Bill Clinton is no longer revered as the "first black president." Tavis Smiley's rapid-fire commentaries on a popular radio show have been silenced. And the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., self-described defender of the black church, has been derided by many on the Web as an old man who needs to "step off."
They all landed in the black community's doghouse after being viewed as endangering Sen. Barack Obama's chances of being elected president. And the community's desire to protect the first African American ever to be in this position may only grow with his win in North Carolina and his close loss in Indiana this week.
Once Obama is in the White House race relations in America will get really interesting. Will blacks stay as protective toward Obama as they are now? Or will they shift their focus toward criticism of Obama when Obama fails to substantially raise up their status and living standards? How is this going to play out? Does anyone have a guess?
More generally, will the Obama presidency increase or decrease inter-racial animosity? Will the debate over racial preferences intensify? Will Obama manage to increase racial preferences enforcement actions in the courts?
Honesty from others is helpful for understanding the world around you. Does Michelle Obama see America in such a negative light because she's black or a leftist or a multiculturalist or what? Barack's wife speaking in Milwaukee Wisconsin:
"What we've learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback and let me tell you something, for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I've seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it's made me proud. And I feel privileged to be a part of even witnessing this, traveling around states all over this country and being reminded that there is more that unites us than divides us..."
The above comment suggests that Michelle's attitude hasn't changed much since her Princeton undergrad years.
In her 1985 Princeton senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” Michelle LaVaughn Robinson lamented that white professors and classmates always saw her as “Black first and a student second.”
She had surveyed alumni to see whether they sacrificed their commitment to other blacks on the altar of success, and foresaw for herself an uneasy future: “further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.”…
As Michelle Obama wrote in her thesis introduction, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.”…
Want a really big chip-on-her-shoulder First Lady who resents white Americans? You are well on your way to getting one.
Writing for the Washington Post Peter Wehner presents reasons Why Republicans Like Obama.
What is at the core of Obama's appeal?
Part of it is the eloquence and uplift of his speeches, combined with his personal grace and dignity.
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A second reason Republicans appreciate Obama is that he is pitted against a couple, the Clintons, whom many Republicans hold in contempt.
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A third reason for Obama's GOP appeal is that unlike Clinton and especially John Edwards, Obama has a message that, at its core, is about unity and hope rather than division and resentment. He stresses that "out of many we are one."
Note to Republicans: The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.
As of the writing of his 1995 book, Obama appears to have been further to the left than about 95% of the public. For example, his concerns in the late 1980s (and repeated with a straight face in his autobiography) about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.'s church was whether it was not radical enough. Similarly, in Obama's book, there's virtually no criticism of welfare. Indeed, Obama's mission in life when he was a racial activist and then when he became a discrimination lawyer was to get more money out of whites for blacks.
Many people assume that because Obama likes to show that he understands their arguments by paraphrasing them back to them, often better than they made them themselves, that he therefore must agree with them. But it's just conservative egomania to assume that the problem with people who disagree with you is that they don't understand your arguments, and therefore anybody who is smart enough to understand you, like Obama is, must agree with you and have your best interests at heart.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
For example, when Charles De Gaulle visited embattled French Algeria in 1958, the first thing he told a vast crowd of worried pied noirs was, "I have understood you." The French-speakers cried in relief because, finally, France had a leader who understood their plight. De Gaulle then proceeded to give their country to their mortal enemies. He understood the French Algerians just fine, as well as they understood themselves. He just didn't care about them as much as they cared about themselves.
Sen. Obama has written a 442 page autobiography in which he took great pains to indicate that A. He cares about his own feelings a vast amount. B. He cares about one segment of the population far more than he cares about the rest.
I do not want a President whose ethnic loyalties put me on the outside. Feminist loyalties toward women are less deep than racial loyalties.
We've reached a point where the possibility of an Obama Presidency has become quite high. If you haven't yet taken a hard look at Obama now is the time. Read Steve Sailer's articles and blog posts for some excellent analysis of Obama's ethnic identity problem: Obama’s Identity Crisis, MainStream Media Won’t Ask Obama Those Nasty Paul-Type Questions. But Shelby Steele Could!, Winter Kills: Obama Exposed As Race Racketeer, Why Obama's church matters, and Obama misspeaks (to put it mildly)
Indeed, it is Mr. Norquist's informal political alliance, what he calls the "Leave Us Alone" coalition, that points up the most serious rents in the 21st-century Republican fabric. Over the past decade, the coalition has grown from its original libertarian base to include Christian Right activists whose agenda of moral regulation represents a flat rejection of libertarian values. It is the modern-day equivalent of Bella Abzug, the New York feminist, and James Eastland, the Mississippi segregationist, attending Democratic conventions together in the 1960's. It is too ridiculous to last, and it won't.
