This post first appeared on Politico.com. Author and legal scholar Ian Haney López recently appeared on Moyers & Company to talk with Bill about his book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. 
 
 Paul Ryan triggered a firestorm of recrimination this week. Speaking recently on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio program, the Wisconsin Republican and self-styled budget wonk linked poverty to “this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” 
 
 Setting aside the factual claim — the notion that poverty is especially concentrated in America’s inner cities is an increasingly antiquated one — these comments elicited a quick and forceful rebuke from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), who decried them as “a thinly veiled racial attack.” She explained: “[W]hen Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says, ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black.’” 
 
 Ryan has since backpedaled, protesting that race was nowhere in his thoughts: “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.” 
 
 Maybe so, but there’s a history here that the Republican Party can’t ignore — one that explains why Lee was so quick to jump on his comments, why the Congressional Black Caucus announced themselves “deeply troubled” by remarks they described as “highly offensive” and why so many others have sharply criticized Ryan. 
 
 By calling out his use of “code words,” Lee put Ryan in the company of past politicians who have blown the proverbial dog whistle — using surreptitious references to race to garner support from anxious voters. Examples of dog whistling include Barry Goldwater’s endorsement of “states’ rights”; Richard Nixon’s opposition to “forced busing”; Ronald Reagan’s blasts against “welfare queens”; and George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ad. 
 
 These instances of racial pandering typically have been treated as disconnected eruptions, when in fact the GOP has made a concerted effort to win support through racial appeals. This pattern is so entrenched — and so well known — that two different chairs of the Republican National Committee have acknowledged and apologized for this strategy. 
 
 “By the seventies and into the eighties and nineties,” RNC chair Ken Mehlman said in a 2005 speech before the NAACP, “Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” Five years later, his successor Michael Steele similarly acknowledged that “for the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.” 
 
 Despite the mea culpas, race baiting has continued: recall New Gingrich’s 2012 tarring of Barack Obama as “the best food-stamp president in American history.” Or consider another Gingrich jibe from the last election: “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” he claimed. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.” 
 
 What, then, of Paul Ryan? Was he dog whistling? To many, his strong echoing of Gingrich, coupled with the larger GOP history of racial pandering, suggested so. Nor did Ryan help himself by invoking the conservative scholar Charles Murray — a man who co-wrote a controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve, tying intelligence to race, and who in 2000 explained that genetics will likely show, “One reason that we still have poverty in the United States is that a lot of poor people are born lazy.” 
 
 But what of Ryan’s insistence he did not consider race whatsoever, or his later explanation that he had been “inarticulate” in his comments? Perhaps Ryan genuinely did not recognize the racial narrative embedded in his remarks about an inner city culture that devalues work. But at best, this suggests that Ryan has uncritically adopted the charged rhetoric of his party without understanding its racial undertones. 
 
 Less charitably, in weighing Ryan’s protestations of innocence, we should be clear that denying racial intent is par for the course in dog whistling. The whole point of speaking in coded terms is to transmit racial messages that can be defended as not about race at all. Today’s broadly shared anti-racist ethos condemns naked appeals to racial solidarity; those politicians who nevertheless seek to trade on racial provocations must do so in ways that maintain plausible deniability. 
 
 Another defense is to insist that Ryan is no bigot. Here’s one version, from Republican political strategist Ron Christie: “Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is not racist nor did he blow a ‘dog whistle’ to launch a thinly veiled racist attack against black people. I offer this from the perspective of someone who has known Paul for more than 20 years: there is not a racist bone in his body.” The fact that Christie is black no doubt lends credibility to his testimony. 
 
 Ian Haney López on Dog Whistle Politics 
 
 But this retort misses the point. Dog whistling is not rooted in fiery hatred but rather in cool calculation — it’s the strategic, carefully considered decision to win votes by stirring racial fears in society. Suppose we stipulate that Ryan is no bigot. So what? The question is not one of animus on Ryan’s part, but of whether — as a tactical matter — he sought to garner support by indirectly stimulating racial passions. 
 
 Of course, an individual’s mindset in any particular instance is almost impossible to know. We cannot be certain what Ryan intended. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that Ryan employed rhetoric closely connected to a dismal history of Republican racial demagoguery. 
 
