Only in America, Again

In Slate, David Berreby debunks the meme that America is the only nation where a member of an ethnic minority could win the country's highest elected office.

He cites examples from history, like Britain's Jewish Prime Minister Ben Disraeli, and other more contemporary examples, like India's Sonia Gandhi and Kenya's Daniel arap Moi.

In fact, most people who said "Obama could only happen here" probably meant "Obama would never happen in Western Europe," because many Americans don't have a keen grasp of ethnic tensions in Asia, Africa and South America. (I don't say this out of vitriol: even the best school curricula these days don't trace human movement before Europe's Age of Exploration, philosophy before the European Enlightenment, or literature before the Bible. This is changing, but it was the case for many years, and the result is an American public that can't tell the difference between Kikuyu and Kalenjin.)

The Disraeli example is a good one, especially considering that Victoria's reign was primetime colonialism and racism was in full churn. Disraeli didn't try to hide his religion, but then again, he couldn't have.

But the "Great Dialogue" on race was different in Disraeli's time. Just examine modern France: President Nicolas Sarkozy ran against a far-right candidate who wanted to expel all immigrants. (It is a testament to the other French politicians that they resigned power rather than risk this outcome, but why does that surprise us?) The nation recently passed a law against hijab in schools, not the act of a nation at peace with its religious diversity (Although Turkey has similar laws, Muslims aren't a minority there). And of course, France suffered riots as recently as 2005 (which politicians and pundits quickly blamed on young North African Muslims.)

Italy, faced with a renewed influx of Muslims from North Africa, has seen a disquieting rise in neo-Nazist cliques, particularly among its youth. But not just there: far-right factions now rule politics.

Meanwhile, everyone knows by now of the ethnic fighting between Darfur's Arab militias and its non-Arab Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit farmers. And what about the crisis between Rwanda's Hutus and Tutsis, now raging between Congo's fragmented ethnicities?

What about the skin color-based prejudice that might even have helped the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi coast to her 2004 victory in India? (To be fair: Gandhi's Congress party set themselves up as the antithesis to the more right-wing BJP, and that's no doubt the big reason that Indians voted for her.) Nonetheless, just in 2007, author Anita Jain discovered that Indian corporations hire white women just to attend high-profile events.

These nations don't make up the whole world, and neither does the United States. But greater mixing has created greater confusion. The international conversation about race hasn't been static, nor has it followed a steady path towards greater tolerance. When people say "Only in America" what they might mean is, at a time when that conversation has gone downhill in many places, Obama's story is inspirational.

"Only in America" is also miles better than the motto we had before: "Never in America."

House on fire

The House Oversight Committee holds its much-publicized "financial collapse" hearings today, where Reps get to grill AIG and Lehman bigwigs over the AIG and Lehman bailout and bankruptcy, respectively.

The Reps' back-and-forth with the bigwigs (which anyone can watch, live, by clicking the link above) reflects a certain obvious reality: like the rest of America, Congress is still trying to figure out what exactly just happened. Waxman's crew asks the predictable questions, which means the rough transcript of the debate looks like this:

Rep: You said, back in 2007, that your business was sound. How can you justify lying to investors like this?
Bigwig: It was pretty awful, yeah.
Rep: Do we need to revisit deregulation, accepting that possibly the financial sector can't be trusted to avoid risk without some government supervision?
Bigwig: Probably not.
Rep: Should someone go to jail over this?
Bigwig: I really don't know.

What hurts, of course, is the obvious fact that the Reps in question can't ask the right questions because they don't even know what the right questions are. Sure, they've acquired the erudite language: credit default swaps, etc. But the companies in question were massively exposed, through multiple contracts, on a number of fronts. Their collapse was, to any outside observer, quite sudden.

What's becoming obvious, however, is that to the people on the inside, this collapse was anything but sudden. It was, if not predictable, at least forseeable. Unfortunately, the people in government whose job it was to foresee (Greenspan, Bernanke, the SEC) didn't make the right judgment calls.

Instead of admitting to its mistakes up front, the SEC has been obfuscating the issue - going so far as to censor potentially damaging reports from its own Inspector General. Not only did the SEC censor the first edition of this report, but when Bloomberg broke the news (this morning) that the SEC had censored the report, either the SEC (or someone else!) got Senator Chuck Grassley to take down the uncensored version he had posted on his Website. Which means the public can still only access the censored version.

It was never AIG and Lehman's job to protect the American people. That was the SEC and the Fed's job. And what is glaringly missing from the House hearings today and yesterday is any acknowledgment or examination of that fact.

Speaking of deep-seated nerdiness

Nate Silver, of Baseball Prospectus fame, has turned his sharp statistician's eye on politics. (Note that I said politics, not policy: there is absolutely nothing but polls and tracking data on FiveThirtyEight.) Politics is, of course, one of the nation's bloodier spectator sports (the medieval standard for winning a duel was drawing first blood, in politics nothing but death will do).

The website is a must-see for anyone who wants to dork out on electoral graphs.

Scare tactics

According to a fun study reported on Scientific American, people who scare easily are more likely to vote conservative. Scientists surveyed 46 Nebraskans (leaving aside, for now, the delicate question of how closely 46 Nebraskans correspond to the entire population of the United States) and found that:

"Having conservative leanings predicted stronger physiological reactions to scary pictures, including a spider sitting on a person's face, a bloodied face and a maggot-infested wound. People who leaned more politically left didn’t respond any differently to those images than they did to pictures of a bowl of fruit, a rabbit or a happy child."

Reminds me of a political "conversation" I had with a former classmate about the Iraq invasion. After a few useless sallies, he broke out with,

"Do you realize that there are terrorists in Iraq? That terrorists could kill people? That they could kill your parents?"

This was his ace argument. He was one of those very educated boneheads, but his moment of honesty revealed what (I consider to be) one of the driving forces behind people's initial support of that misguided war. We were running scared. The problem with running scared is that there's no guarantee you're going to end up going in the right direction. This is what happened with Iraq.

An earlier cited study says that trauma makes people more likely to vote conservative. Which means that W's traumatic mismanagement should have turned the whole nation Republican by now.

Last of the Southern Democrats

One of the most interesting things about political parties is the way they change over time. The Republican Party was once the socially liberal party of Abraham Lincoln, now it's the much more socially conservative party of Sarah Palin. The Democrats were once the choice party of the racist South, now they enjoy more minority support (all minorities!) than the Republicans.

But the changes are gradual, for all that they seem immediate (the Democrats under FDR seemed like a lightning transition, same for Repubs under Reagan).

Then there are the holdouts, or perhaps more the hangovers, politicians who make no sense: like Senator Robert Byrd, who first conceived running for political office when a fellow Klan member suggested it, and who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Byrd is a Democrat, albeit one from West Virginia.

By the way, I am not suggesting that Byrd is worse than any other man of his time, he may just have proven more politically long-lived. Nor am I suggesting that he doesn't deeply regret his past: anything is possible.