The Roots of Romney’s Remarks

During the 1976 Republican Presidential primary, Ronald Reagan began telling an anecdote about a Chicago woman who had defrauded the welfare system by creating eighty aliases in order to collect a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year in benefits. Newspapers reported that the woman, Linda Taylor, had used four aliases and collected about eight thousand dollars, but the legend of the “welfare queen” proved immune to fact-checking. The term emerged at a point when incendiary racial views were common, but the still recent national tumult over civil rights had changed the way those views could be expressed. “Welfare queen” heralded an era in which bigoted views could be euphemized, encoded, and then publicly pronounced thanks to their new patina of plausible deniability. Beyond this, it became a kind of shorthand for big government, a signifier that helped make the words “welfare state” a term of derision.

It’s not at all surprising that the Presidential candidate of a party that so idolizes Reagan would deploy loaded terms like “victim” and “personal responsibility,” as Mitt Romney did in secretly recorded remarks at a fundraiser this spring. What is surprising—though perhaps it shouldn’t be—is that he did so while talking about millions of white people.

At first glance, it would be easy to chalk up Romney’s remarks as a product of Paul Ryan’s influence, or as part of a Randian echo chamber within the Republican campaign, except that Romney made these statements in May—nearly three months before he announced Ryan as his running mate. Either the two men are much more ideologically aligned than we knew, or there’s something broader at play. At their core, Romney’s comments highlight the way language and derision that was once reserved as a reference for the black poor has become applicable to an increasingly broad array of Americans.

In Romney’s defense, he didn’t navigate his way to this political cliff alone. Opponents of President Obama’s health-care-reform bill tarred it as a government giveaway (Rush Limbaugh referred to it as a backdoor means for Obama to give blacks reparations for slavery). The 2010 legislative fight over extending unemployment benefits featured the argument that the program encouraged laziness. There were tones of this same contempt for parasitism in the debates surrounding public-sector labor unions in Wisconsin and Ohio earlier this year.

But Romney’s comments implied that nearly half the public—the recently unemployed, the working poor, the elderly, students—could be thought of in the same terms, and that they were all voting for his opponent. Linda Taylor, it would seem, was simply the tip of the iceberg.

In June, Pew released a study showing that partisanship has become the widest gulf in our society, more predictably indicating divisions among Americans than race, gender, age, or class. But, as Romney’s comments about the forty-seven per cent would suggest, perhaps that is because partisanship has become a stand-in for those other fault lines, that “Democrat” and “Obama supporter” have become code words of their own. If that is the case, it’s almost easy to see why Romney would conflate Obama voters with moochers—we’ve been moving toward making them synonymous for years.

Numerous posts have already pointed out who actually pays no federal income tax, but in neatly conflating Obama’s supporters with that group, Romney brushed away a portion of his own electorate: people who are, presumably, fiercely proud that terms like “victim” and “entitled” don’t apply to them. Romney’s problem, actually, is that he’s doing the opposite of race-baiting—it’s not a code word when it applies to everyone. Or, at least, forty-seven per cent of everyone.

Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Jelani Cobb