THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

EVERYBODY KNOWS WHO THE HISPANIC-"AMERICANS" ARE LOYAL TO | 2005-04-09

Hispanic-Americans have no loyalty to the United States, and Bush and the media are loyal only to them.

Everybody knows that any politician who tries to do anything about illegal aliens will lose if he has Hispanic voters. The media agree that California Republicans cut their own throats politically when they tried to keep Americans from paying for benefits to known illegal aliens.

Hispanic voters who call themselves Americans have no loyalty at all to Americans. Their only loyalty is to other Hispanics.

If they want me to stop saying that, they will have to stop voting that way.

We all know that the reason Bush opposes protecting the US border is precisely because Hispanic voters are loyal only to other Hispanics, America be damned.

That is the rule Bush lives by. But nobody is allowed to state the rule Bush lives by in plain English.

I just did.

USING TIME | 2005-06-18

During my professor days, I often had to teach basic economics at 8 AM on Monday morning. It was a small nightmare.

First of all, basic economics is very, very boring. Secondly, a lot of students had to take it. Thirdly on Monday morning about everybody in the class, including me, was trying to recover from the weekend.

Spending fifty minutes talking about a notoriously boring subject when you and everybody else in the room feels like hell is a very, very unpleasant thing to have to do.

So I hit on a formula. I told the class that, if they listened to every word I said, my lecture would be over in half the time, twenty-five minutes. After twenty-five minutes, I kept the students who weren't listening in for the whole fifty minutes. I just sat there and felt bad and let the rest go.

Soon I didn't have to keep anybody.

And I found on tests that the class remembered what I said during that twenty-five minutes better than they remembered the material in any other class.

I could say it all twice in twenty-five minutes if everybody was listening.

No one was interested in this.

The job of a professor is to give fifty-minute lectures and sign a piece of paper that says a student took a course. It makes no difference whether the student learns anything. To get promoted a professor has to devote his life to pleasing other professors.

Other professors give him his degree.

Other professors decide whether he gets published.

Other professors vote on giving him tenure.

Other professors decide whether he gets promoted.

One published article is more important to a professor than a thousand students who learn the subject from him.

But the fact remains that twenty-five minutes well used is better than fifty minutes of routine lecture.

REPUBLICANISM GOES BACK TO THE COUNTRY CLUB BY ABANDONING THE FLAG | 2000-05-13

Back in 1962, I was the first chairman of the Richland County Young Republicans. Lake High and I were Goldwater Republicans. The Republican Party had elected its first two Republican state legislators since Reconstruction in off elections that year.

The Kennedy Administration had sent federal troops into Mississippi to integrate the University of Mississippi. The 101st Airborne Division was in occupation of the town of Oxford. But the Republican Party of South Carolina didn't want to talk about that. It might sound unrespectable.

They could have won if they had done what Barry Goldwater did, and screamed the outrage of a people invaded by a Democratic Administration. Goldwater pointed out something Boston would find out some years later. He said the North should not cheer too loudly, because if Federal force could be used to push Social Progress in the South, it could be used everywhere else in the United States.

His prediction has come true again, and again and again, in every area of American life.

So while our region was actually being invaded, what did the Republican Party talk about in its campaigns for a United States Senate seat and a seat in the US House from our state? They talked about "fiscal responsibility."

Lake and I kept trying to persuade these dolts that, if all they talked about was "fiscal responsibility," they would lose all the working class white vote we could have gotten. Just as we predicted, South Carolina Republicans lost everything in 1962. Not only did they lose the House and Senate seats, they even lost the two state house seats they had won before.

But they were respectable. As good Republicans, they had put the conservative cause back by years, but that was of no importance to them at all. They had kept the South Carolina Republican Party respectable for the country club set. The Chamber of Commerce was very happy with them.

It would be many years before the Republican Party would address the traditionalist vote and get the white working class vote, the votes we now call Reagan Democrats. From 1962 to 1980, when they finally really went after those issues, we may have lost America irretrievably. I spent all those years fighting to make this transition.

And what was our reward for losing America? Republican respectability.

Now it's back.

David Beasley has stated nationally that he lost his governorship by switching sides on the Confederate flag in South Carolina. Here was a losing strategy, and there is nothing that respectable conservatives go for more hungrily than something that is bound to lose. So they smacked their traditionalist constituency in the teeth in 2000 on the flag, exactly as they did in 1962 on Mississippi.

Only the Chamber of Commerce and liberal opinion matters. To hell with the base vote of working whites and people who see themselves as Southerners, not as mere economic conservatives.

Respectable conservatives have no memory. They think they are doing something new. But for someone who has a political memory, they are doing the same old disastrous thing one more time.

RACE AND PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY | 2006-04-04

Someone in Public Choice asked me how I could have specialized in Public Choice Theory in grad school and base my politics on race.

He points out, correctly, what Public Choice argues that political behavior is based on PERSONAL, not group, interests.

How can I agree that Public Choice leads to many correct conclusions, yet my motivation is racial, not personal.

I have a short answer to this:

"The essential weakness of Public Choice theory is that it cannot explain why people VOTE in national elections."

"It takes effort, and on big election days standing in line takes a LOT of effort."

"The probability of your vote affecting the outcome, and the resultant effect on YOU, is about zero."

"So:"

"1) What gets people out to vote is a COMMUNAL imperative, a sincere belief that something more than their own interests are at stake."

"The fact is that a person's communal beliefs DO tend to coincide with his personal biases. So a lawyer who votes Democratic because of his personal interests as a trial lawyer genuinely BELIEVES trial lawyers are right for his COMMUNITY."

"Why?"

"2) Because all his influences tend in that direction. But it is not a 'rational' choice based on self-interest. He believes what he supports is genuinely good for the group. Otherwise it would not be rational for him, in personal interest terms, to vote at all. The probability that he will affect the final outcome and therefore his OWN interests by going to all the trouble of voting are so close to zero as makes no difference."

"As usual, my disagreement always begins with something people IN the field do not even notice."

"Your disagreement with my communal or racial ideas is probably related to this same mistake that is fundamental to Public Choice."

"Public Choice, with its unfortunate initials PC, is based based on correct point 2), but it totally ignores Poiint 1)."

"Public Choice reaches many correct conclusions because it relates the natural tendency of people to believe that what is good for them is good for everybody. It rejects the concept of group loyalty."

But this rejection of communal loyalty is disproven by the existence of the vote itself.