Racism in the United States of America

For background, see Ortho’s original posts and Jay’s response.  Ortho argues that America is inherently racist, while Jay claims Ortho is comparing the U.S. to a utopia drawn from ideology.

I see the following as facts:

• The United States was founded upon racism.  Originally, this country was not ‘for’ Blacks, Hispanics, or Native Americans, only white male Protestants.  Everyone else was subjugated (slavery) or indirectly eradicated (frontier wars/european disease).  
• The United States only became a true democracy in 1965.  Prior to that, the entire Black population was systematically disenfranchised, as this was the only way to end Reconstruction and reunite ‘white’ America.  At the time, we were the last European country to have such systemic and state-sponsored discrimination.  

Comparatively, then, we seem to be a bit more racist than other European states.  The very fact one could compare the United States to European states or the Soviet Union exposed our racism, as such a comparison would undermine our claim to being a ‘free’ nation.  This itself was one reason the Federal government supported the end of Jim Crow.  And certainly American racism still exists today, although it may be more subliminal than overt.  Consider an average American city, like Albany.  Although segregation does not exist officially, it is present de facto, as inner city neighborhoods (West Hill, Arbor Hill, South End) are almost entirely black while the suburbs are almost entirely white (Bethlehem, Colonie, Latham, Guilderland).  

So racism exists.  But, I would also argue that racism is on the decline, if not about to suffer a farily serious challenge.  After all, a black man is about to be elected to be President of the United States of America.  Think about that.  The same nation whose economy was founded on slave labor for agricultural production (much like how the German Junker class exploited the East Elbian peasantry), which in turn spawned a facist group dedicated to the continued subjugation of blacks, is willingly creating a true racist’s nightmare: rule by a black man.  Frank Rich recently pointed out how this fear is not enough to spoil Obama’s election:

Well, there are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country. But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.

Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even “racists for Obama,” as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis.

Would Obama be elected at any other point in American history? Maybe 1964 or 1968 (in which case it would have been MLK), but that still begs the question regarding the size of the backlash against such a possibility, which I suspect would have been much larger. The fact that there has been no serious backlash (by this I mean real and serious racial violence) points to the fact that racism is not the monster it once was, and is in decline. If anything, an Obama presidency would continue to destroy the racial stereotypes that have dogged American culture and history, as it forces both whites and blacks to question their previously held assumptions about race in America. This doesn’t mean that racism is dead, or ever will die. Probably not, but the best we can hope for is to subdue it to the point that we don’t see it, thus people stop acting on it. A kind of ’see no evil, act no evil’ maybe.

The New Consensus

About a month ago, I caught a talk by Prof. Miroff on his new book (NYT review) on George McGovern’s failed 1972 campaign for presidency against Nixon. It was an obviously Democratic audience and comparisons to the current election were rife, and for good reason. Both McGovern and Obama defined themselves as antiwar candidates, the former opposing the Vietnam War while the latter opposed the ongoing Second Gulf War. However, I was left wondering how far such ‘dovish’ foreign policy similarities would extend to an Obama Administration, one that would have to finish the Iraq War, seriously commit to Afghanistan, and encourage the democratization of Pakistan.
As made clear by Miroff, McGovern has historically been remembered for his strong critique of American foreign policy in the Cold War, much of which was distorted by Nixon to paint him as soft on Communism and a threat to American security. As a ‘peacenik’, McGovern represents the left’s divorce from the traditional national security and foreign policy consensus of the post-war era, which was ultimately destroyed by Vietnam under LBJ. No longer was the country united in an interpretation of America’s position of the world that necessitated the United States containing the Soviet Union and embracing the mantle of hegemony. Despite the end of the Cold War, this consensus has never truly been repaired. We still do not have a common consensus on the necessity of American internationalism, nor a common rationale for engaging in (and sustaining) intervention abroad. Instead a broad range of foreign policy views have emerged in a continuous conflict for influence and control, from John Birch style isolationism, the failed ideology of neoconservatism, and of course left-wing isolationist critiques of American hegemony (embodied by the McGovern candidacy).
Nonwithstanding Obama’s position on Iraq, he has demonstrated himself to be hawkish on other potential threats to the United States, especially the original front of the Long War – the Afghan-Pakistan insurgency. Whereas both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice motivated by rationales that were flimsy at best (Gulf of Tonkin – WMD), the Afghan war is most certainly of a war of necessity, one begun in response to an already manifest existential threat to the United States, and the world for that matter.
There was also an ideological component to Vietnam and Iraq that is absent our involvement in Afghanistan. The first two wars were justified by anticommunism and neoconservatism, yet Afghanistan is driven by more immediate security interests and doesn’t fit neatly into traditional paradigms of American foreign policy.

