It's Kamala!

[Dill]

(08-17-2020, 12:02 PM)hollodero Wrote: Dill: By that same token of distance, there is absolutely no reason to suppose you and your neighbors would raise the meritocratic standard to fight a "rear guard action" to defend a US status quo, especially one you, personally, have always been critical of. You've generally been a touchstone of rational clarity in this forum. My humble apologies if I have given you the impression I thought otherwise. My intent was to SEPARATE, not conflate,  your defense of meritocracy from that of Ingraham and others by emphasizing the difference in context.

Well, to be fair, you also lumped them together in the first place. Meritocratic arguments per se do not have any historic context, they just have a somewhat logical, well, merit. I am certain though without a dozen more examples that meritocratic arguments, as you put it, were used time and again to defend the racially unjust status quo throughout history and up to this day. But this approach also can lead to a killer argument, like saying "you believe the earth is round? You know who else believed that? Hitler." I'm not trying to say you do something akin to that, I'm saying that Laura Ingraham or other right-wing voices don't need to be part of this debate at all, and the existence of Laura Ingraham etc. etc. doesn't need to result in automatically refuting meritocratic arguments. This isn't about the right wing. What I could say about the right wing though is that it can be observed how they start to use the same racism arguments now - like Biden is a racist for saying blacks vote for him or they ain't black or that the hispanic vote is more diverse. No he's not a racist, he's just a bit dull at times. But the quality of the racist takedown is something the right wing learned by observation.

That's probably true. Doesn't mean all they do is not just pandering without leaving them as marginalized as before. It depends on what people do, it also depends on what Kamala Harris will do, it doesn't depend on what skin color or gender she is.

Not sure where I Lumped them together. And I don't think contextualizing arguments to understand what they are intended to accomplish at a specific moment and what specific effects they have had that encourage re-deployment can lead to arguments like "You know who else believed the earth is round?" Which precisely erase those concerns. De-historicizing arguments is what leads to "Hitler did too."

But what you say above I think makes clear where we misunderstand each other. I am saying Ingraham et al. made themselves a part of the debate when they began using the meritocratic argument to defend a racial status quo by saying race should never displace merit as a criterion for advancement. I am arguing, then, not against the principle of meritocracy, but against a specific deployment of it in US race politics because it has been truly devastating to affirmative action efforts. This argument does not entail a rejection of merit as principle for selection of political candidates. But it has to be made as part of a more general effort to explain and hopefully counter systemic racism. 

In explaining this, I have in the past found it useful to start with examples everyone can agree on and understand, like marching band auditions ostensibly based only on merit, and then transition to more complex cases which make clear how the meritocratic argument can serve as a racial bar precisely by uncoupling selection from race. The remaining question now is whether or where that argument continues to work today. My answer is yes. That is what is happening when Ingraham goes off on how Dems rely on identity politics--as if white identity politics were not fundamental to her politics--instead of seeking "the best person" for vp. So I'm puzzled by your insistence the merit argument has nothing to do with the Right, with Ingraham. Are you still defending what I am not disputing, that merit is really a very important and valid standard in selecting leaders? I grant that it is so independently of what Ingraham thinks. But when she deploys it, it is not used independently of "the right" and what she thinks.

The "quality of the racist takedown" is a concern for the Right because they have so often defended racism, and racists like the current president. They feel the accusation even when it is not made.  Since this history is not open to direct refutation, the next best thing is to claim "both sides do it"--hence the frenetic search for racist Dems/Dem statements to distract from those policy differences that attract the vast majority of Black voters to Dems, regardless of their verbal stumbles.