patrick.net

Until 2008, she stayed out of the partisan fray, watching Barack Obama's ascent with scholarly interest. In her first book, 1993's Black Faces, Black Interests, she argued that linking race and representation would only undermine political gains. Party affiliation matters more than race in representing voters' interests. Or, in poli sci lingo, substantive representation outweighs descriptive representation; she showed that voters don't need their elected officials to look like them.

White voters would gladly support a black candidate if he were a convincing enough moderate to promise racial healing across party lines, she predicted. Our first black president, Swain wrote in December 2006 for Ebony, would be someone like freshman senator from Illinois Barack Obama or former national security adviser Colin Powell, men whose immigrant backgrounds relieve them and their voters of the "baggage" of the civil rights era. (Obama declared his candidacy in early February following a family vacation, a typical time to catch up on magazine reading, Swain slyly noted in our first call.)

She lost hope, however, when the influence of Obama's spiritual mentor, black liberation preacher Jeremiah Wright, came to light: "I know that if you really are interested in bringing together people of different races, you don't belong to a black nationalist church." President Obama "did everything to start a race war," she continued, arguing that he and Democrats during his two terms in office "racialized every issue" while declining to condemn racially or religiously motivated violence by name. "You can't stir it, bring up all this stuff," she said, "and then put it back in this box to pull it out during election time." She finds common ground with those who criticize Obama's racial legacy from the left: He took political advantage of racial anxiety but did not deign to address it. The agreement stops there, though. Swain voted for Mike Huckabee in the 2008 primary, according to one former student. Last year, she held out for Ted Cruz as long as he held on.


She's taken to Facebook, YouTube, newspaper columns—and even shelled out for a paid-programming talk show—to carry forth her truth unto a more willing audience than academia offers. Appearing on Fox News with increasing frequency in the last decade signaled to colleagues and friends, those who first knew Carol Swain as a promising young political scientist in the 1990s, that she's not as interested as she used to be in being a serious scholar, I'm told. Her latest books, Be the People: A Call to Reclaim America's Faith and Promise (2011) and Abduction: How Liberalism Steals Our Children's Hearts and Minds (2016), aren't exactly pitched to her peers in the professoriate either.

She's a thorny nationalist on the matter of mass immigration, illegal and otherwise, but welcomes debate while making her position unequivocally clear: "I cannot condone illegal immigration, nor can I close my eyes to the negative impact of mass immigration on the quality of life and opportunities of native-born American citizens who so desperately want their own taste of the American dream," she wrote in Be the People, after noting that immigrants she's known have "blessed my life enormously." (She's curating a second volume of scholarly essays on immigration.) She called for heightened monitoring of Muslims—in a fatefully controversial 2015 op-ed, for one—before it seemed a political possibility.