In fact, the Afghan war is one that United States was the least prepared for in terms of our contemporary foreign policy thinking. Simply take W.’s expressed foreign policy preferences prior to 9/11. W wanted nothing to do with complicated policy objectives such as peacekeeping and nation-building, widely derided as liberal adventurism that should have been forgotten with the Clinton administration. During the 90s, Jesse Helms represented the traditional conservative antipathy to intervention, of which Pat Buchanan is also fond. With 9/11, conservative squeamishness with interventionism and long-term non-military commitments understandably is abandoned, yet no ideological transition is made that makes nation-building and low-intensity warfare the priority of the American foreign policy establishment. Instead, we were left with ‘nation-building lite’ or Douglas Feith’s ‘enabling’ theory of nation-building, which rationally expects people to organize democratically naturally, thus making grand, complicated, and tedious visions of social transformation unnecessary to foreign policy success. It is this understanding of the Afghan war has been truly dangerous to American national security, as it has let a single war evolve into a regional conflict, one in which we are currently in an undeclared war with our supposed ally Pakistan, which by the way, also has nuclear weapons.

Thus, the problem isn’t so much with the left as it is with what’s left of neoconservatism. Nothing in that ideology is compatible with the military innovations developed by Gen. Petreaus in the last two years, in fact, the administration only went that route when threatened with political annihilation in the 2006 midterm elections. Real leadership would have adopted a nation-building heavy approach in 2001 (not five years later) and keeping our eye on the war we had to fight (Afghanistan) as opposed to the war we wanted to fight (Iraq).

Which brings us back to the present, and the possibility of an Obama administration. While certainly his opposition to the Iraq war was McGovernesque, we can be fairly certain that a President Obama would fully commit to Afghanistan and Pakistan and support the strategic shift to counterinsurgency and heavy nation-building. The fact that Obama is being advised by heavyweights like Sarah Sewall (who wrote the intro to the UChicago edition of FM 3-24) and Samantha Power (the most prominent anti-genocide interventionist in the country) provides a good indication of the strategic, moral, and intellectual muscle that an Obama Administration brings to the table. It also suggests that President Obama will be more than receptive to the successful implementation of Petreaus’s vision of counterinsurgency strategy as the modus operandi by which the United States will conduct ongoing and future interventions. By stepping into office without any ideological baggage that could inform the future Obama Doctrine, the Senator from Illionis is well positioned to adopt and expand our best foreign policy practices and intervention strategies.

Most importantly, if Obama can direct the war in Afghanistan towards a democratic outcome for both Afghanistan and Pakistan (and don’t forget about Iraq), he could occupy the center of a new national security and foreign policy consensus, one that is comfortable with American intervention and based on the best successes of the past five years. In this way, Obama could be the anti-McGovern, and move the country past the ideological schism between isolationism and interventionism. If we are once again comfortable with the rationale for the use of American power abroad (both because we know why we are using our power and how we should go about using it), we can better configure our own resources and relationships with other states to achieve those goals.

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BTW, I know I have to find some ground on the debate between Ortho and Jay, as well as answer comments. Will do shortly, so stay tuned…

Obama is still is the foreign policy candidate

Via AM:

In completely unrelated news, from Sen. Barack Obama:

As we rebuild our armed forces, we must meet the full spectrum needs of the new century, not simply recreate the military of the Cold War era. In particular, we must focus on strengthening the ground force units and skills that military officers have dubbed “High Demand/Low Density.” The U.S. military must build up our special operations forces, civil affairs, information operations, engineers, foreign area officers, and other units and capabilities that remain in chronic short supply. We should invest in foreign language training, cultural awareness, and human intelligence and other needed counterinsurgency and stabilization skill sets. And we should create a specialized military advisors corps, which will enable us to better build up local allies’ capacities to take on mutual threats.