The potential for schism in the unwieldy Republican ranks is nothing new; it goes back to the debate between libertarians and Christian moralists that played out in the National Review in the 1950's. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won a presidential election as head of a movement that improbably fused together disciples of Jerry Falwell and disciples of Milton Friedman. But all the factions could agree on the need for a tough stand against Communism, no matter what their differences might be over abortion or federal spending.
Ehrenhalt thinks the conflicts of interests between the factions in the Republican coaltion are becoming more apparent to the various factions. This makes sense to me intuitively. Take abortion for example. 25 years ago libertarians and moderate Republicans who were not opposed to abortion didn't have to worry that a President like Reagan might nominate justices to the US Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade. The size of the shift needed on the Supreme Court was too large to happen in a single President's term of office. But we are fast approaching the point where the Supreme Court will really overturn Roe v. Wade and that'll make differences on this issue harder to ignore.
Similarly, the factions of the Republican coalition who believe in lower taxes and less spending have got to be thinking that when it comes to spending what is the point of even bothering to vote for Republicans rather than Democrats? Other factions in the Republican coalition (e.g. neocons who want to spend a lot invading other countries or otherwise conservative old folks who want more Medicare benefits) have gotten their way to a point where fiscal conservatives have got to feel demoralized about Republicans as the ruling party.
But I see a much bigger threat to the Republican coalition: More states are going to fall into the Donkey column due to immigration. For example, the influx of Hispanics into Georgia and North Carolina might knock both states of the fairly reliable Republican column in Presidential elections. The Republican Party has already declined into long term minority status in California. The fate of the Republican Party in Californa presages the fate of the Republican Party elsewhere.
One of the curious trends in American politics is a decline in the extent to which the parties are defined by class and an increase in racial identity determining party affiliation. Lower class whites increasingly have voted Republican and this has compensated for the growing number of other races voting for the Democrats. But higher income liberals who do not identify with capital owners vote for the Democrats in spite of their income levels. Is this pattern stable? Or will the parties eventually return to representing class interests? Or will the decline of whites as a percentage of the total US population drive even more whites into the Republican Party?
Right now the Republicans are hurting in the eyes of the public because of the Bush Administrations' mistakes and policies. Will the discrediting of Bush lead to a paleocon resurgence in the Republican Party?
Years ago I read and found enlightening Enhenhalt's book The United States of Ambition. It is about the decline of the old style machine politics of backroom deals for choosing candidates and for running governments and the rise of entrepreneurial self-starting individual candidates who make careers out of politics. The book gave me some respect for the advantages of the old political machines. In many instances the political machine operators were much better at choosing competent political candidates than our current system where the candidates pretty much go out on their own and sell themselves to voters. The average voter just isn't very knowledgeable and lots of elections are fought between charismatic figures who are far better at being candidates than at making decisions and administering governments.
As demographic trends bring about a declining quality of the average American voter could a revival of the political machines compensate for this trend?
The US Congress, not content to rest on its laurels with all the destructive multiculturalist immigration and domestic policies it has already created, wants to build even bigger problems into our national institutions. Parallel ethnic governments anyone?
Once known primarily for its opposition to tax increases and government intrusion on individual liberties, the five-year-old Grassroot Institute of Hawaii this year suddenly thrust itself to the forefront of opposition to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act, known as the Akaka bill for lead sponsor U.S. Sen. Dan Akaka, D-Hawai'i.
The bill would create a process for federal recognition of Native Hawaiians as a political entity, and Akaka and U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawai'i had been promised the measure would come to the floor of the Senate by this month.
I'm beginning to think that annexation of Hawaii is up there on the list of places the US should not have grabbed. The top such place is Puerto Rico. We should grant them their independence whether they want it or not.
