What do Liberals think?

As is often the case. I was "confronted" over on Facebook today by a cut and pasted quote from a long time conservative friend that, in a nut shell, could be titled "liberals hate me and want me to be not myself - and why I keep throwing them the middle finger." I pointed out to said friend that plenty of people see no problem telling me as a liberal how to be. His uncaring response was to tell me to write out how I saw things.

So I have. What follows is my response to the points in his post.

Before I go into all your individual points, I want to start by pointing out that cutting and pasting this in what I assume was its original form means you did what you often accuse liberals of doing - painting with a broad brush that's not attached to reality as you know it. You seem to think if you do the same thing you accuse us of doing that's ok, but if we try to do so we are wrong and deserving of your derision. If you want people to look at you differently, you have to do something differently. But here goes.

• I used to think I was pretty much just a regular person, until it was pointed out that I was born white into a working, two-parent household which now, whether I like it or not, makes me privileged, racist & responsible for slavery.
• I was born white, I grew up in a two parent working household too. It does make both of us privileged, and while neither of us is responsible for slavery we ARE responsible for righting the lingering wrongs from that Great Sin because we are white, male and privileged. And we are racist to the extent that we ignore that privilege and the system that underpins and supports it.

• By today's standards I am a fiscal & moral conservative, which makes me a fascist because I plan, budget & support myself.
• No it doesn't. Like me (yes I plan budget and support myself too) that makes you a responsible adult. But fiscal and moral conservatives aren't just about personal decisions - those are labels about economic and political actions and actors writ large. And many of the decisions made by politicians, business owners and ordinary people under those labels do indeed support facisim as it is expressed in the US. Indeed, the fact that moral conservatives have no problem passing legislation telling Americans what they can do in their bedrooms, where they can go to the bathroom and who they can avoid serving in their businesses is certainly about controlling society. Fiscal conservationism seems to express itself politically in wanting someone else to pay for the things you want government to do for you, since adequate taxation is anathema, but ballooning deficits is not.

• I went to school & always held a job. But I now find out that I didn’t earn it myself because I was somehow advantaged, because others that didn't follow the same path say so...
• Great. Congratulations. You were advantaged however in that your skin color didn't prevent you from getting a job, or a promotion or an education. Don't believe me?
• White men with a criminal record are more likely to get an interview than Black men with no criminal record. (https://www.naacp.org/fairchancehiring/)
• African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and they earn nearly 25 percent less when they are employed. (https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html)
• Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. This would suggest either employer prejudice or employer perception that race signals lower productivity.

• I believe in freedom of religion, which depending upon which religion you believe in, makes me your friend or your foe, because apparently I'm supposed to believe whatever you do....
• No one asks you to give up your faith. No one asks you to convert to another faith. But both liberals and the U.S. Constitution say quite clearly that your faith is no better - and should receive no special government protection - then any other. Oh, and there's no war on Christians in the US. If there were I'd be on the front lines - defending all religions including the Presbyterian Protestant tradition I grew up and was baptized in.

• I believe in the 2nd Amendment, which makes me a de facto member of a vast gun lobby.
• Well I guess that would make me a gun lobbyist too. But we both know that's not the case, so . . . its your resistance to dealing with gun access leading to gun violence and gun suicide in the vague name of liberty that is the problem. When the President - last week - said he would send the regular Army into America's streets to quell protesters if governors and mayors weren't tough enough by his standards, the same people who only a month before carried automatic rifles into the Michigan legislature to protest stay at home orders were SILENT. After 8 years under President Obama of railing that a black liberal president was going to come take our guns. Want to persuade me you care about these things - what did you do when a legal concealed carry permit holder was shot and killed in his car by police after telling them he was reaching for his CCW permit? What did you do when a 12 year old kid was killed within 1.2 seconds of police contacting him because he was in a public park with a toy gun? And were you upset when you learned the NRA used to be in favor of strict gun control - until the Black Panthers began carrying weapons in US cities to protect themselves from police brutality? 80% of Americans claim to support universal background checks and closing the gun show loophole, so how about working with us on this?

• I doubt almost everything the "main stream" media tells me, because I don't know who's lying to me today, which makes me a right-wing conspiracy nut.
• I'm a scientist, so doubt is my profession. But the "mainstream media" actually reports a lot of stuff factually and always has. You have been conditioned to doubt them by other media who make money off keeping you uninformed. Otherwise why would the President's reelection campaign send CNN a letter telling them to retract a poll the President doesn't like when even Fox has put up polls he doesn't like? What makes you look like a right wing conspiracy nut is trafficking in and not pushing back publicly on right wing conspiracies. Like a 75 year old long time peace activist who was handing a police officer back a lost helmet was then shoved to the ground so hard he bled out of his ears because he was somehow scanning police radios. Or the NRA fueled gun seizure rumors I noted above. Or Pizza Gate. This stuff is clearly made up - even my kids can see through it. Why can't you?

