By Joel Mathis
Photo: Former Vice President Joe Biden - Drew
Angerer/Getty Images
Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, a
debate broke out about the future of the Democratic Party: Should it work to
recapture white voters who had fled and voted so overwhelmingly for
Republicans? Or should Democrats continue down the path of so-called "identity
politics" and double down on efforts to build a racially diverse
coalition of voters?
Thanks to developments this week, we can put that choice
in clearer terms: Are Democrats going to be the party of Joe Biden or Ta-Nahesi
Coates?
Judging by the early returns, Bidenism has a limited
future. The real question, perhaps, is whether his approach is still potent
enough that he can win the presidency in 2020?
The likely answer: no.
Let's rewind to last Tuesday night. Biden, the former
vice president and current Democratic presidential candidate, caught
flack after he decided to profess
nostalgia for the early 1970s, a time when he could work side-by-side
in the Senate with notorious Democrat segregationists like Sens. James
O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman
Talmadge of
Georgia and still get stuff done.
"I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never
called me 'boy,' he always called me 'son,'" Biden said Tuesday at a New
York fundraiser, adding: "You go down the list of all these guys. Well
guess what? At least there was some civility."
The
backlash was fierce. Even Sen. Cory Booker — the New Jersey Democrat
who has tried to power his presidential campaign on good vibes and avoiding
confrontation — called
out Biden. "I have to tell Vice President Biden, as someone I respect,
that he is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as
examples of how to bring our country together," Booker said.
Biden refused to
apologize. "I've been involved in civil rights my whole career,"
he said. "Period, period, period."
Coates, meanwhile, isn't running for anything — he is a writer,
not a politician.
But his advocacy for racial justice represents an important
constituency within the Democratic Party: His 2014 cover story for The
Atlantic called "The
Case for Reparations" stirred a dormant debate on the issue. On
Wednesday, he went before a House subcommittee to make a passionate, detailed
plea for the government to start work on the topic.
…
Right now, Democrats seem to be trying to have it both
ways: The Coates agenda is front-and-center in Congress, after all, while Biden
remains at the head of the party's presidential pack.
But the tension can't
last forever — and neither will liberal nostalgia for buddying up with Democrat segregationists.
Joe Biden may or may not win the 2020 nomination, but one
thing is increasingly clear: He has already lost the battle for the Democratic
Party's future.
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RELATED
ARTICLE
THE BAD ECONOMICS OF REPARATIONS
BY JOHN
HINDERAKER | POWERLINE
Photo: Ta-Nehisi Coates - Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Last week a House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing
on reparations at which activist Ta-Nehisi Coates testified. Coates
told the committee that before the Civil War, nearly half of the economic
activity of the United States was generated by cotton produced by slaves.
This
was an implausible claim on its face, for those who know anything about the
pre-Civil War economy.
Had it been true, the South might well have won the war.
Nevertheless, Coates’s assertion was widely repeated in the pres.
At the American
Institute for Economic Research, Phil Magness explains the elementary
fallacy that underlies Coates’s claim:
Coates’s numbers come from Cornell University
historian Ed Baptist’s 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told.
In a key passage in the book, Baptist purports to add up the total value of
economic activity that derived from cotton production, which at $77 million
made up about 5 percent of the estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of the
United States in 1836.
Baptist then committed a fundamental accounting
error.
He proceeded to double and even triple count intermediate transactions
involved in cotton production — things like land purchases for plantations,
tools used for cotton production, transportation, insurance, and credit
instruments used in each.
Eventually that $77 million became $600 million in
Baptist’s accounting, or almost half of the entire antebellum economy of the
United States.
There’s a crucial problem with Baptist’s
approach.
The calculation of GDP, the main formulation of national accounts and
a representation of the dollar amount of economic activity in a country in a
given year, only incorporates the value of final goods and services produced.
The rationale for doing so comes from accounting, as the price of the final
good already incorporates intermediate transactions that go into its production
and distribution.
Baptist’s numbers are not only wrong — they reflect a basic
unfamiliarity with the meaning and definition of GDP.
This is not a mistake that could be made in good faith by
anyone with even a passing acquaintance with economics.
When The Half Has Never
Been Told first appeared in print, economists immediately picked up on
the error. Bradley Hansen of Mary Washington University kicked off the scrutiny
by posting a thorough dissection of Baptist’s errors on his personal blog.
Economic
historians Alan Olmstead (UC-Davis) and Paul Rhode (University of Michigan)
chimed in with a devastating critique of Baptist’s empirics, observing that a
continuation of his “faulty methodology by summing the ‘roles’ of cotton with a
few other primary products” would yield an amount that “easily exceed[ed] 100
percent of GDP” in the antebellum United States — an economic impossibility.
The bottom line?
Slave-produced goods
accounted for “the mid to high single digits, not the 50 percent claim that
Coates repeated.”
In short, this is one more case of the Left making “facts” up
to support its radical political agenda.