The U.S. House of Representatives also have their concerns. In a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay from Representatives Steve King, Mike Pence, Gil Gutknecht, Dana Rohrabacher, Virgil Goode, Jeff Flake, Ernest Istook, Barbara Cubin, Lynn Westmorland, Jeb Hensarling, Dave Weldon, and others who signed on between July 20 and July 22, 2005, they presented questions about the bill.
Second, these bills raise practical questions that simply have not been addressed. For example, would a race-based government in Hawaii have the power to disrupt our nation's military operations there? Will gambling expand in Hawaii, given this legislation's vague language? Would the new race-based government have new rights to file lawsuits against the federal government under "breach of trust" theories? Will Native American appropriations be depleted when the 400,000 Native Hawaiians across the nation seek to participate in the same programs? How could Hawaii function if people living in the same neighborhood are subject to different laws, regulations, and taxes?
Consider for example, two small businesses in Hawaii competing against one another. One is owned by a Native Hawaiian, and the other is owned by one who is not. The former will be exempt from state taxes, state business regulations, and zoning and environment laws, and the latter will not. These problems and many other questions deserve answers.
Someone planning ahead could marry a native pure blood Hawaiian as a way to have kids who would be exempt from taxation and regulation. "Wealthy businessman seeks pure Hawaiian women to create tax-exempt business dynasty."
Former US Senators Slade Gorton of Washington and Hank Brown of Colorado say a racially exclusive government for native Hawaiians would violate the US Constitution.
The Senate is poised to sanction the creation of a racially exclusive government by and for Native Hawaiians who satisfy a blood test. The new race-based sovereign that would be summoned into being by the so-called Akaka Bill would operate outside the U.S. Constitution and the nation's most cherished civil rights statutes. Indeed, the champions of the proposed legislation boast that the new Native Hawaiian entity could secede from the Union like the Confederacy, but without the necessity of shelling Fort Sumter.
The Akaka Bill classifies citizens by race, defying the express provisions of the 14th Amendment. It also rests on a betrayal of express commitments made by its sponsors a decade ago, and asserts as true many false statements about the history of Hawaii. It should be defeated.
Among a list of 21 House conservatives who signed the letter opposing the Akaka bill are immigration restrictionist Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and libertarian Ron Paul (R-TX). Paul's name on the list is not surprising. But Paul is also taking positions on cultural issues and national identity questions which go against the Open Borders position of many ideological libertarians. John Ray points to a Ron Paul essay "Immigration and the Welfare State" where Paul calls for a halt to illegal immigration and says his constituents want a general reduction in immigration.
More and more of my constituents are asking me when Congress will address the problem of illegal immigration. The public correctly perceives that neither political party has the courage to do what is necessary to prevent further erosion of both our border security and our national identity. As a result, immigration may be the sleeper issue that decides the 2008 presidential election.
The problem of illegal immigration will not be solved easily, but we can start by recognizing that the overwhelming majority of Americans – including immigrants – want immigration reduced, not expanded.
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Economic considerations aside, we must address the cultural aspects of immigration.
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We need to allocate far more of our resources, both in terms of money and manpower, to securing our borders and coastlines here at home. This is the most critical task before us, both in terms of immigration problems and the threat of foreign terrorists. Unless and until we secure our borders, illegal immigration and the problems associated with it will only increase.
The sense of common cause and common interests is decaying in America. A serious proposal to create a parallel government in Hawaii based on a blood test is yet another example of how big the problem has become.
In an interview with the German magazine Der Speigel retired Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew explains why he couldn't allow an unfettered Western style democracy to operate in Singapore.
SPIEGEL: During your career, you have kept your distance from Western style democracy. Are you still convinced that an authoritarian system is the future for Asia?
Mr. Lee: Why should I be against democracy? The British came here, never gave me democracy, except when they were about to leave. But I cannot run my system based on their rules. I have to amend it to fit my people's position. In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion. Supposing I'd run their system here, Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese. I would have a constant clash in my Parliament which cannot be resolved because the Chinese majority would always overrule them. So I found a formula that changes that...
Steve Sailer comments in response that multiple ethnicities with big differences in loyalties are the enemy of democracy.