 Barbara Lee was correct to respond forcefully. In our political culture, dog whistling all too often takes the form of warnings about a “tailspin of culture” in the “inner cities” and “generations of men not even thinking about working.” Sharply rebuked, hopefully Ryan and others will think twice — or, if Ryan is to be believed, then think for the first time — about using political rhetoric imbued with ugly racial stereotypes. ||||| One of the worst traits of some left-liberals is their easy resort to calling those who disagree with them bigots or racists or worse. There are some sites on the web that seem almost entirely devoted to patrolling the discourse for any sign of sin. This one’s a homophobe; this one’s a racist; so-and-so said this and that could be – shock! – prejudiced. It can sometimes be a way to avoid engaging arguments rather than tackling them. And so, on cue, Paul Ryan is taking heat for these remarks: 
 
 We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with. 
 
 He noted that “Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard – those guys have written books on this.” Cue liberal freakout. Josh Marshall focuses on the citation of Murray: 
 
 When you start off by basing your arguments around the work of Charles Murray you just lose your credibility from the start as someone actually interested in addressing poverty or joblessness or really doing anything other than coming up with reasons to cut off what little assistance society provides for its most marginalized members or, alternatively, pumping up people with racial resentments against black people and giving them ersatz ‘scholarship’ to justify their racial antipathies. That’s because Murray’s public career has been based on pushing the idea that black urban poverty is primarily the fault of black people and their diseased ‘culture.’ Relatedly, and more controversially, he has argued that black people are genetically inferior to white people and other notional races with regards to intelligence. Yes, that last part should be crystal clear: Murray is best known for attempting to marshal social science evidence to argue that black people are genetically not as smart as white people. 
 
 Sigh. Josh seems to be arguing that Murray blames all resilient urban black poverty on culture …. and then blames it all on genes! Pick one canard, would be my advice. And the truth is: in The Bell Curve, Murray was concerned about the role of genes and environment in the resilient IQ differentials among different ethnic groups, as anyone who actually read his book (I did, most liberals wouldn’t) would know. As for the notion that Murray is useless in actually attempting to help urban poverty, has Josh ever heard of the book Losing Ground? It was the key text for the Clinton welfare reforms of the 1990s – which even Obama now concedes he dismissed too easily. 
 
 And it is simply untrue that Murray has argued that “black people are genetically inferior to white people and other notional races with regards to intelligence.” Murray’s work specifically insists that there are countless African-Americans with higher IQs than countless whites and Asians and Hispanics. (He has recently focused his efforts on white poverty as well – which would seem to disprove some of Josh’s claims.) It’s just that the bell curve (which was the title of the whole fricking book) starts at a slightly different place for different racial groupings – something that drives blank slate liberals nuts with cognitive dissonance. Years later, the differentials still exist. Why do you think there are de facto quotas to prevent brainy Asians from dominating the Ivy League? But of course, nothing drives ideologues nuts like reality. 
 
 One more thing: I’m sure Murray has gotten used to this distortion of his work. But it still strikes me as outrageous that a scholar like Murray is subjected to being called a racist of the worst sort and a dishonest scholar – simply because the resilient data support his core point, and because he dares to cite genetics. (It’s an old and great line that liberals believe nothing is genetic but homosexuality, while conservatives believe everything is genetic except homosexuality. For my part, it seems pretty damn obvious that almost all human behavior is a function of both – and the interaction between them.) 
 
 Josh goes another round: 
 
 
 
 Weigel notes that it’s not necessarily clear that Ryan was referencing The Bell Curve. He might just as well have been talking about Losing Ground, the critique of liberal social policies, particularly welfare, which put Murray on the map in the 1980s or his more recent work on the ‘white underclass’. To which I would say, maybe? Who knows? And really, who cares? At the risk of sounding wrenchingly corny, The Bell Curve is a bell you simply cannot un-ring. As Joan Walsh notes here, in the years since publishing The Bell Curve, Murray has slightly softened his argument. He now refers to IQ and what he believes is the mental inferiority of African-Americans not as ‘genetic’ but rather as ‘intractable.’ By this Murray seems to mean that there are too many factors playing into intelligence to definitively say genetics are behind what he claims are the mental/intellectual shortcomings of black people. The deficit is simply ‘intractable’ – by which he means that whatever mix of genetics, culture and circumstance create it, nothing can be done to change it in any meaningful way. 
 