• I am proud of my heritage and our inclusive American culture, making me a xenophobe.
• Our culture isn't inclusive. See my job stats above. Or consider that George Floyd died after being arrested for committing a property crime - allegedly passing a fake $20 that in all likelihood he didn't know was fake. Or Breanna Taylor - killed in her own home by plainclothes cops executing a warrant to arrest a person who hadn't been seen (much less lived) at her home in months and who police already had in custody. Find me stories like that of white men and white women. Or U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R -SC) who had to show ID to the U.S. Capitol Police to prove he was a sitting US Senator. Or read all the stories about people of color being told they have to cut their hair to wrestle or graduate highschool. And what about how you treat and talk about transgender people? Even IF the US was inclusive, the label of xenophobe comes because you would rather attack people coming here from south america and africa fleeing war and gang terrorism seeking a better life for themselves then welcome them and help them become Americans.

• I believe in hard work and fair compensation, which today makes me an anti-socialist.
• Socialism has nothing to do with hard work and fair compensation. White women still make 80% of what a man makes in the same job. Black women make 65% of what a white man earns. Black Men earn 87% of what a white man earns for the same job. Compensation is not yet fair, and to the extent that you oppose changing that or support systems that perpetuate that - yeah you are part of the problem.

• I believe our system guarantees freedom of effort – not freedom of outcome, which makes me a borderline sociopath.
• By now it should be clear that effort only gets you so far. Your rabid resistance to looking these facts in the face and then advocating for change is indeed beyond frustrating. Too many people work all their lives and never get ahead simply because of the color of their skin or their gender.

• I believe in the defense and protection of America for and by all citizens, now making me a militant.
• No liberal suggests we shouldn't defend the nation. But we object strenuously to the idea that decade plus year long wars should be fought in our name for questionable reasons in places where there is no existential threat to the US. Especially when taxes are not raised to pay for those wars, and other government services that do take care of Americans are curtailed at the same time.

• I am proud of our American flag, what it stands for and the many who died to let it fly, and I stand and salute during our National Anthem, so I must be an uncaring, unsympathetic racist.
• You APPEAR to be an uncaring unsympathetic racist because rather then support the rights of black Americans to kneel in protest of things being done to them in your communities under color of that flag, you insist they are unpatriotic or unamerican. You keep this up even when veterans of all races and background tell you over and over that they didn't serve so you could denigrate your fellow Americans. If that weren't enough you don't push back when my patriotism is questioned in your space - even though I have dedicated my career to public service and public science. My oath to protect the Constitution is the same one spoken by every American soldier, sailor, airman and marine (and every federal bureaucrat up to the Vice President). But to too many of your other friends my liberal view make me a mentally unfit traitor who hates his own race. And you NEVER tell them to knock it off.

• All this happened in the last 15 to 20 years, when I was raising my kids to be good responsible people, and must not have been paying attention, to the invading hordes of self righteous good-doer's!

Self righteous people are all around and on all sides. The ones still calling liberals mentally diseased are definitely self righteous. The ones saying that they must arm themselves to the teeth to "water the tree of liberty" by preventing a tyrannical government who choose to remain silent when government commits actual tyranny are definitely righteous do gooders.

Every day you make a choice in what you say, what you support, and what you remain silent on. If you don't want liberals to roll their eyes, wring their hands, or see you as the opposition then don't give us reason to. Treat us with the dignity and respect you claim we don't give you. And recognize and affirm that differences in opinion about how to achieve a more inclusive, successful America aren't reason to knock anyone.

Now What - A mediation on the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

My head hurts.  Not because the confirmation hearings for Mr. Kavanaugh produced dialogue about gender equality or sexual assault that's over due.  Not because many women are - perhaps for the first time - willing to take on the patriarchy.  And not because Mitch McConnell proved again that he doesn't really care about anything other then power.

No, it hurts because so many of my fellow Americans have reduced all this a simple statement:

We Won!
or to another simple statement:

Suck it Libtards!
No matter the evidence that Mr. Kavanaugh is not fit to sit on the Supreme Court - and there were questions about him perjuring himself before the Blasey-Ford hearing - no matter that he is a partisan jurist who will be an "activist judge;' and leaving aside the fact that going into the second hearing the Senate Judiciary Committee was actually aware of 7 allegations against him (making it a He Said They Said no a He Said She Said) as it was billed; and never mind Mr. McConnell's disastrous silencing of Judge Merrick Garland - what the folks on the right love above all else is stick it to the left.

