A couple of folks have passed along this WSJ article from Hoover Institute Scholar Shelby Steele, which hits on quite a few of the topics I discuss here. From “Hillary’s Plantation”:
Of course Hillary Clinton’s recent claim that Republicans run the House of Representatives like a “plantation” was old-fashioned political and racial pandering. After all, she uttered this remark at what certainly would have been a prime venue for her husband: a largely black audience on Martin Luther King Day. So, clearly, she was looking to connect with this most loyal Democratic constituency. But Mrs. Clinton is possessed of a tin ear precisely where her husband is all deftness and charm. Black audiences are beyond her. The room of black faces that brings her husband alive, freezes her in overbearing rectitude.
And yet, pandering of the sort she exhibited on MLK Day requires a convincing human identification in order to work. The political panderer always identifies with the suffering of those pandered to—always “feels their pain.” And this is where a tin ear can be disastrous: In giving witness to a group’s suffering, one can seem to be shaming the group. Must blacks have their slave past rubbed in their face simply for Hillary Clinton to make a little hay against modern-day Republicans?
When political pandering goes awry, it calls you a name. On an emotional level, many blacks will hear Hillary’s remark as follows: “I say Republicans run the House like a plantation because I am speaking to Negroes—the wretched of the earth, a slave people—who will surely know all about plantations.” Is this a tin ear or a Freudian slip, blacks will wonder? Does she really see us as she projects us—as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist? Quite possibly so, since no apology has been forthcoming.
And since “blackness”—at least, authentic blackness of the kind that carries any political clout—is now seen primarily as a party affiliation and not a product of genetic conditions conspiring to specify particular physical manifestations, apologies are demanded only by conservative blacks who (aren’t, as a rule, real, anyway).
But I digress…
If Newt Gingrich also once used the plantation metaphor in reference to Congress, his goal was only an innocuous one: to be descriptive, not to pander. He was speaking to a reporter, not to a black audience, and he had the good taste to cast himself as a slave who would “lead the slave rebellion.” Thus, he identified with the black struggle for freedom, not with the helplessness and humiliation of the plantation slave. If the plantation metaphor will always be inaccurate and hyperbolic where Congress is concerned, at least Mr. Gingrich’s use of it carried no offense.
And even Mrs. Clinton’s “offense” would have amounted to very little had it come from nothing more than an awkward metaphor. But, in fact, it came from a corruption in post-’60s liberalism and Democratic politics that profoundly insults blacks. Mrs. Clinton came to Al Sharpton’s MLK celebration looking for an easy harvest of black votes. And she knew the drill—white liberals and Dems whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance. Once positioned as the white champions of this grievance, they actually turn black resentment into white liberal power. Today, Democrats cannot be competitive without this alchemy. So Mrs. Clinton’s real insult to blacks—one far uglier than her plantation metaphor—is to value them only for their sense of grievance.
This is precisely the crux of the matter, and—moreso—gets right to the heart of the poisoned philsophy of progressive identity politics, particularly when such a philosophy cynically exploits what might be legitimate (if misguided, in most cases) sense of social guilt to behave as a powerful political tool. To most politicians, rank opportunism and voter-bloc manipulations drive tise group-based strategy. And it is a strategy with a particularly formidable emotional appeal that is difficult to speak against without being charged with complicity in the insidious institutional effects of its potential social defeat in favor of a philosophical paradigm for successes that preaches individualism.
Mrs. Clinton’s husband was a master of this alchemy, and his presidency also illustrated its greatest advantage. Once black grievance is morphed into liberal power, it need never be honored. President Clinton notoriously felt black pain, won the black vote, and then rewarded blacks with the cold shower of welfare reform. And here, now, is Mrs. Clinton sidling up to the trough of black grievance, eyes wide in expectation, but also a tad contemptuous. It is hard to fully respect one’s suckers.
A great achievement of modern liberalism—and a primary reason for its surviving decades past the credibility of its ideas—is that it captured black resentment as an exclusive source of power. It even gave this resentment a Democratic Party affiliation. (Antiwar sentiment is the other great source of liberal power, but it is not the steady provider that black and minority resentment has been.) Republicans have often envied this power, but have never competed well for it because it can be accessed only by pandering to the socialistic longings of minority leaders—vast government spending, social programs, higher taxes and so on. Republicans and conservatives have simply never had an easy or glib mechanism for addressing profound social grievances.
