Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [51]
In other instances, Reagan stood firm. In a 1984 case concerning another Christian college, the Supreme Court limited the Civil Rights Act’s effectiveness by ruling that its antidiscrimination provisions applied only to discriminatory programs. Therefore, whole institutions could not be penalized for violations by specific departments. In response, Congress amended the Civil Rights Act to override the ruling and restore the previous enforcement capabilities. Reagan vetoed the amendment on the grounds that it would “vastly and unjustifiably expand the power of the Federal Government” and threaten “cherished values as religious liberty”—once again representing (white, Christian) Americans as threatened by civil rights policy.45 But Congress overrode Reagan’s veto.
Reagan didn’t achieve his welfare reform objectives either. While the Democrats did pass a welfare reform bill at Reagan’s urging in 1988, it fell well short of the radical reductions he had championed.
But Reagan’s domestic legacy was not policy. It was mythology. There were two elements to the myth. First, the black beneficiaries of welfare and affirmative action weren’t victims—hence the duplicitous Welfare Queen, the indolent Strapping Young Buck, and the “special privileges” for minorities. Second, the white wage-earners were victims—hence the hamburger meat-eating taxpayers and the “reverse discrimination” against white people.
In chapter 1, we discussed the idea of the zero-sum game, which means that one side’s gain is the other side’s loss. If you view race relations through the prism of a zero-sum game between two teams, then anything that the government does to benefit the black team necessarily damages the white team. Reagan’s mythology framed welfare and affirmative action programs as elements in a zero-sum game between whites and blacks. Welfare for the shiftless blacks robs the industrious whites of their hard-earned incomes. Affirmative action for unqualified blacks discriminates against deserving whites. Thus, those who subscribe to the mythology regard such programs as essentially persecuting white people.
Many of Reagan’s supporters internalized this conflict. Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg coined the term Reagan Democrat in a classic 1984 study that documented the political evolution of Macomb County, Michigan, which had voted overwhelmingly for JFK in 1960 and even more overwhelmingly for Reagan in 1980. According to Greenberg:
These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics. Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives . . . The special status of blacks is perceived by almost all of these individuals as a serious obstacle to their personal advancement. Indeed, discrimination against whites has become a well-assimilated and ready explanation for their status, vulnerability and failures.46
These attitudes survived long after Reagan left office. A 1993 poll showed that 35 percent of whites believed that blacks “generally preferred to accept welfare than work for a living” and 20 percent believed that blacks “were not as hard-working as everyone else,” but 33 percent believed that a black candidate was more likely to be hired than an equally qualified white candidate. Such opinions were not reserved to recalcitrant old grandparents. While a third of those over the age of fifty held prejudiced views, they were nearly matched by people under thirty.47 Similarly, a 1994 poll found that 55 percent of Americans wrongly believed that most welfare beneficiaries were black. Among these, 69 percent assumed that most welfare recipients didn’t want to work, and 64 percent believed that most of them didn’t really need welfare.48