Never Trump-Always Racist

​Listening to a never-Trump podcast is always a gamble.  It’s mostly going after how awful Trump is, and maybe interesting enough insight into center-right concerns.  There seems to have been more self-interrogation earlier on in the MAGA takeover of the GOP, but lately it feels rare. 
 
On a recent episode discussing possible Kamala Harris VP picks, a brief list of policy preferences was presented.  Shapiro, the centrist Democratic Governor of PA, seems a favorite.  His antagonism of teachers’ unions, and support for school vouchers, fracking, and Israel loom large.
 
But taking apart any of those issues unpacks the fundamental racism of conservatism, and not only why it has given us MAGA, but why even the most moderate conservative positions cannot be extricated from racism.
 
None of this is going to be explicit racism.  But if when seeing inequality, pain and the mistreatment of people of color, one turns away and ignores it, or worse - creates fictions to explain it way, or make excuses for why immediate and intensive intervention is not only not require but too dangerous to try, one is preferencing the advancement of white supremacy.
 
Let’s look at these issues in order.  Antipathy for teachers’ unions and support for school vouchers are based on the same premise.  School reform is needed because schools are failing minorities.  Minorities are both poor because they don’t get quality educations because unions are protecting lousy teachers, and since they are poor, they can’t afford to live near good schools.  Vouchers can be used by the poor to go to non-union schools, get quality educations and rise out of poverty.  The “soft bigotry of low expectations” does the old right-wing triple-Lindsy of turning the critique around to say it is the left, actually, who are the racists because they don’t care about black poverty.
 
It’s a rickety story built on multiple failings both of logic and fact.  Poor kids start out without school-ready skills.  Their parents have little education themselves, and work for low pay that breaks families and introduces high levels of stress.  Housing markets force families into neighborhoods where generations of burden nurture the portion of people with anti-social behaviors.  Schools in these neighborhoods do their best, but making up for large scale social failures would require hard-to-imagine levels of academic intervention.  Yet the simplest intervention - in theory if not policy, would be not into schools but into a labor market that seems to require poverty in the first place.  For every poverty wage job, you definitionally get a poor household.  If all labor paid non-poverty wages, poverty would practically cease to exist. 
 
Yet for conservatives, supporting unions and fair wages is a non-starter.  From trickle-down, to growth theory, to (misapplied) ideas about operant conditioning and the reinforcing/punishing contingencies of “bettering oneself” through acquiring new skills and or hard work to achieve success, conservatism tells a story seemingly designed to avoid collectivism and the abstraction of capital from individual production to social production.  Deeper social theory here might productively lead to various strains of democratic monarchism (accumulation of wealth as a social good) and a conception of libertarian free will (pull yourself up by your bootstraps).  This story looks at persistent American racial inequality and is fine with a permanent underclass of low wage workers who historically have been disproportionately minority and there is no reason to think they won’t always be.
 
Fracking support seems a blend of pragmatic political maneuvering and avoidance of carbon regulation and government job creation.  The right has soft spot for blue collar workers who have become dependent on gas extraction. This is likely rooted in deeper racial affinities (fellow whites in the working class) and a story about the labor market providing good jobs without government involvement. 
 
No case needs to be made for how devastating climate change is, particularly for the global south and its largely non-white populations.  Fracking, responsible for a relatively small portion of total CO2 emissions, is a significant contributor nonetheless.  If people need jobs the government can create them in various ways, including incentivizing businesses to invest in these communities.
 
Yet this requires an acknowledgement both of the serious harm caused by climate change, as well as a belief that the government should fund interventions.  Yet a government of this sort would require increased taxes, and thus violate conservative notions about wealth and will such as mentioned above.  It would also require valuing the lives of poor Americans whites vastly more than the brown peoples who will bear the overwhelming brunt of climate death.
 
Regarding Israel, it will not be surprising to find a messy set of assumptions and values.  Israel was founded as a safe place for Jews.  The Greatest Generation fought against fascism for democracy, and Israel was a sort of prize at the end.  Arab neighbors are ungrateful at best and fascist or simply pathological at worst.  Israel must defend itself from the barbarians, even if it has to bend the rules to do so.
 
Where to begin?  Jews have come to be coded white, and among religious conservatives members in good standing of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  A bit of noble savage gilding takes place over the ones who started of good with the Old Testament but kind of lost their way when they failed to recognize Jesus as the Son of God.  This gets dark fast with the more fundamentalist types who have their own wicked fantasies about the final end for Jews.  But even leaving that aside, to see the settlements, the segregation, the vicious campaigns that target journalists and civilians, and to not feel horror, one can only but value the life of Jews and Arabs quite differently.
 
None of this is explicit, conscious, overt racism.  Yet the policy preferences and assumptions require a privileging of white people over people of color.  When you look at the toxic bigotry that has always lived in the corners of conservatism, seeing its bloom grow at varying rates of the decades, and that has now burst its seams to take control of the conservative American party, it is no surprise that what feeds the toxic element is not extrinsic to conservatism but rather intrinsic to its notions of government, capital, and apparently race.