Because Obama was right on the war to begin with, he can talk the talk and walk the walk better than the other two clowns in the race.

Kenya, Obama, and AFRICOM

In my last post, I provocatively argued that the presidency was Obama’s for the taking.  Assuming this is still true, we can see that the emerging Kenyan political crisis will be first ‘new’ foreign policy issue to be taken up by President-to-be Obama.  The portfolio on Kenya won’t be far from the White House. From the Times of NYC:

Barack Obama, whose late father was Kenyan, spoke with the opposition leader Raila Odinga for about five minutes from New Hampshire, asking the opposition leader to meet directly with President Mwai Kibaki, said the Democratic presidential candidate’s spokesman.”He urged an end to violence and that Mr. Odinga sit down, without preconditions, with President Kibaki to resolve this issue peacefully,” said the spokesman, Bill Burton.Odinga told the British Broadcasting Corp. that Obama’s father was his maternal uncle, and that Obama called him twice ”in the midst of his campaigning … to express his concern and to say that he is also going to call President Kibaki so that Kibaki agrees to find a negotiated, satisfactory solution to this problem.”Obama’s campaign, however, said the candidate called Odinga only once and that he was unaware the two were related except by tribal affiliation.

Which is a smart move on the part of Obama. He should never acknowledge his Luo tribal affiliation and instead only speak of affiliation with the Kenyan nation. Nonetheless, I expect him to stay immersed in this diplomacy until his presidency begins, at which point Kenya gets put on top of the pile alongside Iraq and Afghanistan.In a most direct and personal way, this could singal the geographical shift into Africa that Barnett talks about, especially with reference to AFRICOM. The Kenyan civil strife is exactly the kind of environment that it is suited for. One can read the conflict as a violation of the social contract: ethnic Luos have always been pissed about Kikuyus getting the spoils of the state, and following this last rigged election, they’ve had enough. Given these circumstances, it is completely plausible that some kind of ethnic-based Luo separatist movement coud form in SE Kenya, whereby Luos rebel to create their own state that can safeguard their development in ways that the Kikuyu Kenyan state did not. AFRICOM’s role could be to prevent this from happening. Putting AFRICOM on-the-ground in the Rift Valley would lead to economic development and interaction between both sides of the conflict. If we established friendly relations between both sides, it would not necessarily be far-fetched for Luo-American and Kikuyu-American friendship to spill over into Luo-Kikuyu friendship. In fact, this is a key assumption of Social Network Analysis (thanks Prof. Rethemeyer): that if there are mutual ties between actors A and B, and actors A and C, there should be a mutual tie between B and C. The absence of this last tie is impossible, and described by Granovetter as a forbidden triad.Please excuse the excursion into sociology, but I think it still holds for, say, AFRICOM and two ethnic groups. If AFRICOM were on the ground and forged mutual relationships between two groups, those groups should also form mutual relations. If Obama becomes president, and Kenya gets put on top of the pile, this is how AFRICOM can restore stability to Kenya.

Obama wins, backed by the media

Barack Obama is nearly a shoe-in to become the Democratic nominee for president.  He rises at a time when a generational dynamic (not that one) is shifting in American politics, both demographically and ideologically.  Not only that, but Germany already has a crush on Obama.  However, all this is possible because the American media has had an earlier crush on Obama, one that kept his candicacy a possibly over the summer.  In fact, what happened was like a vetting process, where some performances were failures (debates) and other were successes (large-scale rallies).  Obama stayed in the national spotlight because the media kept him there, and did not allow the idea of his candicacy to become mere noise.  His campaign was probably over-tailored for Iowa, and lived nationally on cable news channels. Barring disaster, it’s safe to say Obama will take the nomination and defeat any Republican, as the GOP lacks momentum, the majority of the money, and any good candidates save McCain.  What’s more interesting are the Congressional races, which are also not looking good for the Republicans.  Many are opting for earlier retirement, sensing a period in which they’d rather not even try to participate.  Could it be that the age of partisan politics dissolves with a filibuster proof Democratic majority?