He’s A Different Color But We’re The Same Kid, I’ll Treat Him Like My Brother He’ll Treat Me Like His»

This is outside the lane of my blog, but my friend John Judis has written one of the best pieces you’ll read about the persistence of racism in American political attitudes.

With the help of Harvard doctoral student Scott Winship, I looked at the levels of racial resentment in ANES data from 1988, 1992, and 2000 (the questions were omitted in 1996). What Winship and I found was that resentment was highest among males rather than females, the middle class rather than the wealthy or poor, those lacking a college degree, those who worked in skilled or semi-skilled blue collar jobs or as laborers, and residents of small towns in the Midwest and South. Does that profile sound familiar? It’s more or less a description of the white working-class voters who have spurned Obama and with whom John Kerry and Al Gore had trouble. The only groups that didn’t evince racial animosity toward blacks were voters with post-graduate degrees and, of course, African Americans. Hispanics were nearly as prejudiced as whites, and a group labeled “other” that includes Asian Americans was even more so–a partial explanation, perhaps, for why Obama fared so poorly among these groups in California. Clearly, racial resentment persisted–just in a more nuanced form.

Watch Me Crank Dat Watch Me Roll»

While searching for something in Peter Scoblic’s awesome new book U.S. vs. Them — see! I don’t think everything about The New Republic sucks — I came across what might be the most unfortunate language ever used to describe nuclear war. It amounts to the Soulja Boy doctrine:

The “solution” that many analysts embraced was to limit a nuclear war. The United States should not plan, per the [Single Integration Operations Plan] to launch the entirety of the nuclear arsenal in what Herman Kahn, one of RAND’s leading theorists, dubbed a “war orgasm.”

Um. Peter? Maybe you shouldn’t–

Instead, if it had to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict — say, because the Red Army invaded Western Europe, overwhelming American troops — it should first target Soviet military forces. Nuclear weapons might stop a conventional assault, and if the United States also targeted Soviet nuclear forces, they would impede Moscow’s ability to retaliate in kind. The United States could then hold Soviet cities hostage to a second U.S. strike, meaning that in the best case the Soviets might be deterred from retaliating at all. In this way, RAND analysts theorized the United States might actually be able to win a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Resorting to his own sexual metaphor, [nuclear theorist Bernard] Brodie likened the SIOP to orgasmic intercourse, whereas the RAND strategy was equivalent to withdrawal before ejaculation. More formally, this approach was known as counterforce.

In other words, by the mid-1960s, we don’t SIOP no mo’, we just counterforce that ho. Now yooooooooooooooou.