They don't care that their own voting rights might eventually curtailed - as long as the Left looses. They don't care that their healthcare costs will go back up - as long as the Leftlooses.  They don't care about a Trillion dollar deficit - as long as the Left looses.  They don't care about the end of medically safe abortions for women of lower economic means - as long as the Left looses. They don't care about clean air or clean water - as long as the Left looses.

And they certainly don't care about adhering to teachings of the Christ they all claim for themselves - as long as the Left looses.

How can the State get it right, when Congress gets it so wrong?

I'm no fan of single party control of the three branches of government.  I have always been a fan of cross-aisle compromise.  so it was neat to see today that the Mississippi State Senate – led by many Republican senators – voted unanimously on Senate Bill 2634, which creates a special trust fund for the total of $750 million Mississippi will receive over the next 15 years for economic damages from the Deepwater Horizon disaster than spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. That trust fund will put the money back into the coast where the damage occurred, and where those funds rightfully belong.  They could have snarfed the funds up for general state use, but wisely decided not to.

At the same time, Congressman Steve Pallazzo - whose District covers the Gulf coast - is  co-sponsoring H.R.861 - to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency. Those $750 Million would not have come to Mississippi to make right this terrible wrong without the yeoman work of the federal employees of the EPA, NOAA, and the Coast Guard.  Terminating the very agency that helped secure this settlement, that helped make Mississippi whole again, is immoral because it creates a real danger that when the next disaster strikes, Mississippians will be unprotected and left to fend for themselves.  BP did not pay up out of the goodness of its collective heart – it paid because the EPA worked tirelessly to make sure that the company was held accountable for its wrong.

You really have to wonder who the guy is actually representing, given his state colleagues willingness to do the right thing with the hard work of the very agency he wants to terminate.

George Will misread's the source of Republican's Immigration Quagmire

Two quotes from Yogi Berra seem appropriate looking over the field of Republican Presidential candidates – and particularly their tortured responses to America’s desire for leadership on immigration. 

“You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there.”

Today’s column on immigration (and particularly the xenophobic approach of Donald Trump to the issue) by George Will hints at the disconnect between the Tea Party “base” that allegedly captures the Republican Primary vote, and the reality of America’s history and modern economy.  In a nut shell, Mr. Will reports on, but doesn’t really analyze, the disconnect between the vast majority of Americans who favor a path to legal status for America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, and Mr. Trump’s call for mass deportations and a border wall that keep the “bad” immigrants out while allowing the future return of the “good” immigrants – a deportation and return that will require (in Mr. Will’s estimation) a significant growth in the size of government, since immigration and border control are a governmental function that cannot (yet anyway) be outsourced to a private entity.  Mr. Will casts Mr. Trump’s immigration plan as a mysterious assault on the Small Government Principles the Republican Party allegedly stands for, and manages to include the supposed failures of the “government” to “run” Amtrak as but one example of why bureaucracy will fail to do what Trump suggests.

For starters, Mr. Will grossly misleads readers on why Amtrak has problems.  Created in 1970 to answer the abandonment of passenger service by private railroads, AMTRAK is not a government agency like the FBI or USDA – rather is a Congressional Chartered semi-private corporation providing a public service to Americans.  Further,  Amtrak’s budget is approved every year by a Congress that insists it make a profit (competing against airlines and personal automobiles), while starving it of operating capitol, failing to invest in highspeed rail, and (until the late 1990’s) preventing Amtrak from advertising in the same way as airlines or even Greyhound.  So Mr. Will’s operational analogy is failed on its face, a fact the WaPo would do well to correct publicly.

All that, however, pales in comparison to Mr. Will’s most notable and most enduring failure as a pundit – his unwillingness to call out Republican’s for the bed which they have created for themselves.  After decades of demonizing minorities to gain electoral advantages (including Blacks, Asians, Muslim Arabs, and now Latinos); after claiming to want to reduce the reach of government while bailing out Too Big TO Fail banks for their misdeeds in the Great Recession, and after taking America into a decade long war based on purposely falsified intelligence (a war used to create and enhance fear and mistrust of “the other”) – What exactly does Mr. Will think the Republican base would accept as immigration policy?  Republicans have fought tooth and nail (added and abetted by a spineless Democratic Party since late 2001) to create a xenophobic surveillance state where needs of corporations outweigh the needs and freedoms of average citizens.  Those illegal immigrant – who FWIW pick our fruits and vegetables, clean our offices, build our homes, and care for many of our children – can no more be successfully turned away from our borders then can the lily white poor who became Tea Party supporters because they wanted the same bailout the banks and stock brokers and hedge fund managers got.

In his closing, Mr. Will notes that mis-handled immigration policy –in a nation built on and proud of its immigrant heritage – has cost the republican Party national elections before.  As Yogi also says:

It's like deja-vu, all over again.