[my emphasis] Longtime readers will recognize these arguments—though my formulations are hardly so eloquent as Mr Steele’s. But the points are the same. As I wrote back on December 1:
An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics. And in an era of academic specialization wherein just about every individual identity group has its own set of researchers and theoretical championsâ€â€as well as a widely accepted generic narrative of grievanceâ€â€the observation that continued relevance (which translates into political power) is contingent upon the nursing and care of the grievance is something that too often goes unexamined by a society that, at base, really does wish to understand and fix the problems and frustrations expressed by individual identity groups.
All of which leads, I’d argue, to a cultural millieu thatâ€â€perverselyâ€â€is fearful of acknowledging its own successes, because to do so is to make irrelevant those who have been so adamant about bringing about those successes. The ends, ironically, have been subsumed by the means, and the meansâ€â€or better, the structural apparatus designed to support and animate the individual identity group’s cause and promote it’s political agendaâ€â€have become more coveted, insofar as they carry all the institutional power, than the ends they claim to advocate.
Ironically, I was chided on more than one occasion for making these precise arguments, on the grounds that, as a white guy, I had no business doing so. Let the Black establishment fling its own Oreos, the argument went—though such a rejoinder quite obviously missed the very point I was trying to drive home.
I suppose here, Steele can be chided on similar grounds: by virtue of his remarks, his very authenticity as a black can be challenged, and we will all be expected collectively to ignore that those doing the challenging are, in many cases, enlightened white liberals.
Which means that, the other factors cancelled out, the “enlightened” component of a critic’s bona fides (how self-serving!) is what is operative in their formulation of the argument. Or, to put it more frankly—they are simply better prepared to pronounce on how social dynamics should work, they feel, than are the rest of us—including those blacks who, you’ll forgive the intentional reprise, have left the liberal plantation.
Which brings us full circle to Mr Steele:
[…] this Republican “weakness” has now begun to emerge as a great—if still largely potential—Republican advantage. Precisely because Republicans cannot easily pander to black grievance, they have no need to value blacks only for their sense of grievance. Unlike Democrats, they can celebrate what is positive and constructive in minority life without losing power. The dilemma for Democrats, liberals and the civil rights establishment is that they become redundant and lose power the instant blacks move beyond grievance and begin to succeed by dint of their own hard work. So they persecute such blacks, attack their credibility as blacks, just as they pander to blacks who define their political relationship to America through grievance. Republicans are generally freer of the political bigotry by which the left either panders to or persecutes black Americans.
No one on the current political scene better embodies this Republican advantage than the current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. The archetype that Ms. Rice represents is “overcoming” rather than grievance. Despite a childhood in the segregated South that might entitle her to a grievance identity, she has clearly chosen that older black American tradition in which blacks neither deny injustice nor allow themselves to be defined by it. This tradition, as Ralph Ellison once put it, “springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done.” And, because Ms. Rice is grounded in this tradition, she is of absolutely no value to modern liberalism or the Democratic Party despite her many talents and achievements. Quite the reverse, she is their worst nightmare. If blacks were to take her example and embrace overcoming rather than grievance, the wound to liberalism would be mortal. It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton’s “plantation” pandering in a room full of Condi Rices.
This is why so many Republicans (including Laura Bush) now salivate at the thought of a Rice presidential bid. No other potential Republican candidate could—to borrow an old Marxist phrase—better “heighten the contradictions” of modern liberalism and Democratic power than Ms. Rice. The more ugly her persecution by the civil rights establishment and the left, the more she would give liberalism the look of communism in its last days—an ideology long since hollowed of its idealism and left with nothing save its meanness and repressiveness. Who can say what Ms. Rice will do. But history is calling her, or someone like her. She is the object of a deep longing in America for race to be finally handled, not by political idealisms, but by the classic principles of freedom and fairness.
Idealisms quickly descend into evil because they are so easily seized as a means to ordinary power. The politics of black uplift was once an idealism, but today it has become the work of hacks, tired apparatchiks and petty demagogues looking for power. And there, on TV last week, as if to illustrate this truth, was the specter of Mrs. Clinton and Al Sharpton embracing at the podium, mere captives of power making the tired charge—via an encrusted plantation metaphor—that Republicans are racists. What exhaustion! And what evil, to labor so hard at keeping blacks mired in grievance. Kind of reminds one of a plantation, though here the harvest is surely grievance rather than cotton.
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(h/ Craig Caughman and Terry Hastings, who wryly notes, “Black America was forced into servitude the first time around. This time they demand it. Up is down, black is white.”
Precisely. And Gene Wilder is Richard Pryor.
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See also, Confederate Yankee, Dr Sanity, Austin Bay, Kobayashi Maru, and Gates of Vienna.
Gene Wilder is dead? I never liked that Wonka fellow…
The thought of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson attack Condi Rice is too ironic to digest right now…get back to me in a few months.
