More depressing thoughts about race in America

Digby has an incisive long post about how American resistance to a social insurance state is tangled up in racism. It's one of those it's even worse than I thought kinds of things. It's also one of those white people need to get with the program kinds of things.

This ancient attachment to racism in this country is going to finally bring us down if we do not force it out of the body politic once and for all. The need is urgent, not just on a moral basis --- the moral case is always urgent --- but on a pragmatic, survival basis as well. The American frontier is closed, our total dominance of the world economy is rapidly diminishing and globalization and technology are pressuring the middle and working classes of this country in ways that we are only now beginning to see. This path of ever lower taxes and higher deficits in service of a nonsensical insistence on the ruination of public schools, a refusal to endow universal health care, a systematic destruction of social security and the combined devastation of rolling back workplace regulations while destroying unions is based on a theological belief in unfettered capitalism and American ''individualism.'' This romantic notion manifests itself as modern Republicanism but, in fact, it is nothing more than the same phony excuse for opportunism and racism that has existed since the founding.