The famine in opinion pieces worth commenting on continues. What struck me about David Brooks’s New York Times column reacting to the brouhaha in the Los Angeles City Council (obvious racism being expressed), is how many falsehoods underpin the situation. Here’s Mr. Brooks’s description:
Council President Nury Martinez — who has since resigned from the Council — along with two colleagues and a labor ally talked about a range of subjects, including redistricting, but two assumptions undergirded much of what they said. Their first assumption was that America is divided into monolithic racial blocs. The world they take for granted is not a world of persons; it’s a world of rigid racial categories.
At one point Martinez vulgarly derided someone because “he’s with the Blacks.†You’re either with one racial army or you’re with another.
The second assumption was that these monolithic racial blocs are locked in a never-ending ethnic war for power. The core topic of their conversation was to redraw Council districts to benefit Latino leaders.
Let’s start enumerating them. The first, never mentioned by Mr. Brooks, is that there is a static amount of wealth so the only option or become wealthier is to take from somebody else. If that were true we would still be living on the amount of wealth we were 200 years ago. We aren’t. We’re much wealthier. That “exploitation model” is Marxist and wrong but it also the prevailing view among those who produce nothing themselves other than, possibly, discord. It is a view commonly encountered among politicians.
But that’s not the only misconception involved. All but one of the members of the Los Angeles City Council are Democrats (there is also a lone independent). Anyone who believed that all that is needed to achieve comity is single party hegemony was sadly mistaken. Republicans may be reveling in the Los Angeles City Council’s conflicts but they didn’t cause it and they aren’t responsible for any impasses that arise. Squabbling for primacy among Democrats is.
And look how well that comports with what I’ve been predicting for the last 20 years (since Judis and Texeira’s Towards a Permanent Democratic Majority). The increasing percentage of Hispanics would result in a racial spoils system which blacks would inevitably lose. We’ll see if the other part of my prediction holds true—the beneficiaries of conflicts between blacks and Hispanics will be white.
I want to call attention to a final misconception: the notion that only Anglos can be racist. How anyone could believe that eludes me but people clearly do. My Irish and Swiss ancestors would recoil at being referred to as “Anglos” but that’s the racial divide that has emerged—blacks, Hispanics, and Anglos. There aren’t enough “Asians” yet to add to the cacophony.
The incredulous aspect of this L.A. story is that the people involved in the “scandal†are powerful democrat personalities – Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo, Kevin de Leon & Ron Herrera. Rarely does such an elite group of politicos get caught in expressing the inner workings of their mindsets. This, coupled with a cooperating press usually silent about any misbehavior of slimy democrats, has actually come forward and published the embarrassing racial overtones surrounding an event held almost a year ago. What hasn’t been revealed, though, is why now, and who recorded and brought this damaging discussion to the public’s attention?
Asians have been determined to be “White Adjacent”.
They don’t havta like it.
“That “exploitation model†is Marxist ”
Much too simplistic. There is a lot of room between some pure Marxist model and pure market distribution. Its very clear that government has been used so that one group/individual could exploit advantages to that group/individual or disadvantaging others. Or not intervening when groups were disadvantaged due to religion, sex or race.
Steve
There is one difference between economics and politics.
In politics, especially in winner-take-all district system as practiced in the US, it is mostly a static number of seats to be won. The only option to gaining power is to take it from someone else (by taking their seat). It is a zero-sum game.
As to the last paragraph. It is already the case for the West Coast states, the politics of affirmative action in college admissions is fracturing Democratic hegemony due to Asian-American opposition.
In Washington State, an initiative to ban affirmative action occurred in 1998 and reaffirmed in 2018. California also has a ban on affirmative action from 1996 that was reaffirmed in 2020 (with a bigger margin). The was despite the whole Democratic Party establishment in both states going all out for affirmative action.