Democrats’ Identity Crisis
Who ‘racialized’ US politics?
DEMOCRATIC pundits are calling on their party to court working-class and non-coastal whites in the wake of this month’s electoral rout. But the Democratic Party is now dominated by identity politics, which defines whites, particularly heterosexual males, as oppressors of every other population in the United States. Why should the targets of such thinking embrace an ideology that scorns them?
The most absurd Democratic meme to emerge from the party’s defeat is the claim that it’s Donald Trump, rather than Democrats, who engages in “aggressive, racialized discourse,” in the words of a Los Angeles Times op-ed. By contrast, President Obama sought a “post-racial, bridge-building society,” according to New York Times reporter Peter Baker. Obama’s post-racial efforts have now “given way to an angry, jeering, us-againstthem nation,” writes Baker, in a front-page “news” story.
Tell that valedictory for “post-racial bridge-building” to police officers, who have been living through two years of racialized hatred directed at them in the streets, to the applause of many Democratic politicians.
Black Lives Matter rhetoric consists of slogans like: “CPD [Chicago Police Department] KKK, how many children did you kill today?” “F--k the police,” and “Racist, killer cops.” Officers have been assassinated by Black Lives Matterinspired killers who set out to kill whites in general and white police officers in particular. Gun murders of law-enforcement officers are up 67 percent this year through Nov. 23.
Obama welcomed Black Lives Matter activists several times to the White House. He racialized the criminal-justice system, repeatedly accusing it of discriminating, often lethally, against blacks. At the memorial service for five Dallas police officers gunned down in July 2016, Obama declared that black parents were right to fear that “something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door” — that the child will be shot by a cop simply for being “stupid.”
Obama put Brittany Packnett, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, on his President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Packnett’s postelection essay on Vox, “White People: what is your plan for the Trump presidency?” is emblematic of the racial demonology that is now core Democratic thinking. Packnett announces that she’s “tired of continuously being assaulted” by her country with its pervasive “white supremacy.” She calls on “white people” to “deal with what white people cause,” because “people of color have enough work to do for ourselves — to protect, free, and find joy for our people.”
In truth, the Democratic Party is now merely an extension of leftwing campus culture; few institutions exist wherein the skew toward Democratic allegiance is more pronounced.
Black students at Bard College, an elite school in New York’s Hudson Valley, called last year for an end to “systemic and structural racism on campus . . . so that Black students can go to class without fear.” If any black Bard student had ever been assaulted by a white faculty member, administrator or student, the record does not reflect it.
These claims of “structural racism and institutional oppression,” in the words of Brown University’s allegedly threatened black students, overlook the fact that every selective college in the country employs massive racial preferences in admissions favoring less academically qualified black and Hispanic students over more academically qualified white and Asian ones.
Every faculty hiring search is a desperate exercise in finding black and Hispanic candidates whom rival colleges have not already scooped up at inflated prices. To combat alleged “white supremacy,” Democratic administrations have built permanent bureaucracies dedicated to the proposition that white males discriminate against everyone else.
Evidence of such discrimination is by now exceedingly rare, however, so “disparate impact” analysis steps into the breach. Police and fire departments, public and private employers, bank lending officers, landlords, insurers, school administrators and election officials have all been found guilty of discrimination despite following raceneutral procedures. The mandated remedy is a race-conscious policy crafted to favor non-white, nonmale “identity.”
Trump’s sally during the first Republican primary debate that “this country doesn’t have time” for “total political correctness” sent a signal that the reigning presumptions about oppression were finally vulnerable. The message resonated. Democrats will have to do much more than invoke traditional Democratic class warfare to convince non-elite white voters that the party does not see them as one of America’s biggest problems.