"We have come to our Nation's Capitol to cash a check:" How Dr. King's legacy is being destroyed by income inequality and Citizen's United

For someone who spends time thinking and writing about politics and policy, the juxtaposition of the holiday celebrating the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the State of the Union address by the Nation’s first African American President, and the fifth anniversary of the Citizen’s United ruling can’t be ignored.   What makes it all the worse, however, is that the President tonight should – if he wants to keep Dr. King’s legacy alive – make another round of proposals that require starting with rolling back Citizens United.

Unfortunately, This MLK Day finds us in a more divided, more racially, more economically unequal society.  Like it or not, the SCOUTS prediction that their decision in Citizen’s United would decrease campaign corruption – because unlimited funds for “speech” by corporations and other groups would “allow” more people to know who gave what to whom – the reality is that BOTH parties are now both heavily dark money funded, and funded in such significant amounts by super PACs that the political speech of ordinary people is effectively drowned out. In a day and age where it takes $1 Billion or more just to get to the White House, no one can realistically say that any person (except a billionaire or two) has as much political speech as a corporation or Super PAC.  This is critically important, because in the wake of the SCOTUS gutting of the Civil Rights Act, all an individual has left is their speech (since in many cases they have defacto lost their vote).

In turn, that court-created inequality in political speech of necessity creates economic inequality where there was none, and enlarges it where it already exists.  Wages after the Great Recession are stagnant at best, and the reality is that while unemployment keeps dropping, the two biggest forces driving it are people taking lower wage jobs (and often at less than full employment) and people simply exiting the workforce all together.  These things, not coincidentally, have driven corporate profits up to the highest levels in decades.  Sadly, the income inequality that this created is now coming back to haunt those corporations, as lower gas prices give underpaid workers some economic breathing room to clear up debts and begin saving again.  Consumers can also spend again (though it seems they aren’t – waiting further price drops), but many more of them may well lose their jobs in the formerly growing energy sector if prices continue to stay low.  In addition, the financial sector that is now the “bedrock” of our economy is taking stock hits to energy sector stocks, which means that Wall Street will likely start advocating for government interference in the market to boost oil prices. After all, you can’t invest tens of millions of dollars on a Presidential candidate, or tens of thousands on a Senator if they don’t help you stay afloat, can you?

All of this would look and sound eerily familiar to Dr. King, who died in 1968 preparing his Campaign for the Poor as the next chapter of his Civil Rights Movement work.

Then, as now, most of the poor of working age had jobs, but, as King puts it: “they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation.” In 1968, 25 million people — nearly 13 percent of the population — were living below the poverty level, according to the Census Bureau. (In 2013, 45.3 million people — 14.5 percent were below the poverty level.)

Dr. King understood, as do a few folks today, that access to the voting booth, or forced desegregation, would do little to ease the plight of racial minorities if their economic condition – along with the economic condition of the poor whites who were often their most violent opposition – didn’t improve.  Then, as now, minorities and poor whites compete for fewer and fewer lower paying jobs, and that competition stokes much of the fear used by politicians to drive a wedge between groups that should be allied.  Yet because he was unable to carry on with his important work, we are left to apologize to our descendants, as we seem unwilling to do anything to support the radical change now necessary to keep the Dream Alive.

America's White poor - Republicans in Name Only

The number of Americans who are poor enough to qualify for food stamps has increased by a disturbing 30 million in the last 13 years. In 2000, 17 million Americans were receiving food stamps; in 2013, the number is 47 million. Hoping to stir up racial tensions, far-right AM radio talk show hosts and Fox News wingnuts try to paint food stamp recipients as strictly or mostly people of color. But the facts don’t bear that out. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly half of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites (in Ohio, it’s around 65%). So when Republicans vote to cut food stamps, many of the people they are hurting are white. On September 19, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to slash billions of dollars from the U.S. food stamp program during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Tough words today in Salon, especially since SNAP- more commonly referred to as Food Stamps - has long been viewed by Republican politicians as a coded way to talk about minorities in America.  Ronald Reagan affirmed that association during his political life by discussing the plight of the "Welfare Queen" and successive conservatives have only exacerbated the problem.

Yet since the beginning of the Great Recession, whites have NOT been spared the horror of slipping into poverty.  With American unemployment at 7.3% at the end of October , many of those same white folks are now several years into using a program of federal financial assistance (or dare I say it - welfare) that many of them never thought they'd need, but without which many of them will have a hard time surviving.

Monthly unemployment Rates January 20013 through October 2004

And while we are nowhere near the high (but not historic high) unemployment Rates we saw in 2009 and 2010, it is becoming clear that we are not yet at "full employment" and may never be.

