Enimen and other white producers and consumers of black culture are responsible for the decay of white cultural values?
It sounds like Jeb's really worried about the black Americanization of white America. Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com

To get a sense of Jeb Bush's view of the American worker, I recommend going to 32:20 in his interview last week with members of the New Hampshire Union Leader. What does he say here in the context of how he is going to win Hispanic votes? He thinks most of them and Americans in general do not want "government handouts" and want to "achieve earned success."

These expressions are not empty or ahistorical. These are buttons that the right presses again, and again, and again. Obama, the right says repeatedly, won the election because he promised government cheese to poor people. And by poor people, they mean black people; and by black people, they mean lazy people; and by lazy people, they mean people without a work ethic.

I'm overreacting? I'm overanalyzing Jeb's words? I don't think so.

I finally listened to the whole Union Leader interview this morning and I found no less than four statements that set off the racial alarms in my head (such as Obama uses big words—34:44). As for the statement that Americans need "to work longer hours" (go to 16:20), this, too, has racial significance.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman pointed out in his column "The Laziness Dogma" that the root of this statement is the "nation of takers" discourse that's popular on the right and basically blames poverty not on the greed of the rich, the obscene concentration of wealth, and poorly funded public institutions, but on culture. The problem is not the values of capitalism, but the values of a "culture of poverty."

The paradigmatic "culture of poverty" in the US is black poverty, and according to this line of conservative thinking, black poverty is caused by key values in that culture that are incompatible with the work ethic of a competitive job market. This is the argument that the political scientist Charles Murray made in the book Krugman mentions in his column, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life—I read it in college under the impression that it was a real scientific work, as it appeared to contain a heavy dose of the bio-cultural theories that were circulating the field of evolutionary psychology.

However, since the publication of that controversial book in 1994 (which was disproved 12 years before it even hit the press by Stephen Jay Gould's masterful The Mismeasure of Man), middle-class wages have stagnated, and more and more white people are losing their homes and falling into poverty. Again, instead of blaming greedy bankers and CEO bonuses, the right is blaming culture. But this time, according to Krugman's reading of Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, the problem is whites, particularly those in the lower classes, are becoming and behaving more like the black Americans in Bell Curve.

Krugman writes:

Some of us look at these [social] changes and see them as consequences of an economy that no longer offers good jobs to ordinary workers. This happened to African-Americans first, as blue-collar jobs disappeared from inner cities, but has now become a much wider phenomenon thanks to soaring income inequality. Mr. [Charles] Murray, however, sees the changes as the consequence of a mysterious decline in traditional values, enabled by government programs which mean that men no longer “need to work to survive.” And Mr. Bush presumably shares that view.
The white love of rap music, baggy clothes are so many signs of the decline of white culture.

Before closing this post, I want to point out one more crazy thing in this notorious interview, which, by the way, has convinced me that George is far smarter than Jeb. Along with believing that a garage tinkerer will solve climate change, Jeb Bush wants to replace Obamacare with an Apple Watch. No fucking joke. Go to 47:20, and hear him say: "This device will allow us to empower health care by individuals."