There's so much romanticized worship of the Ellis Island immigration these days that it's heretical to mention the obvious fact that massive European immigration was a blow to functional democracy at the local level in America. It's hard to run a multiethnic city without venal machine politics. Chicago, for example, remains a one party town all the way into the 21st century. Like Singapore and the Lee family, Chicago has settled upon dynastic family rule as the best solution, with DaLee Rich Mike following DaLee Rich Joe as mayor for 37 of the last 50 years, and who knows how many years to come.
1. The term "extremism", frequently used in the public discourse about religion and terrorism, has no tangible legal meaning or definition and is thus unhelpful and emotive. To equate "extremism" with the aspirations of Muslims for Sharia laws in the Muslim world or the desire to see unification towards a Caliphate in the Muslim lands, as seemed to be misrepresented by the prime minister, is inaccurate and disingenuous. It indicates ignorance of what the Sharia is and what a Caliphate is and will alienate and victimise the Muslim community unnecessarily.
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3. It is natural for Muslims to feel sympathy with fellow Muslims elsewhere in the world and to desire justice for those of them living under oppression. Many people compare the Israeli reality with South African apartheid and demand a similar solution. To denounce anybody who questions the legitimacy of Israel will be seen as an attempt to silence academic thought and legitimate political expression. If the government hopes to pander to Zionist pressure by condemning and excluding from this country people who are critical of Israeli apartheid, it is in fact supporting apartheid.
A clear majority of British Muslims want to live under Sharia law. The idea of religious freedom for all religions contradicts the idea of individual freedom.
Note that to Muslims a non-Muslim living under Muslim rule is not oppressed by a Muslim living under non-Muslim rule is oppressed. More generally, the more people put their ethnic, racial, or religious group identity ahead of national identity the more divided a polity becomes and the more democracy becomes a spoils system with politicial differences centered around grabs for goodies for each group at the expense of other groups. Systems split by ethnic differences, religious differences, and tribal loyalties become corrupt because civil servants and politicians see control of power in government as means to deliver for their groups. In-breeding groups become the centers of political factions. In the extreme societies sink into civil war.
Many warning signs are flashing across Western Civilization that people in different races, ethnicities, tribes, and religions do not have the same loyalties, values, culture, and sense of common identity. America and other Western nations are in deep demographic trouble. The dilution of white majorities is opening a Pandora's Box of inter-ethnic politicial clashes. It is time to stop all immigration, deport illegal immigrants, and repeal the automatic granting of US citizenship to children born in the US to foreign parents.
Update: ParaPundit question: If people are so different as to deserve separate governments and separate legal systems then shouldn't they be kept in separate countries divided by enforced borders?
Steve Sailer expands on this theory that NASCAR is a white ethnic pride festival and explains that Republicans win elections because white males are angry over decades of being beat up on by liberals.
In short, NASCAR is an ethnic pride festival for the one of people who aren't supposed to hold ethnic pride festivals.
After that, I started to notice some other institutions were in the business of providing covert identity politics for people who aren't to practice identity politics publicly. Indeed, that perspective provided a novel answer to a couple of that a lot of people are asking:
"Why do Republicans win so much these days? But why do they then so seldom use their power to do anything conservative?"
Admittedly, this new theory is more subjective than my recent quantitative articles in VDARE.com and The American Conservative explaining the 2004 red state - blue state gap: "The Baby Gap," "The Marriage Gap," "The Mortgage Gap," and, underneath it all, "The Dirt Gap."
I guess you can call this one the White Guy Gap.
I suspect that liberals are now paying the price for decades of insulting white men. White males make up about one third of the population, but the problem with white guys, from a liberal perspective, is that they happen to be the people who get most of the big things done in this country. That's just unfair, no, that's downright evil of them.
Steve sees voting Republican as a covert exercise in identity politics for white men. But since it is covert and since liberals still set the mainstream rules for what demands and complaints are morally legitimate white men fail to effectively advance their own interests explicitly enough to get the Republican Party to translate those demands into policy.
There's nothing unnatural about the people who keep the country running wanting to have a large say in running the country. The problem, though, is that white male identity politics is the self-love that dares not speak its name.
So, many Republican white men studiously avoid endorsing policies that would actually help white male Republicans, such as immigration restrictions. They are too intimidated by fears of being accused of bias in favor of themselves. Of course, every other group in America is free to be flagrantly biased in favor of its own members' welfare, but white males aren't allowed that freedom.
As a tragic result white males have, by voting Republican inadvertently empowered the neoconservatives to pursue a foreign policy strategy that is harmful to US interests.