 But if Josh had read the original book, he would have seen that that was Murray’s argument all along! “Intractable” means a function of both culture and genes. Now I should make clear that I’m not entirely persuaded by Charles’ thesis. I think it’s too fatalist and gloomy. The plasticity of IQ is obvious, and culture may matter far more in the long run. If Murray’s thesis requires no government action to help the poor, I’m as opposed to it as David Frum. But Murray is an intellectual adventurer. He speaks things we only talk about in our own heads. And his original prediction – that modern, SAT-based, liberal economies will, over time, lead to greater and greater inequality has not exactly been proven unfounded, has it? And referencing Murray – along with Bob Putnam, one should add – is perfectly appropriate when talking about arguments about poverty and how to tackle it. 
 
 Michael Sean Winters gives Ryan the benefit of the doubt: 
 
 First, we on the left have been complaining that Republicans like don’t give a hoot about the poor, and not without cause. I remember Cong. Ryan speaking at Georgetown in 2012 and talking about subsidiarity and federalism and how the federal government should not be the lead actor in anti-poverty efforts. I thought at the time: That would be credible if he could point to any single Republican governor or mayor who was actually attempting some innovative anti-poverty efforts, but he can’t, so the invocation of subsidiarity in this regard is a smokescreen. It is obvious that Ryan has been trying to wrestle with the issue of poverty since then, and I think we have an obligation not to throw his words back in his teeth the second they are uttered. That is not the way to create a bipartisan consensus on the need for our nation to confront lingering poverty in our midst. 
 
 By the way, check out Murray’s responses in our Ask Anything series to get his recent take on the Bell Curve criticism. A long thread on race and IQ is here. ||||| Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait. 
 
 Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People. 
 
 Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics. 
 
 We are told, for example, that conservatives are against big government and high spending. Yet even as Republican governors and state legislatures block the expansion of Medicaid, the G.O.P. angrily denounces modest cost-saving measures for Medicare. How can this contradiction be explained? Well, what do many Medicaid recipients look like — and I’m talking about the color of their skin, not the content of their character — and how does that compare with the typical Medicare beneficiary? Mystery solved. 
 
 Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees. Instead, all the movement’s passion, starting with Rick Santelli’s famous rant on CNBC, has been directed against any hint of financial relief for low-income borrowers. And what is it about these borrowers that makes them such targets of ire? You know the answer. 
 
 One odd consequence of our still-racialized politics is that conservatives are still, in effect, mobilizing against the bums on welfare even though both the bums and the welfare are long gone or never existed. Mr. Santelli’s fury was directed against mortgage relief that never actually happened. Right-wingers rage against tales of food stamp abuse that almost always turn out to be false or at least greatly exaggerated. And Mr. Ryan’s black-men-don’t-want-to-work theory of poverty is decades out of date. 
 
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 In the 1970s it was still possible to claim in good faith that there was plenty of opportunity in America, and that poverty persisted only because of cultural breakdown among African-Americans. Back then, after all, blue-collar jobs still paid well, and unemployment was low. The reality was that opportunity was much more limited than affluent Americans imagined; as the sociologist William Julius Wilson has documented, the flight of industry from urban centers meant that minority workers literally couldn’t get to those good jobs, and the supposed cultural causes of poverty were actually effects of that lack of opportunity. Still, you could understand why many observers failed to see this. 
 
 But over the past 40 years good jobs for ordinary workers have disappeared, not just from inner cities but everywhere: adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen for 60 percent of working American men. And as economic opportunity has shriveled for half the population, many behaviors that used to be held up as demonstrations of black cultural breakdown — the breakdown of marriage, drug abuse, and so on — have spread among working-class whites too. 
 
 These awkward facts have not, however, penetrated the world of conservative ideology. Earlier this month the House Budget Committee, under Mr. Ryan’s direction, released a 205-page report on the alleged failure of the War on Poverty. What does the report have to say about the impact of falling real wages? It never mentions the subject at all. 
 
