The Michigan governor would not endorse conservative Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, because of his appeals to Democratic segregationists. And when Romney was in Richard Nixon’s cabinet, he drove the president to distraction with his highly public efforts to integrate housing in all-white suburbs.
.. As president of the American Motors Company, briefly among Detroit’s most innovative car makers, Romney believed corporations had multiple stakeholders, as described by Rick Perlstein. If they are people, corporations also constitute a community of individuals who depend on each other. “Each owes a debt to the other,” a biographer quoted Romney as saying. Hoover’s rugged individualism, Romney thought, was “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”
.. As Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Nixon, he was implacable in the view that minorities deserve access to quality housing in affluent white suburbs, so much so he became a political liability. Nixon was not willing, as Romney was, to sacrifice the support of white voters in the name of egalitarianism. Until the president cut off all funding to desegregate suburbia, Romney’s HUD, according to sociologist Christopher Bonastia, “came surprisingly close to implementing unpopular anti-discrimination policies.”
.. With Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968, liberal Republicans were on a path toward extinction. Who was the last? Some say Nelson Rockefeller. Others say George Romney. Others still say Jack Kemp. But a pretty good case can be made for George Romney’s son Mitt, particularly during his first run for president in 2008, before the former Massachusetts governor rejected his record of using liberal methods to achieve Republican goals.
.. The divisive rhetoric never came naturally to Mitt Romney. The ideology of his youth wasn’t steeped in the coded language of the Southern Strategy, as it was for candidates like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who famously called Obama America’s greatest “food-stamp president.” The ideology of Romney’s youth was the opposite.
White America’s ‘Broken Heart’
On the left, the white vote was nearly evenly split in Iowa between Hillary Clinton, a pragmatist who believes that the system can be fixed, and Bernie Sanders, a revolutionary who believes that system must be dismantled. At least on the Democratic side, age, income and liberalism seemed to be the fault lines — older, wealthier, more moderate people preferred Clinton and younger, less wealthy and “very liberal” people preferred Sanders.
.. “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.”
He rattled off the reasons for this rise — suicide, alcoholism and drug overdoses — and then concluded that these white Americans were dying of “a broken heart.”
.. “What the American people understand is this country was based and is based on fairness.” Nonwhite people in this country understand that as a matter of history and heritage this simply isn’t true, but it is a hallowed ideal for white America and one that centers the America ethos.
Indeed, the current urgency about inequality as an issue is really about how some white Americans are coming to live an experience that many minorities in this country have long lived — structural inequity has leapt the racial barrier — and that the legacy to which they fully assumed they were heirs is increasingly beyond their grasp.
.. Last month, the MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted: “This campaign is starting to feel more and more like a long, national nervous breakdown.” For white America, I believe this is true.
Plutocrats and Prejudice
To oversimplify a bit — but only, I think, a bit — the Sanders view is that money is the root of all evil. Or more specifically, the corrupting influence of big money, of the 1 percent and the corporate elite, is the overarching source of the political ugliness we see all around us.
The Clinton view, on the other hand, seems to be that money is the root of some evil, maybe a lot of evil, but it isn’t the whole story. Instead, racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice are powerful forces in their own right.
.. Crucially, the rise of the American hard right was the rise of a coalition, an alliance between an elite seeking low taxes and deregulation and a base of voters motivated by fears of social change and, above all, by hostility toward you-know-who.
.. On the other hand, if the divisions in American politics aren’t just about money, if they reflect deep-seated prejudices that progressives simply can’t appease, such visions of radical change are naïve. And I believe that they are.
Face time: here’s how infants learn from facial expressions
For example, when infants who are first learning to crawl and walk are presented with a possibly dangerous slope, they look to their mothers’ facial expressions for cues. They attempt to descend the slope only when their mothers offer an encouraging smile; they refuse when their mothers discourage them from going.
Similarly, toddlers avoid new toys when mothers pose a fearful facial expression toward them. But they happily approach new toys when mothers show a smiling face.
.. Perhaps even more surprising is that infants prefer the faces of their own race by three months of age, and have trouble distinguishing between faces of other races by nine months.
Researchers call this phenomenon “perceptual narrowing”: it means that newborns’ brains are flexible enough to distinguish between a variety of different faces (even faces of different species) right from birth.
But as they become experts at identifying the faces they see most often, they lose the ability to differentiate between faces that look different from the ones that are most familiar to them. In other words, they begin to have trouble deciding whether two faces of a different race are the same person, or two different people.
.. The good news is that exposure to people from other races on a daily basis can erase this effect.