So, in the end, many of the Congressman (and a few Senators) who have voted to cut SNAP - and are pursuing drastic reductions to Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA mandates, and even Social Security, are cutting the very federal programs keeping their constituents alive.  I hope that when these recipients go to get their checks, and see the reductions they get angry and demand their elected officials do something.  I fear those same officials will manage to frame the issues in a way that shifts blame from the politicians to somewhere, anywhere, else.  That shifting will have tragic consequences, but it will be America's economic margins - and so it will go unreported, unnoticed, and uncorrected.  America the exceptional indeed.

Remembering President Kennedy: The Quote we SHOULD all carry with us.

"Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future." —John F. Kennedy

Firing government employees will solve unemployment (Said too many people now)!

Over on Facebook I got into another argument with a moderate conservative friend. I should really stop doing that. But he was responding to my post of E.J. Dionne's Column today which essentially says that drastic cuts to government spending - given our current employment numbers - is the WRONG thing to do if we need jobs.  Which we do.

My well meaning, but underemployed friend took that as another "I'm entitled to my job" screed by another overstuffed, underachieving, under employed fed.  He should know better with me, but there we were.  His argument was that federal employment - for that matter - any government employment - should go down in a down turn, as should government spending.

Leaving aside the anti-Kenynes approach he has (RE stimulative impacts of federal spending in down economies since governments aren't actually bound by supply and can create demand through deficits), I took him to task over federal employment, since I'm not the only one of his friends who's a fed.

That argument led me to do some data analysis, which I present below.  First, looking at federal civilian employment trends since 1962 (Data courtesy OPM.gov), I find that the federal government is nowhere as big as it has been in my life time.  Specifically, the federal government topped out at over 3 Million employees under President Reagan, began to shrink under President Bush 41, shrank dramatically under President Clinton (to less then 2.65 Million), climbed again under President Bush 43 (During the prime years of the Great Recession), and began to shrink again under President Obama. 

Sadly, the data cut off from OPM is 2011 so we can't see what the impacts of 2012 and 2013 budget decisions are - particularly Sequestration.

Interestingly, I'm not the only one to notice the dip in employment under our current President.  Forbes published a short, to the point analysis of total government employment (in which they lump local, state, and federal employees) vs. total population.  Their "in the face of conventional wisdom" conclusion is that not only did the ratio of total government employees to the population go down, but that the rate of growth of government employees to the population went down under President Obama.  They rightly attribute the declines to the Great Recession, though they note most decline is due to budget cuts forced on states that are legally mandates to balance their budgets.

And then there's this little nugget from The Atlantic in May, 2013:

But rather than Washington leading the still-weak economy, the cart has led the horse, with the private sector adding roughly 2.2 million jobs over the past year while state, local, and federal governments have shed more than 90,000 jobs.

 Finally, the American Enterprise Institute notes that total government employment as well as Federal government employment have declined under President Obama (they conveniently carry their data back to 2001, and ignore the increase under President Bush; but theirs is the same data set I  used above):

So no, federal and state and local government employees haven't been spared the axe - far from it.  And no, federal employment isn't out of control - Mr. Reagan had a million or so more feds the Mr. Obama has.

And no, cutting federal spending on employees won't solve any economic problems.  If the private sector is adding jobs while government is still firing people, I'd say we're suffering enough.

Tea Party Racism

Over on Facebook I got drawn into a discussion/argument/throwdown between two folks I highly respect.  The subject was, nominally, Tea Party racism, and the essentials of the conversation is that one of the combatants called Tea Party members racist based on an image of a Confederate Flag from a protest last week at the White House.  The other combatant, who identifies with the Tea Party cause (though I don’t know if he’s actually a member of any Tea Party group), took it personally and the “usual” fireworks ensued.

I waded in with a well reasoned mini-essay attempting to put the severe reaction of the first combatant in perspective for the second, hoping since I know these men to generally be men of integrity, that we might actually come to an understanding.  Combatant number 2 challenged me to come up with some facts – not blog posts, not retread photos, but facts – to buttress my claims.  So being a scientist for whom the call to display facts in an emotional argument is like sweet nectar to a bee, I jumped in.

But before I get to the research – which I think is important – I have to acknowledge that this argument, like so much in the current political sphere – is not about demonstrable facts.  Its about fears – fear of economic loss, fear of loss of social standing or place, fear of unknown or “other” cultures or socio-economic groups.  And its about an America that is changing so fast that in my life time we’ve gone from one or two rotary phones attached to the wall in each house to handheld “phones” that have more computing power then the Lunar Lander.  That change, along with demographic shifts in America that will render European Whites a minority in my life time (2050) is something that society has not really equipped its members to handle, nor have we acknowledged (particularly on the Left) the need for that equipping.  Instead we’ve leapt from TRS-80’s to Mac’s to Thinkpads to iPads to Google Glass without so much as turning to our fellow citizens and asking if they are still ok.  And like it or not, those fears and that change are now being exploited by those who want to resurrect and then fix in place a social and economic order that rests on some people have economic and social privilege built on the backs of economic serfs who are politically powerless.

