> Dennis: Tea partiers are more more likely to be racist. Who knew? This
> still doesn't connect the dots to white racism against Obama explaining....
> what exactly?
>
> Somebody: Sure it does. White Americans are already predisposed to be
> against the Democrats as the party of minorities, and this is easily
> exacerbated by a minority president presiding during a depression. There's
> no need to find outlandish alternative explanations here.
>
> Whites don't vote for Democrats. The last Democratic president to receive a
> majority of white votes was Lyndon Johnson. Carter, Clinton, and Obama have
> gotten decreasing shares of the white vote. Obama got only 43% of white
> voters! This, after the Iraq war disaster and the economic collapse. There's
> no mystery here; whites in this country have become very conservative since
> the civil rights revolution.
>
>
And Democrats have facilitated this development by embracing
neoliberalism... voila, a huge contradiction at the heart of Obama's
politics. Clinton embraced a variant of the Declining Significance of Race
argument of William Julius Wilson in order to woo back Reagan Democrats and
then used it to craft the 1996 welfare "reform", Obama embraces neocon
"responsibility and accountability" discourses... each reinforces incipient
racism and its close ties to classism.
As always, the utterly mainstream sensibilities associated with basic social self-reflexivity and sociological imagination are radical in a nation and entrenched parties committed to cowboy individualism and Horatio Alger entrepreneurialism.