 And since conservatives can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of what’s happening to opportunity in America, they’re left with nothing but that old-time dog whistle. Mr. Ryan wasn’t being inarticulate — he said what he said because it’s all that he’s got. ||||| WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican Representative Paul Ryan on Friday agreed to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus after members of the group branded his remarks about inner-city poverty this week "highly offensive". 
 
 The controversy began on Wednesday after Ryan said on William Bennett's talk radio show, "Morning in America," that there was a "tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value of work." 
 
 Representative Barbara Lee of California, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, called Ryan's remarks a "thinly veiled racial attack." 
 
 "Let's be clear, when Mr. Ryan says 'inner city,' when he says, 'culture,' these are simply code words for what he really means: 'black'," Lee said in a statement. 
 
 Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate, is known for budgets with proposed deep cuts to programs that help the poor. The potential 2016 presidential contender has made a point of proposing Republican solutions to ease poverty that focus on the private sector. 
 
 The Wisconsin lawmaker, who chairs the House Budget Committee, said in a statement that he "was inarticulate" about the point he was trying to make. 
 
 "I was not implicating the culture of one community, but of society as a whole," Ryan said. "We have allowed our society to isolate or quarantine the poor rather than integrate people into our communities. The predictable result has been multi-generational poverty and little opportunity." 
 
 Last week Ryan released a report on the federal government's 50-year-old "War on Poverty" that concluded that many of the 92 federal programs aimed at assisting the poor were "haphazard" and contributed to a "poverty trap" that keeps people dependent on welfare benefits. 
 
 Representative Marcia Fudge, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Representative Gwen Moore, also from Wisconsin, sent Ryan a letter in which they called his talk radio remarks "highly offensive" and invited him to a meeting of the caucus to discuss ways to eradicate poverty. 
 
 "A serious policy conversation on poverty should not begin with assumptions or stereotypes," they wrote. 
 
 Ryan spokesman William Allison said on Friday the House Budget Committee chairman "would welcome a productive conversation on how to better fight poverty, and he looks forward to meeting with the CBC in the near future." 
 
 Allison declined to comment on the timing for Ryan's 2015 budget plan. 
 
 House Speaker John Boehner has repeatedly said the House would pass a budget this year that would reach balance within 10 years. This would require deep cuts in federal benefit programs, especially if previously agreed discretionary spending levels for 2015 are maintained. 
 
 Republican lawmakers and aides said on Friday that party leaders were polling rank-and-file members to gauge support in the caucus for a budget that balances in 10 years, indicating some uncertainty over the path forward. 
 
 No Democrats are likely to vote for a Ryan budget, so to pass, it would need 218 votes out of the party's 233 House members. 
 
 A two-year budget deal negotiated by Ryan and Democratic Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray had to rely on Democrats for passage as 62 Republicans voted against it. 
 
 (Reporting By David Lawder) ||||| I wrote here about the Democratic Party’s disgraceful attempt to smear Paul Ryan and Bill Bennett as part of their ongoing fundraising effort. Last week, Ryan appeared on Bennett’s Morning In America radio show and, among other topics, he and Bennett discussed urban poverty. This is what Ryan said, as transcribed by me: 
 
 Bennett — Fatherless problem is a big one. Ryan — Absolutely — that’s the tailspin or spiral that we’re looking at in our communities — your buddy Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those guys have written books on this, which is, we have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work — so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with. Everybody’s got to get involved. So this is what we talk about when we talk about civil society. If you’re driving from the suburb to the sports arena downtown by these blighted neighborhoods, you can’t just say “I’m paying my taxes, government’s going to fix that.” You need to get involved. You need to get involved yourself, whether through a good mentor program or some religious charity, whatever it is to make a difference, and that’s how we help resuscitate our culture. 
 
 The party of slavery and Jim Crow responded by sending out an email calling Ryan’s words a “thinly veiled racial attack” and a “dog-whistle to ugly racial politics.” The Democrats claimed–without actually quoting Ryan, of course–that he “told ultra-conservative radio host Bill Bennett that poverty in America is caused by a ‘culture problem’ of ‘inner city’ men too lazy to work.” The Democrats’ goal, as always, was to stir up and mislead their party’s faithful so as to raise money. They also called on their followers to sign an online petition denouncing Paul Ryan. 
 
