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Reprise

See if any of this sounds vaguely familiar to you, dear readers:

Sadly, racial identity politics, originated as a divide-and-conquer propaganda campaign by the Soviets in the 1920s, and then picked up again in earnest in the 1960s by those like communist history professor Howard Zinn, determined the election. Today, Weatherman founder, terrorist, and former professor of education Bill Ayers continues the Soviet disinformation campaign of attributing racism to capitalism.

To my dismay, not only did the usual suspects, like George Stephanopoulos, promote this old propaganda line, but many “conservative” analysts fell into the trap on the day after.

The George Soros-funded site AlterNet celebrated with an article titled “What Propelled Obama to Victory and Sent the Plutocrats and Racists to a Brutal Defeat”:

The diverse, creative, younger coalition that propelled the first black president — a guy whose middle name is Hussein — to the presidency, beat back what may well have been the last stand of Ronald Reagan’s coalition of plutocrats, white working-class men and religious conservatives.

The GOP’s most reliable supporters remain white, married couples who identify themselves as Christians, a group that continues its sharp decline in numbers.

The same site fulminates at the large size of Christian families, and hyperventilates about overpopulation. But the celebration over a “sharp decline in numbers” reveals an ideological callousness. I think of Bill Ayers’ plans to eliminate about 25 million Americans who would refuse to be reeducated after the revolution.

But celebration over changes in ethnic and racial makeup happens in more respectable venues. Back in September, at the last Decatur, Georgia, Labor Day Book Festival, a political science professor and author of The Polarized Public? Why American Government Is So Dysfunctional predicted to the almost all-white audience that Democrats would prevail this election season. Political polarization was attributed to “extremism” on the part of conservatives, whose numbers were thankfully diminishing due to demographic changes. The fact that audiences at Obama rallies consisted of large numbers of minorities (according to the slides shown) was heralded.

What struck me about the audience, many of whom wore Obama insignia, was the applause and sighs of relief upon hearing that the Democrats were going to win on the basis of demographics. These middle-aged, college-educated book lovers had no qualms about the fact that their winning strategy did not rely on ideas or even ideology. An air of moral self-congratulation, carried over from the “marches” of the 1960s, was displayed in the facial expressions and comments.

This audience may not consciously register that they are using minorities (and therefore stereotyping them) to advance progressive politics, but the late Howard Zinn did. In 1969, he wrote in an essay titled “Marxism and the New Left”:

In the United States, the traditional idea that the agent of social change will be the proletariat needs re-examination, when the best-organized of the workers are bribed into silence with suburban houses and automobiles, and drugged into compliance with mass entertainment.

Presaging the Obama strategy, Zinn suggested that “unorganized workers,” like “white collar workers, domestic workers, migratory and farm laborers, service industry workers,” may play a part in social change.

Then he tellingly posited:

Recent experience suggests that Negroes — and perhaps Negroes in the ghetto — may be the most powerful single force for social change in the United States. Marx envisioned the industrial proletariat as the revolutionary agent because it was in need, exploited, and brought face to face in the factory. The Negro is in need, exploited and brought together in the ghetto.

Zinn then suggests that students are also viable members of such a coalition:

Perhaps some peculiar combination, unpredictable at this moment, will be formed in a time of national crisis.

Change will come about, Zinn predicts:

… by tactics short of violent revolution, but far more militant than normal parliamentary procedure.

It will take systematic, persistent organizing and education, in the ghettos, in the universities, plus coordinated actions of various kinds.

The middle class was the hurdle, a la Karl Marx — until Obama’s rhetorical appeals and after decades of reeducation in the schools. Changes in immigration and the War on Poverty that placed massive numbers on welfare roles finished the job. The educators made sure that the new immigrants received an education steeped in anti-Americanism. Today, Howard Zinn’s Marxist A People’s History of the United States is assigned in high schools and college classes, and is adapted for middle school and even elementary school. Bill Ayers’ books are widely used in colleges of education, and he often speaks on college campuses.

In the Election Day postmortems, many fell into the progressive/Marxist trap. Erick Erickson wrote that Mitt Romney’s “conscious decision to blow off Hispanic voters” made Republicans sound like a party that “hates brown people.”

Ron Radosh speculated that with a “position” like that of the Wall Street Journal and most of the business community that was “more flexible and less dogmatic than the anti-immigration position of many conservatives,” Romney might have done better.

But J. Christian Adams goes back to the George W. Bush administration to make the point that “GOP Outreach to Hispanics Won’t Work.” The Left has been working hard to demonize conservatives, of all races and ethnic groups. In 1953, Communist Hugh Bradley demonized NAACP President Walter White for “red-baiting.” Last summer, Mother Jones lambasted Allen West for — guess what — “Red-baiting.”

What needs to be pointed out is how progressives, for political and personal purposes, have used these groups. We need to point out Zinn’s exploitative use of “ghetto Negroes” (by 1969, a term considered offensive). As Diana West reveals in breaking down the post-election numbers, the Obama voters were “the graduate-degreed and the uneducated; the Marxist elites and the wards (masses) of the federal state, the grand old Leninist coalition all over again.” In other words, Howard Zinn and Bill Ayers and their gullible victims.

I won’t bore you with yet another dissertation on how the kernel assumptions of identity politics and Edward Said’s post-colonial school of thought so crucial to the left’s having secured the Enlightenment’s deconstruction has been institutionalized into language, where it self-perpetuates and becomes bound up in our very contemporary epistemology.  Because no one really gives a fuck about any of that, it being fundamentally unserious, particularly when compared with the necessity for perfecting the way we count the various identity groups so we know to whom we may most effectively pander in our race to build a winning electoral coalition.

Except to say this:  you really should start giving a fuck about all of that, because it isn‘t fundamentally unserious, and in fact, it is the only way back from a country wherein both parties — not just the left — participate in such destructive behavior, further solidifying it as a kind of ideological status quo.

The GOP just isn’t as good at it, try as they might.

— Which perhaps is why so many of the “purists” are increasingly refusing to be browbeaten into coming out to vote for them.

Just a thought.  And probably an uninformed one.  More likely, it has something to do with rape babies.

(h/t Glenn)

 

7 Replies to “Reprise”

  1. geoffb says:

    Ron Radosh in a different piece that seems to fit in with this thread and with my own oddball crankyness.

  2. Squid says:

    The GOP’s most reliable supporters remain white, married couples who identify themselves as Christians successful people who try to raise their own children to be successful in turn, a group that continues its sharp decline in numbers.

    One leaves it as an exercise to the reader as to why productive, competent, self-reliant families are declining in numbers.

  3. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Racist, atheist gamophobes?

  4. Squid says:

    I do wish we could relabel the parties. I think the Competent Party versus the Dependent Party would lend a bit of clarity to our elections.

  5. StrangernFiction says:

    What needs to be clarified is that Republican does not equal conservative.

  6. Ernst Schreiber says:

    F. A. Hayek called himself an old-Whig, if I remember.

    I don’t think he meant the anti-Jackson party.

  7. Darleen says:

    Joe Biden screamed “they’ll put you back in CHAINS” all the time they couldn’t see they already were …

    Master Joe, in his white suit telling the darkies that they’ll starve on their own, just stay on the plantation and at least 3 squares and a cot will always be theirs.

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