I think the Lott episode demonstrates that the the US is getting better on race (at least since 1948 and at least in its imagined self) in spite of all the endlessly repeated coded propaganda.... Peter K
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Let me take a long riff on this.
I think the Lott episode demonstrates that US political parties and institutions are getting a lott more cagey about race and haven't significantly changed their operating assumptions at all---or at least not since the political and social violence directed at them during the early seventies quieted down.
What was behind the ouster of Lott, was he threatened to accidently unmask Republican conservatism's true godfather not as Ronald Reagan, but as George Wallace. While Lott tried to defend himself badly he would have eventually stripped the current Republican neoliberal corporate WSJ slime of their pretense that they had changed their ways on race and poverty. Once that mask (now termed compassionate conservatism) was blatantly stripped off, the same old hypocritical states rights, snarling, bigoted, nastiness of the old southern establishment would have been right back in front without it's neoliberal happy face.
Let's be clear. That mask is only used to salve the conscience of the white majority who vote for them. It helps reassure that white majority that they have made social progress and risen above those old lynch mob photos or the later incarnation of dogs and fire hoses. Sure they've made progress. Instead of the burning a cross, they push tax codes, zoning laws, building codes, and development projects that effectively surround and isolate every major black and minority dominated area in the country maintaining them as blighted cores.
Instead of legally segregated public accommodations, they push privatization where it will benefit whitey the most, or push more funding for `good' public schools and less for `bad' public schools on some barely disguised pretense of the merit system. If by chance a few crumbs fall the other way, well sure, fine, it only proves the point they are generous, tolerant, and compassionate.
Meanwhile, the great Latino hope that the US conservatives pride themselves in developing depends on exploiting the traditional patrone hierarchy within Hispanic communities and siphoning off the support of that internally oppressive caste, and then pretending it represents these communities as a whole.
This domestic political move by Republicans is intimately related to the way the US government and both parties conduct foreign policy in Latin America as a whole.
Look at Venezuela for example, and the so-called `popular uprising' against Chavez. As far as I can tell, it is lead by the potentially threatened managerial, middle and elite classes against a broad poverty ridden mass---represented by the Chavez government. I don't know this, but I seriously suspect the US through some covert channel or other is funding support for any group who promises to oust Chavez. Why? Because I suspect Chavez, Da Silva and others are working very hard to revitalize a progressive pan american movement in the whole region, and trying to link together Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, and perhaps some portion of Columbia, Bolivia and Mexico. Such a linkage would seriously threaten the US economic dependence and exploitation of the whole southern hemisphere. If anything like that kind of pan american linkage ever became concrete reality, it might be in a sufficiently powerful position to defeat US lead neoliberal globalization policies by making temporary alliances on the international front with other regional interests on a case by case basis.
So then, the point is that US government support for anti-Chavez forces, the never ending `war on drugs' in Columbia, IMF/WB/WTO dickering with Brazil and Argentina, etc. are the foreign policy side.
Meanwhile on the domestic front, the same game is played locally by seeking out the old elite crust and the younger scared managerial dupes of US Hispanic communities and trying to lure them into `compassionate' conservatism. Meanwhile, at exactly the same time both US domestic political parties mount massive paramilitary attacks on gangs and drugs in the same communities---while of course milking them economically dry through endlessly exploitive manquiladoro-like labor and development policies---which of course generate precisely the socio-economic conditions that make gangs and drugs an illusionary alternative. Thus foreign and domestic politics mirror each other.
Chuck Grimes