By Deauwand Myers
Janet Jackson's 1986 pop hit, "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" is about a lover who used to do great things in the relationship, but hasn't done anything in a long while to keep the relationship afloat.
Way too often, when Republicans and conservatives talk about race relations and social justice in America, they parrot the same tired refrain: "We're the party of Lincoln. Our party freed the slaves." That was over a century and a half ago.
Whenever I hear this refrain, all I can hum is "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" The answer is: not much, or worse, harm.
Republicans, and more broadly, conservatives, have been against every socioeconomic, sociopolitical advancement in American history since Reconstruction. Worse, at least since the late 1960s, Republicans have nurtured white angst, racial animosity, and white supremacy as key motivators to lock up much of the American South and several presidencies.
The late Lee Atwater, Republican uberstrategist to Reagan, et al, made this point quite explicit. In an infamous 1981 recorded interview, (a forty-two-minute recording discovered in its entirety by James Carter IV), Atwater explains how Republicans win racists without sounding racist. We call these signifiers "dog whistles" today:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say ‘nigger'— that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.'"
Breathtaking. The entire interview, entitled "Exclusive: Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy" can be read and heard on "The Nation" website.
No surprise, then, that Reagan started his successful 1980 presidential campaign at a rally talking about "states' rights" (a phrase segregationists coined in the 1960s to keep states racially divided in housing, education, and the like) in the very same Mississippi county in which three civil rights activists were murdered in the 1960s.
Democrats, of which progressives and leftists aggregate, are far and away better at addressing sociopolitical and socioeconomic problems than Republicans: Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, The Disability, Civil and Voting Rights Acts, and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, are good examples. Social Security has lifted more people (poor and elderly) out of poverty than any federal program in American history. It's an unmitigated success. Keeping it well funded would simply mean increasing the cap on taxable income.
Far too many American's don't even have a cursory understanding of history. Poor, working whites have more or less voted along conservative lines for generations.Meanwhile, their very survival is made possible via the party they rarely elect (federal programs subsidizing the poor and disabled, for example). Labor standards and work regulations,the five-day workweek, overtime pay, protections against wage theft and arbitrary dismissals all come from labor unions and Democrats. Not magic.
This is why recent Korean electoral history is all the more disheartening. Conservative governance brought decades of president-dictators, summary executions, torture, repression of political speech, and the decay of civic life.
The first real, democratic president, Kim Young-sam, was elected by the people. He followed the rule of law, and was from a progressive party. Each successive progressive party's leader who won the presidency endeavored to make education more affordable, and healthcare and childcare more accessible.
President Moon is already continuing this pattern. His administration will drastically increase wages for conscripted soldiers, boost subsidies for the impoverished elderly, and create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Korea's underemployed, overeducated, young, adult population through public/private partnerships
Former President Lee Myung-bak, a conservative, did none of these. And of course, we all know how the conservative's absentee, puppet ex-president, Park Geun-hye, was impeached for a litany of alleged crimes.
In Korea, like elsewhere, conservative ideology is a religion. Facts and empirical evidence do not persuade most adherents thereof. Cutting taxes for the rich does not spur the economy. Yet, they swear it does. Strong public investment in education, including tertiary education, ensuring affordable childcare and wage parity for women spurs economic growth. They disagree. American conservatives are much worse, of course: climate change isn't real. Healthcare should be controlled by the free market. Even Korean conservatives don't believe this foolishness.
President Moon is a progressive. I hope Koreans remember all what he and his party have done to improve the electorate's quality of life when parliamentary and presidential elections come around. I hope they ask, "What have you done for me lately?"
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.
.jpg/dims/resize/740/optimize) |
Way too often, when Republicans and conservatives talk about race relations and social justice in America, they parrot the same tired refrain: "We're the party of Lincoln. Our party freed the slaves." That was over a century and a half ago.
Whenever I hear this refrain, all I can hum is "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" The answer is: not much, or worse, harm.
Republicans, and more broadly, conservatives, have been against every socioeconomic, sociopolitical advancement in American history since Reconstruction. Worse, at least since the late 1960s, Republicans have nurtured white angst, racial animosity, and white supremacy as key motivators to lock up much of the American South and several presidencies.
The late Lee Atwater, Republican uberstrategist to Reagan, et al, made this point quite explicit. In an infamous 1981 recorded interview, (a forty-two-minute recording discovered in its entirety by James Carter IV), Atwater explains how Republicans win racists without sounding racist. We call these signifiers "dog whistles" today:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say ‘nigger'— that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.'"
Breathtaking. The entire interview, entitled "Exclusive: Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy" can be read and heard on "The Nation" website.
No surprise, then, that Reagan started his successful 1980 presidential campaign at a rally talking about "states' rights" (a phrase segregationists coined in the 1960s to keep states racially divided in housing, education, and the like) in the very same Mississippi county in which three civil rights activists were murdered in the 1960s.
Democrats, of which progressives and leftists aggregate, are far and away better at addressing sociopolitical and socioeconomic problems than Republicans: Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, The Disability, Civil and Voting Rights Acts, and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, are good examples. Social Security has lifted more people (poor and elderly) out of poverty than any federal program in American history. It's an unmitigated success. Keeping it well funded would simply mean increasing the cap on taxable income.
Far too many American's don't even have a cursory understanding of history. Poor, working whites have more or less voted along conservative lines for generations.Meanwhile, their very survival is made possible via the party they rarely elect (federal programs subsidizing the poor and disabled, for example). Labor standards and work regulations,the five-day workweek, overtime pay, protections against wage theft and arbitrary dismissals all come from labor unions and Democrats. Not magic.
This is why recent Korean electoral history is all the more disheartening. Conservative governance brought decades of president-dictators, summary executions, torture, repression of political speech, and the decay of civic life.
The first real, democratic president, Kim Young-sam, was elected by the people. He followed the rule of law, and was from a progressive party. Each successive progressive party's leader who won the presidency endeavored to make education more affordable, and healthcare and childcare more accessible.
President Moon is already continuing this pattern. His administration will drastically increase wages for conscripted soldiers, boost subsidies for the impoverished elderly, and create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Korea's underemployed, overeducated, young, adult population through public/private partnerships
Former President Lee Myung-bak, a conservative, did none of these. And of course, we all know how the conservative's absentee, puppet ex-president, Park Geun-hye, was impeached for a litany of alleged crimes.
In Korea, like elsewhere, conservative ideology is a religion. Facts and empirical evidence do not persuade most adherents thereof. Cutting taxes for the rich does not spur the economy. Yet, they swear it does. Strong public investment in education, including tertiary education, ensuring affordable childcare and wage parity for women spurs economic growth. They disagree. American conservatives are much worse, of course: climate change isn't real. Healthcare should be controlled by the free market. Even Korean conservatives don't believe this foolishness.
President Moon is a progressive. I hope Koreans remember all what he and his party have done to improve the electorate's quality of life when parliamentary and presidential elections come around. I hope they ask, "What have you done for me lately?"
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.
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