the next best offensive team in the league by nearly 200 runs. But if not for the distraction created by his presence they could have been really good!) The Cleveland Indians, who broke the American League’s color line, were so distracted they won the World Series in Larry Doby’s first full year with the team and would go on to set the American League record for wins in a season with the first African-American player in the league still patrolling the outfield. If breaking barriers of prejudice is devastating to an organization’s chances of winning, history keeps it well hidden.

But even if we assumed for the sake of argument that Sam would be a “distraction” and risk team discord, it’s a terrible argument. It’s an assumption that makes all discrimination self-justifying.

Read the whole etc.