Back to the data:

First up is research highlighted at rawstory.com.  While they don’t give actual percentages in their coverage, the story does summarize what appears to be legitimate and recent social science research (sadly buried behind one of those infernal paywalls; emphasis in Italics mine):

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/19/study-uncovers-anti-black-attitudes-among-tea-party-supporters-but-not-members/

New research published online in Race and Social Problems suggests the racial politics surrounding the tea party movement are highly nuanced. The researchers found no difference between the racial attitudes of the general white population and self-identified tea party members. Those who had a favorable view of the tea party {i.e. Tea Party Supports but not members}, on the other hand, were in fact more likely to admit to holding anti-black sentiments.

“Clearly, an African-American, mixed-race, liberal President may trigger symbolic racism and even racial stereotypes among the population at large,” Angie Maxwell from the University of Arkansas and Wayne Parent from Louisiana State University wrote in their study. But the evidence suggests the tea party wasn’t simply a racist reaction, though racists appear to be drawn to the movement.

The link between racial animus and favorable opinions of the tea party movement was clearer. Tea party supporters were more likely than the general white population to agree with statements like, “It is really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites” and disagree with statements like, “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.”

These results coincide with previous research, which found tea party supporters held negative attitudes about African Americans, Hispanic Americans and LGBT Americans. Unlike past research, the present study found a difference between tea party supporters and actual tea party members.

“These distinctions demonstrate that the ‘subterranean agenda’ of the tea party may be different among members and among those who admire the general movement from afar,” Maxwell and Parent concluded. “What the tea party means to its members and what it represents to the large public may, in fact, not be the same thing.”

Because its behind that paywall, its hard to know how many people were surveyed, or if the percentage of Tea Party respondents mimics what has been reported to be Tea Party representation in th egeneral population.  These finding do suggest that there are, in fact, racist elements and ideas/views in the Tea Party universe.  They also suggest that Tea Party members (those actively participating in Tea Party groups as citizen activists) are probably not the problem.  So both of my combatant friends are right at least to some degree.

Searching for more numbers (!), I found this:

http://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/tea-party-nationalism/the-report/tea-parties-racism-anti-semitism-and-the-militia-impulse

A striking difference over positive attitudes towards black people showed up in a multi-state poll, conducted in March 2010, by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality. Of those who strongly disapproved of the Tea Party, 55% agreed with the statement that black people were “VERY hard working.” Of those who strongly approved of the Tea Party, only 18% agreed with the statement that black people were “VERY hard working.” This 24-point difference pointed at Tea Party supporters as more likely to have negative feelings about the work ethic of black people. In fact, 68% of the Tea party “approvers” believed that if only they would try harder, then black people would be as well off as white people. That number fell by almost half, to 35%, when the “disapprovers” answered it.[245]

Further, almost three-quarters of Tea Party supporters (73%), told pollsters that government programs aimed at providing a social safety net for poor people actually encourages them to remain poor.[246] In fact, more than a bit of anecdotal evidence shows hostility and resentment towards the poor and the programs designed to help them. Hence, the signs such as one at an early St. Louis Tea Party that read: “Honk if I am paying your mortgage.” Not every Tea party supporter exhibited such feelings, certainly, but enough of it showed up in opinion polls to give credence to the description of Tea Parties as mean-spirited.

Similarly, both anecdotal evidence and poll data point to an irreconcilable gap between the president and Tea Partiers. More is at issue here than a simple disagreement of social policy and legislation. Indeed, a quarter of Tea Party supporters polled on the question admit that they think that the Obama “administration favors black people over whites.”[247] When asked whether or not Barack Obama understood the “needs and problems of people like you,” almost three-fourths of Tea Partiers (73%) said “no.” A similar number (75%) said he did not “share the values most Americans try to live by.”

Is all that of that Racist?  To an African American – definitely.  To a liberal white guy trained in statistics – more then likely.  Obviously not to some Tea Party folks.  But the University of Washington study cited above intrigued me.  Open access to data is a hallmark of quality science, so I followed the interwebs.  Sadly for my Tea Party supporting combatant, the data don’t look good (again, emphasis and clarifying additions in Italics are mine):

http://depts.washington.edu/uwiser/racepolitics.html

For instance, the Tea Party, the grassroots movement committed to reining in what they perceive as big government, and fiscal irresponsibility, also appear predisposed to intolerance. Approximately 45% of Whites either strongly or somewhat approve of the {Tea Party} movement. Of those, only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45 % believe Blacks are intelligent, and only 41% think that Blacks are trustworthy. Perceptions of Latinos aren’t much different. While 54% of White Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be hardworking, only 44% think them intelligent, and even fewer, 42% of Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be trustworthy. When it comes to gays and lesbians, White Tea Party supporters also hold negative attitudes. Only 36% think gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to adopt children, and just 17% are in favor of same-sex marriage.