So, instead, Republican white men meekly accept their leaders' Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World policies to show how unprejudiced, how self-sacrificing they are. They send their sons to die in Iraq so that some medieval anti-American Ayatollah can win an election.
Some neocons, on their more honest moments, are open about their ideological approach to politics (really, read to the end of this article and again look for the mention of the word "ideological"). So the first generation neocons might have been ex-Trotskyites but while they changed to a different abstract model of politics too many kept an unempirical theoretical approach to reasoning about the human condition. Traditional conservatism is in a sense the antithesis of an ideology because conservatives have a distrust for highly systematized political philosophies and for the idea that humans can create utopias. I think the neocons, not being real conservatives, are motivated in foreign policy by a mixture of interest in Israel and their misguided desire to spread their own form of utopian democratic liberalism.
The Democrats probably can't adjust their message to once again attract white males because the Democratic Party is too intent on attracting lots of other identity groups such as blacks, Hispanics, career women, welfare recipients, gays, and others. The Dems are going to continue to be willing to discriminate against and transfer assets away from white males to serve these other groups - all the while labelling large numberes of white males violent, racist, and assorted other derogatory terms. As a consequence the battle over the Republican Party is going to remain the most important political battle in America for a while longer - at least until demographic patterns shift power more permanently to the Democrats and the US becomes more like Latin America. If white males become angry enough to reject left-liberal definitions of what is moral and what is acceptable then we could stop invading other countries and even implement a much more restrictive immigration policy. But don't expect any help to come from a serious attempt by the Democrats to compete for the white male vote. The Dems have too much invested in serving their main constituent groups and justifying their policies with their own list of lies about human nature.
Update: Steve answers points a reader makes in reaction to Steve's essay.
No, what I said was, "Now, white men are probably the most tolerant and forbearing of any American group—they've been raised to take it like a man—but they are also only human." In your Midwestern state, for example, whites likely pay over 90% of the taxes that support your university and your Ph.D. program. Yet, while ethnic groups who contribute far less to the upkeep of your university insist upon ethnic cheerleading for themselves in programs like "African-American Studies," whites are expected to pay to be derided in your program.
That's quite remarkable. The only way to explain it is that the liberal settlement that emerged from the civil rights era is based on the notion that whites are not an ethnic group with their own ethnic interests. Instead, they are just The Majority, and they can afford to subsidize Minorities, because the cost per individual member of The Majority is limited.
In the long run, the liberal arrangement is threatened by immigration, since The Majority, who is supposed to subsidize Minorities, won't be a majority forever, and the cost per individual member of the former majority will soar.
But, obviously, the liberal dispensation is also headed for big trouble if whites are considered no longer to be just The Majority but are instead considered to be just another ethnic group. Indeed, you should point out to your professors that they should be careful what they wish for. No recognized American ethnic group puts up with subsidizing being insulted, and if your department succeeds in getting whites to think of themselves as an ethnic group, then continued taxpayer funding for your department would be threatened.
On the other hand, your professors aren't quite that dim. Indeed, they sense that they can profit financially from raising white ethnic consciousness. See, the more white ethnic activism they elicit, the more they can claim that they must be subsidized by the state to squash it by indoctrinating in whites the belief that they are the Evil Ethnicity, and therefore must pay to be insulted. It's another political perpetual motion machine.
The liberal arrangement is also threatened by an aging population. The oldsters are going to take such a large portion of transfer payments and other government mandates that the economy just isn't going to have enough resources left over to pay for the tax that racial preferences for blacks and Hispanics exacts on whites. Also, those costs from "affirmative action" racial preferences make the economy function more poorly. People are put into jobs that they do poorly while other people who could do those jobs are prevented from doing so. As old people become a growing portion of the labor force we will need the most economically efficient allocation of all working age labor.
The liberal arrangement is also threatened by the march of biotechnology. The myths that serve as the justification for racial preferences that discriminate against whites are going to be crushed by cheap DNA sequencing and other technologies that will lead to the discovery of the causes of differences in ability between individuals and groups.
Whether the liberal arrangement will be threatened by rising anger of white males remains to be seen. White males elected George W. Bush and he turned around and had Alberto Gonzales gut the government case against University of Michigan on discrimination against whites for the benefit of blacks and Hispanics.