 On Friday, I got a follow-up email from the Democratic Party: 
 
 From: Democratic Headquarters [mailto:[email protected] ] 
 
 Sent: Friday, March 14, 2014 11:13 AM 
 
 To: Hinderaker, John H. 
 
 Subject: Denounce Paul Ryan Thanks for signing! 
 
 I did not, of course, sign the Democrats’ petition. 
 
 This week, Paul Ryan cited a white nationalist… 
 
 They are referring to Charles Murray. Unbelievable. 
 
 …to claim that inner city men have a “culture problem” of “not working.” Paul Ryan can use all the code words he wants but make no mistake — his comments are nothing but a thinly veiled racial attack. 
 
 Labor force participation among African-Americans is at a record low of around 60%; in the inner cities, which Ryan was talking about, it is far lower. Barack Obama has acknowledged the problem: “Barack Obama says fewer black, Latino young men participate in the labor force than young white men.” So Ryan was just telling the truth. 
 
 When Republicans use dog whistle politics to justify their dangerous agenda, we need to call them out. We want to get as many signatures as we can denouncing Paul Ryan’s thinly veiled racist attacks. 
 
 Far from being a “thinly veiled racial attack,” Ryan’s point was that listeners should become personally involved through mentoring and supporting religious and other organizations to try to improve labor force participation, and not just leave the intractable problem of urban poverty in the hands of the government. 
 
 Forward this email to three friends right now and ask them to denounce Paul Ryan >> SIGN YOUR NAME HERE –> http://dccc.org/Denounce-Paul-Ryan 
 
 It is impossible to overstate not just how dishonest, but how vicious the Democratic Party is. “Denounce Paul Ryan!” For what? For expressing concern about a very real human problem and urging his radio listeners to try to do something about it. ||||| Regarding the Irish potato famine, the New York Times’s Timothy Egan writes, “There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.” He goes on to make precisely the comparison whose existence he denies, casting Paul Ryan in the role of Sir Charles Trevelyan. In addition to batting about average for a Sunday Review pontificator — the above quotation comprising the 24 sensible words in a 1,000-word column — Egan offers a perfect distillation of the liberal view of Paul Ryan and his concern about the culture of dependency: that it is “heartless,” “dangerous,” “mean-spirited,” and based on intellectual dishonesty. 
 
 On the subject of intellectual dishonesty, Ryan has been enduring an additional strand of unfair criticism for having cited a story told by a member of Scott Walker’s cabinet during congressional testimony, which turns out to be made up: 
 
 You know, a little boy told me once that what was important to him is that he didn’t want school lunch, he wanted a brown bag because the brown bag that he brought with his lunch in it meant that his mom cared about him. Just think what we have done. If this kid tells me a brown bag was more important than a free lunch, we’ve missed the whole notion of parents being there for their children because we’ve taken over that responsibility, and I think we need to be very careful about how we provide programs to families that don’t undermine families’ responsibilities. 
 
 The anecdote is fiction, though not Paul Ryan’s fiction, but the point it illustrates is heartbreaking nonfiction. We have millions of children in poverty because of families that cannot or will not meet their responsibilities to their children. Children of single-parent homes, which are overwhelmingly single-mother homes, are not only more likely to be poor but are more likely to stay poor. And so are their neighbors: New scholarship from Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that children in single-parent households experience higher rates of economic mobility when they live in communities with relatively high levels of marriage — and that children of married couples experience lower rates of economic mobility when they live in communities in which single-parent households are prevalent. As W. Bradford Wilcox put it, it takes a married village. 
 
 What Paul Ryan understands, and what Timothy Egan and his ilk are professionally and politically committed to not understanding, is that the holistic effect of programs intended to help the poor is to make the lives of the poor worse in significant ways, mainly by encouraging the long-term dependency that concerns Ryan and others. By, for example, penalizing work and subsidizing unemployment, or by penalizing marriage and subsidizing single motherhood, the welfare state creates incentives for people to make choices for the sake of short-term benefits, choices that are destructive for themselves and their families in the long term. As economists at Georgia State University’s Fiscal Research Center put it: “The current federal and state tax-benefit system creates price and income effects. The price effects are due to the phase in and phase outs of the benefits from the programs analyzed in this report. In some cases, the cost of earning an additional $100 of income is a loss of benefits double that amount. The income effects of these programs may influence household decisions regarding work, investing in education and the acquisition of skills, and possibly even marriage and fertility.” 
 