As this figure shows, even as we account for conservatism and partisanship, support for the Tea Party remains a valid predictor of racial resentment. We're not saying that ideology isn't important, because it is: as people become more conservative, it increases by 23 percent the chance that they're racially resentful. Also, Democrats are 15 percent less likely than Republicans to be racially resentful. Even so, support for the Tea Party makes one 25 percent more likely to be racially resentful than those who don't support the Tea Party.

Differences in {Tea Party website} content emerge when comparing the content from official tea party websites to the content from the National Review online, a mainstream conservative commentary.  Only 14 percent of the content from tea party websites focuses on big government or states rights, issues that are supposedly the ultimate concern of the tea party.  This is compared to 39 percent of the content examined from the National Review online.  19 percent of the content from tea party websites focuses on immigration, the gay community, race and personal attacks on Obama, compared to only 10 percent of the National Review’s online content.  10 percent of posts and articles on tea party websites focus on patriotism and taking back the country while less than 1 percent of the content from the National Review online have this focus.  Similarly, 36 percent of the content from the National Review online examines national security or foreign policy compared to only 2 percent of the content from tea party websites.  Content focusing on socialism, communism, and the current government ruining the country make up 24 percent of the content on tea party websites.  Again, this is in contrast to the National Review online where only 5 percent of the content is of this nature.  These findings suggest that the opinions and concerns of the tea party not only differ from mainstream America, but also from the conservative mainstream as well.

These data are striking for two important conclusions.  First, that Tea Party supporters (as opposed to members) are more likely the other conservatives to harbor racial resentment (which many conflate with racism); in turn conservatives are more likely then liberals to hold similar racial resentments.  Second, Tea Party groups focus nearly the same amount  of their web content on immigration, gays, race(including attacks on President Obama), socialism, communism, and the ruination of the country by the current government (43%b total) as the “mainstream” conservative press focuses on big government and states rights – which the Tea Party has claimed are its central issues.  It might be true that Tea Party web managers don’t seek content on these issues because National Review already does it; more likely the Tea Party needs to get straight what its issues really are. 

Finally in the data department, the Southern Poverty Law Center has published data (under the hilariously dark euphemism unsweet tea) that suggests the Tea Party’s almost all white membership may be a factor in its apparent racial resentment:

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/summer/unsweet-tea

Just 1% of Tea Party supporters are black, the recent poll found, compared to more than 12% of the general population. Nine out of 10 disapproved of President Obama's job performance. Asked why they didn't like the president, 19% said they just don't like him, 11% suggested he is moving the country toward "socialism," and 9% said he is dishonest. Fifty-two percent thought too much has been made of black people's problems, about twice the proportion of all Americans.

Does all this make the ENTIRE Tea Party Racist?  No, it does not.  But these data do point out that the Tea Party has race relations problems and blindspots, some of which appear to be even bigger then the race relations blindspots that have been part of the conservative movement since it’s inception.  Sadly, that racial blindspot trace back to the pre-civil war South, an economy built on the owning (and abusing) of people of color:

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/06/20/the-tea-partys-legacy-of-racism/

The battle against the Constitution and later against an energetic federal government — the sort of nation-building especially envisioned by Washington and Hamilton – emanated, in part, from the fears of many Southern plantation owners that eventually the national political system would move to outlaw slavery and thus negate their massive investment in human bondage.

Their thinking was that the stronger the federal government became the more likely it would act to impose a national judgment against the South’s slavery. So, while the Southern argument was often couched in the rhetoric of “liberty,” i.e. the rights of states to set their own rules, the underlying point was the maintenance of slavery, the “liberty” to own black people.

{After the Civil War} However, the defeated South still balked at equal rights for blacks and invoked “states’ rights” to defend segregation during the Jim Crow era. White Southerners amassed enough political clout, especially within the Democratic Party – the successor to Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party – to fend off civil rights for blacks.

The battle over states’ rights was joined again in the 1950s when the federal government finally committed itself to enforcing the principle of “equal protection under the law” as prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Many white Southerners were furious that their system of segregation was being dismantled by federal authority.

Southern rightists and many libertarians insisted that federal laws prohibiting denial of voting rights for blacks and outlawing segregation in public places were unconstitutional. But federal courts ruled that Congress was within its rights in banning such discrimination within the states.