It almost inevitably has to be Condi, does it not?
Hmmmm.
When it comes to cheese fries, we’re all black.
Audience member: “Are you saying that the Democratic Party doesn’t care about the Black community?
Bulworth: “Isn’t that obvious?”
SB: school
larn ‘em up
The unfortunate reality behind this article is that Mr. Steele is most assuredly in a very small minority as far as African Americans are concerned. I believe he is absolutely right on his points in the article, but the sad fact is that the Democrats have such a stranglehold on the Black voting bloc that Clinton got almost a standing ovation when she made this comment.
As Mr Steele says-“It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton’s “plantation†pandering in a room full of Condi Rices. “
That’s the problem. There isn’t anywhere near a room full of Condi Rices. There isn’t a room even a quarter filled with Condi Rices. Kanye West says “Bush hates black people” and everyone assumes he does because he’s Republican. Forget the fact that Bush has appointed more blacks to important positions in the cabinet than anyone else in history. Doesn’t matter. He hates black people. I think Steele is right in that Rice would absolutely devour Clinton on a political stage, but I don’t think she has any desire to right now which is unfortunate.
If Condi runs, and makes the African-American conservative ‘menace’ real as a viable political force to the average leftish reflexive Democrat voter, they’ll just have to invent a new ___con code word for it–just like ‘neocon’ for the *shock!* non-liberal Jewish folks. Who the leftist considers equally obliged, as card carrying ‘oppressed persons’, to toe whatever line the left draws for them.
Indeed, I was once delighted to read an essay on, of all things, Greek architecture, which referred to the ‘vulgar’ (i.e. lucid) work of the conservative Jewish writer Allan Bloom and patronizingly pitied him for his insistence on working for the side that wants to ‘rob him of his heritage’.
Steele does well, though, to frame the argument in terms of political power–who really has it and at whose expense in the current situation–that is, in terms which a Marxist or leftist is most likely to understand and might even (maybe, if the moons are in the correct alignment) find occasion to be swayed by. After all, one can only really criticize a leftist ‘from the left’ without getting dinged and dismissed for heresy.
Then there was the wonk that noted the NBA dress code kerfuffle was, in fact, a case of wealthy black men fighting for the right to wear chains.
I would feel sorry for Ms. Rice if she wins the nod to run, and I would weep for her if she got elected. I think she actually could win vs. Hillary, as she will probably gain more Trad-Dem votes than lose Trad-Rep.
The Bleach bath her opposition, including the “leaders” of the Black community will subject her to will settle, if she is elected, into a long simmer of scorn through which they will tear her race from her bit by bit. They would never acknowledge, nor will they allow history to record the marvelous sacrifice she will have made for her own.
“Oreo-con”
(In less than twelve hours, a lib will lecture us all that, in fact, no Oreos have ever been thrown at a black conservative.)
If Rice could win the GOP nomination then I believe she would likely garner strong support from Republicans all over the country. I don’t see her race being much of an issue to most Republicans except those most “racially sensitive” people (white or non-) as long as she continues to presente herself as intelligent, thoughtful, principled, positive, and practical.
The most damage could come from the far-left attacking her for her inauthentic “blackness”, thus causing many voters – including plenty of blacks – to feel guilty for voting for a candidate solely based on her race and/or gender. I’d bet there are plenty out there who will decide their vote on racial differences, but at the same time they may feel some guilt about choosing for that reason or because they’d end up chooosing a Republican for that reason. The Dem’s crazy-wing is so radioactive they wouldn’t blink at pulling such a blatantly racist stunt. And I’m sure Jackson & Sharpton would have no problem getting paid to be their spokespeople.
Chaka-con, of course.
Yeah, but the number of African Americans upset about Mrs Clinton’s remarks you could count on your hand.
The crowd stood up at the applause sign. I doubt that anyone was really listening. My prediction Hillary does not make it out of Iowa. Not smart enough, has no charm and Bill can not change any of that. So who’s next?
There is only one plantation today. It is the black Democrat plantation. If a black person dares stray from the plantation they are vilified by the toadies of the black “establishment.” Condoleeza Rice is compared to Aunt Jemima, Colon Powell is called an Uncle Tom. This is not racist because it is spoken by the black elites.
The black “leadership” tries to ensure that all the people stay down on the plantation by marginalizing any person of color who is not a liberal socialist Democrat by accusing them of not being authentic.
Shame on them, for being the one thing they pretend to hate: Racist!
J.R.: see also It’s OK to Leave the Plantation. Just beware of being accused of racism!