 Ryan, in a conversation with Bill Bennett, linked the problem of welfare dependency to the “tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” For speaking of a true thing that must never be said, Ryan was ritually denounced as a racist by such inspiring figures as Representative Barbara Lee. If we assume as Ryan’s critics do that “inner city” is a synonym for “black,” then consider the facts: Unemployment among inner-city men of all races is estimated to run roughly twice the national rate, while unemployment among black inner-city men in cities such as Milwaukee and Detroit has been estimated to exceed 50 percent; 71 percent of working-age white men are in the labor force, but the corresponding number for black men is only 63.6 percent — and going down. New York City manages to graduate barely half of its black male students from high school — and among high-school dropouts, two-thirds reach the age of 26 without ever having held a full-time job lasting at least one year. And perhaps most significant, the vast majority of blacks are born out of wedlock. You could not come up with a more effective system for producing poverty if you tried. If Paul Ryan is a racist for criticizing those conditions, what shall we call the people who run New York City’s public schools or those who govern Detroit — the people who help create those conditions? 
 
 The evidence regarding poverty, single motherhood, and economic mobility is overwhelming. It is as close to “settled science” as the social sciences have to offer. The question that must be answered is whether the poor’s actual interests are served by those who would help direct them toward marriage, work, and stability, or by those who loudly advertise their own compassion, which, conveniently, costs them very little and pays them very well. 
 
 This is a familiar situation for conservatives, whose Sisyphean task is to explain to the community at large the difference between the intended results of government programs and the actual results of government programs. Spending more money on Head Start and Medicaid sounds like a very good idea until one confronts the evidence that those programs provide few if any lasting and measurable benefits. A mature mind would understand that it is not only possible but likely that programs intended to benefit the poor will in fact harm them. The unhappy fact is that would-be reformers such as Paul Ryan are sitting opposite not mature-minded opponents but rather a collection of sentimentalists and opportunists; the former cannot understand the law of unintended consequences, while the latter are committed to exploiting the intellectual defects of the former for their own political benefit. 
 
 Which is to say: There is no comparison, of course, between a pimp who exploits the poor for his own gratification and a man like Timothy Egan.
– Paul Ryan knew exactly what he was doing in a radio interview last week when he said that the US had a "tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working," Paul Krugman argues in the New York Times today, in the most prominent of several pieces debating the comments. Several Democrats have denounced the comments as racist. Ryan says he was simply being "inarticulate." Here's what people are saying: Ryan was simply "speaking of a true thing that must never be said," write the editors of the National Review. And who's more racist, Ryan "for criticizing those conditions," or "the people who run New York City’s public schools or those who govern Detroit—the people who help create those conditions?" "Paul Ryan was just telling the truth," agrees John Hinderaker at Power Line, pointing out that labor force participation among African Americans is at a record low. "It is impossible to overstate not just how dishonest, but how vicious" these attacks are, he writes. Ryan just expressed concern about "very real human problems" and urged action to fix them. "There's a history here that the Republican Party can't ignore," argues Ian Haney Lopez on Bill Moyers' site. The GOP has used coded racial language for years—two different RNC chairs have even apologized for it. Ryan either "uncritically adopted the charged rhetoric of his party without understanding its racial undertones," or deployed that rhetoric tactically to stoke racial tensions. Krugman agrees, and takes it further, using Ryan's comments as an example of racism he sees baked into GOP rhetoric. "Race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of US politics," he writes. Why does the GOP block spending on Medicaid while opposing cuts to Medicare? "Well, what do many Medicaid recipients look like … and how does that compare with the typical Medicare beneficiary? Mystery solved." Many have denounced Ryan for citing Charles Murray, author of the controversial book, The Bell Curve, which argued that black people have lower average IQs than white people, and that the difference was partially genetic. But Andrew Sullivan calls that, and the attacks on Ryan, a "smear." Murray, he argues, is an unfairly maligned "intellectual adventurer," willing to "speak things we only talk about in our own heads." Ryan, for his part, seems eager to smooth the incident over; he's promised to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus soon to discuss it, a spokesman told Reuters on Friday.