Southern white anger was also reflected in the prevalence of the Confederate battle flag on pickup trucks and in store windows. Gradually, however, the American Right retreated from outright support of racial segregation. The growing public revulsion over the “Stars and Bars” as a symbol of racism also forced the Right to make a stylistic adjustment as well.

To this day, much of the American Right has refused to come to grips with the idea of non-whites holding U.S. citizenship. And, there is now a palpable fear that the demographics of democracy might finally eradicate white supremacy in the United States. It is that last-ditch fight for white dominance – as much as anything else – that is driving today’s Tea Party.

Interestingly, however, this fight is not just focused on racial dominance – it seems to be focused on modern Democrats (and perhaps their predecessors) who, as always, favor government solutions to intractable social and economic problems (or they used to anyway):

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/08/history-of-the-tea-party

And that's a problem. It's a problem because too many observers mistakenly react to the tea party as if it's brand new, an organic and spontaneous response to something unique in the current political climate. But it's not. It's not a response to the recession or to health care reform or to some kind of spectacular new liberal overreach. It's what happens whenever a Democrat takes over the White House. When FDR was in office in the 1930s, conservative zealotry coalesced in the Liberty League. When JFK won the presidency in the '60s, the John Birch Society flourished. When Bill Clinton ended the Reagan Revolution in the '90s, talk radio erupted with the conspiracy theories of the Arkansas Project. And today, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, it's the tea party's turn.

Above all, though, is the recurring theme of creeping socialism and a federal government that's destroying our freedoms. In the '30s this took the form of rabid opposition to FDR's alphabet soup of new regulatory agencies. In the '60s it was John Birch Society founder Robert Welch's insistence that the threat of communism actually took second place to the "cancer of collectivism." Welch believed that overweening government had destroyed civilizations from Babylonia to 19th-century Europe, and he said his fight could be expressed in just five words: "Less government and more responsibility."

All of this points in one direction. The growth of the tea party movement isn't really due to the recession (in fact, polling evidence shows that tea partiers are generally better off and less affected by the recession than the population at large). It's not because Obama is black (white Democratic presidents got largely the same treatment). And it's not because Obama bailed out General Motors (so did George W. Bush). It's simpler. Ever since the 1930s, something very much like the tea party movement has fluoresced every time a Democrat wins the presidency, and the nature of the fluorescence always follows many of the same broad contours: a reverence for the Constitution, a supposedly spontaneous uprising of formerly nonpolitical middle-class activists, a preoccupation with socialism and the expanding tyranny of big government, a bitterness toward an underclass viewed as unwilling to work, and a weakness for outlandish conspiracy theories.

How did this happen? Partly it's a reflection of the long-term rightward shift of the Republican Party. Partly it's a product of the modern media environment: The Birchers were limited to mimeograph machines and PTA meetings to get the word out, while the tea partiers can rely on Fox News and Facebook. Beyond that, though, it's also a reflection of the mainstreaming of extremism. In 1961, Time exposed the John Birch Society to a national audience and condemned it as a "tiresome, comic-opera joke"; in 2009, it splashed Glenn Beck on the cover and called him "tireless, funny, self-deprecating...a gifted storyteller." And it's the same story in the political community: The Birchers were eventually drummed out of the conservative movement, but the tea partiers are almost universally welcomed today. "In the '60s," says Rick Perlstein, a historian of the American right, "you had someone like William F. Buckley pushing back against the Birchers. Today, when David Frum tries to play the same role, he's completely ostracized. There are just no countervailing forces in the Republican Party anymore." Unlike the Birchers, or even the Clinton conspiracy theorists, the tea partiers aren't a fringe part of the conservative movement. They are the conservative movement.

So where does that leave my combatants?  Clearly there is a racist element to support of the Tea Party even if individual Tea Party members are not, themselves racist.  That racist element is part of a play to use the Tea Party to drive the Republican Party to answer legitimate fears about change, about loss, about economic vitality with firm convictions and easy targets of blame, rather then answering with real nuance and substance.  It’s also clear this is both the culmination of four or five (or even six) decades of Republicans telling people government is the problem– with its power to redistribute income and create equality of opportunity that mocks private market places – have been the latest contribution in a long line of attempts in post-Civil War America to beat back opportunities for the poor, who are often historically and still people of color.  Tea Party members need to come to grips with this reality if they really want to have a place in future America.

Liberals too have to come to grips with something – Tea Party Members are sincere Americans who don’t like what they see happening to a country they love.  Tea Party tactics are many times likely to use or harken to racist tactics – the evidence does exist – and Tea Party supporters do appear to harbor racial resentments if not outright racism.  If we are to build the America we want, we have to confront that racism where and when we see it – regardless of which side of the aisle we sit on.