I just hope we get to see video of Hillary dancing and singing in a black church. Maybe she could teach them the hokey pokey ‘cause that’s what it’s all about.
I agree with Steele that at some point the very thing that got you there can become the yoke around your neck. But that it changed from the former to the latter would seem to be a given. Maybe for the Black community it happened with the bringing down of the wall. Certainly that put to rest the Communist exploitation of the socialist card, and proved once and for all that no matter how badly oppressed “overcoming” is not just an empty dream. The question is when will the Community feel strong enough to let go of the yoke and step out into the fresh air and sunshine or real social advancement, or for that matter, even recognize it awaits. I think the answer is that Condi in the Presidency would make it impossible for race baiting opportunists like Sharpton, Jackson, Farakhan, et al, to stay afloat. Condi could indeed, hold the key to the Black America becoming just another viable part of America, with no importance to race any longer needed. The Democrats have to be painfully aware of this, so I’d expect an even more eggregious, race based campaign in 2008. I also don’t think that they can win such a campaign, doomed to failure by the very ugliness, and social subversiveness, concantamont to such an agenda.
– After all, as anyone knows, what possible enticement can a welfare state based party offer to a truly self-sufficient people.
A bill was indeed introduced in the House of Representatives within the past year or two that would have brought back slavery (in the form of military conscription).
It was sponsored by Charles Rangel, a black Democrat from Harlem.
Two things: I hope Dr. Rice doesn’t run in 2008. I think her chances aren’t all that great, because she’s never held elective office. (I hope she runs for a lower office – any governorships going begging in 2008? – and then seeks the Presidency in another term or maybe two.) And if she loses, that’s a defeat greater than your run-of-the-mill Bob Dole/Bush I thing, wherein at the end of the day it really only counts against the person involved; like it or not, Dr. Rice would be transformed into a symbol, and I don’t want to see her ability squandered that way.
And, I don’t think “they” can hurt her. Oh, maybe “they” could ruin her political chances, but “they” couldn’t break her down as a person. “They” couldn’t “tear her race from her,” “they” couldn’t tar her with the brush of “inexplicable” singleness, “they” couldn’t wound her with references to her politically incorrect decisions at Stanford and elsewhere. She’s titanium. But I don’t think she’d win, not yet.
TW: My two cents’ worth.
Howard Dean IS…
Mandingo…
Yeh…. the Roots of the Dems problem….
We can only pray that Hill gets the nomination…mobilization like you have never seen before.
The Maryland Democrats are pulling out all the stops to … er, stop Michael Steele from getting into the Senate:
Measure restores vote to all felons
Ironically (or not), the guy who wrote the Dred Scott decision was a Democrat from Maryland.
Bill and Hillary fall asleep every night chuckling at the dipshits who buy their pandering.
Second, I am convinced blacks would support Condi on a GOP ticket. Are you kidding? The first black President? That trumps all hell out of party loyalty. What’s more, the tone-deaf Donk leadership would make a clumsy, condescending effort to paint her white and pretty much maginalize themselves for a decade.
Bring it!
From Hillary’s latest speech at the big NOW Roundup:
…..and Republican congress has been blowing their big sticky load of jiz in our face for 11 years now and you know what I’m talking about….
The thing that I don’t understand about Hilary is that she’s been trying to straddle the line for the past few years now, trying not to be too “radical”, trying not to be too “left”, etc. She’s basically bent over and taken everything that the opposition has thrown at her without so much as a whimper.
Then suddenly (as election talk is in the air) she makes a “strong” and “radical” statement about Congress being a “plantation”? Ooo! What a rebel! What a badass! She’s going to revolutionize the party!
Lady, please. Don’t insult my intelligence. And for pete’s sake, don’t compare a large group of elite white people to slaves. I’m so tired of that horrible woman I could scream. I’d probably have to vote for a republican for the first time in my life if she runs.
As for comments on here regarding Dems playing the race card to trick the constituents while “chuckling at the dipshits that buy their pandering”, well, same could be said in regards to Christianity and conservatives, guys. Pot, meet kettle.
And running Condi in the election? Please. She’d end up like Keyes. Everyone loved to talk about how great Keyes was during the election, how he holds such strong conservative views and really represents the values of his party base….
How far did he get in those elections, again?
Wait, what? Republicans take the Christian vote for granted, tricking their constituents to buy their pandering? You’d THINK I’d be in on that.
Come on, Stacy, unless you’ve got some seekret knowledge I lack, that’s kinda silly.
Hey, if you’re not in on it, then maybe…
You’re one of the dipshits that buys it?
(Sorry, just a joke, I couldn’t resist).