Race Matters

I keep saying: many of the people covering and commenting on politics are ill-equipped to do so because they continually underestimate how race is the organizing principle of AMerican politics. We so desperately want to pretend otherwise, but that is a willful blindness.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) November 3, 2021

It’s clear that there is not yet a willingness to confront the landscape of American politics. The Va race was not abt “education” or “enthusiasm” or “change.” There’s no ability to engage w/the grim reality of an electorate of white voters primed to embrace racial threats.

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) November 3, 2021

“What can the Democrats learn?” is not really the question. How does a democracy address the systematic use of manufactured racial threat as a strategy for political control? Perhaps engaging that question seriously when Bush I disgracefully used Willie Horton would have helped.

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) November 3, 2021

It’s the OTHER bill — the one they nuked parental leave, college debt repayment and a major climate provision out of — that actually would help the people who mainly vote for Democrats: minority, young and single women, working class POC, white collegians… you know: their base.

— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid 😷 (@JoyAnnReid) November 3, 2021

It’s not like that’s not easy to do in America, where a portion of the population has always prized group dominance over democracy and shared progress. Nixon did it. Reagan did it with “welfare queens.” Atwater preached it. GWB did it with Willie Horton. Trump LUXURIATED in it.

— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid 😷 (@JoyAnnReid) November 3, 2021

Why? Because as I said last night, to effectively do so they would have to actively and aggressively defend THEIR base, the way Republicans go to the mat to defend even their most extreme voters. But most Dems can’t or don’t want to. They crave the voters they don’t have.

— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid 😷 (@JoyAnnReid) November 3, 2021

And last but certainly not least McAuliffe’s other problem is that there was nothing new or particularly interesting about his candidacy. To beat Virginia’s long history of flipping gubernatorial parties to the opposite of the president’s party, maybe run someone novel to voters?

— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid 😷 (@JoyAnnReid) November 3, 2021

I agree on McAuliffe. Too often these races come down to who’s running, rather than what broad national issues we are told is involved. But talking about narratives that exist only so pundits can talk about them is the whole point of narratives.

And the point of some narratives is to obscure the reality of history (which is part of the present) so we can go on pretending it’s passed.

But the past isn’t over; it isn’t even passed.