It’s rather unusual for high-profile columnists at the same newspaper to engage in a public quarrel, but the NYT’s Paul Krugman and David Brooks have been going at it, slyly.
In a recent column about race and politics, Krugman noted the Republican Party’s use of the Southern Strategy to pit whites and blacks against one another. It’s a point Krugman also emphasized in his brilliant new book, “The Conscience of a Liberal.”
Republican politicians, who understand quite well that the G.O.P.’s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites, have tacitly acknowledged this reality. Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.
Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered.
David Brooks responded this week, without mentioning Krugman by name, but nevertheless subtly slamming his colleague for his use of the Reagan anecdote.
Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.
Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion…. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence.
Krugman returned the volley yesterday, still refraining from mentioning Brooks’ name.
As Krugman explained on his blog, Reagan’s defenders would have us believe that his “states’ rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was just an “innocent mistake,” which Reagan managed to make over and over again.
When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.
When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as the New York Times reported, “The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression ‘young buck,’ which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.” But the appearance that Reagan was playing to Southern prejudice was just an innocent mistake.
Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South,” he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.
In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.
And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.
Your turn, Mr. Brooks. I seriously doubt there’s a compelling response to this, but feel free to give it a shot.