I was just listening to a fairly uninspired discussion on NPR about race and the coverage of the Democratic primary (while driving to the airport). One interesting tidbit from the Washington Post’s Kevin Merida is that the Obama campaign has met with some serious racial antagonism in Pennsylvania. How extensive it was I couldn’t gather from the conversation. But the n-word was tossed around, some signs burned etc.
Now, let me ask you something. If there was a similarly viable black guy running for president in the GOP primary and he met with anything like this sort of thing, don’t you think there’d be more than a little Krugman-like hysteria about how racist the GOP is? About how conservatism = racism? About how the curtain had been pulled back on the “true nature” of the Republican Party?
But when this happens among Democrats, it seems not to dawn on anyone to make any connection whatsoever between the Democratic Party or liberalism or anything of the sort and racism. Rather, to the extent these things are discussed at all, they are more proof of “America’s original sin,” in the words of one of the panelists.
Look, Jonah [1], I hold no illusions about the numbers of people reading this blog, but I’ve been pointing out for quite some weeks now, that the whole of the Democrat primary campaign has boiled down to racism [2] vs Sexism [3]. If you vote in the primary for Obama, you’re sexist because you won’t vote for a woman. If you vote for Hillary Clinton, you’re a racist because you won’t vote for the black guy. And Democrats were supposed to be ABOVE racism and sexism. Guess all that goes out the window when you’re in the midst of a power grab.
One such mention, last month:
Ummmm…. Hold up a tick, here. WHAT position? Since she’s a Clinton supporter, she’s talking about sexism against Hillary, as opposed to racism against Obama [4]. We’re still in the primary, and so the position she’s describe is driven by DEMOCRATS. I’ll get into this at need, but I suspect the implications here are clear to you already. Like I said at Q&O yesterday, identity politics is of course, by its very nature, racist, sexist, etc. The real fun comes from watching its adherents try to avoid that basic fact. And, yes, I’m just waiting for someone to call me a bigot for saynig that. You watch; it’ll happen.
I mentioned this nonsense again tonight [5]in the Ramble, in fact. Trust me when I tell you, it’s being noticed, too, though not nearly by the numbers I’d like to see.
For clarity: The very reason that they can’t seem to recognize their own racism and sexism is that the very root of their political identity is based on group politics. For all the screaming about how racist and sexist everyone else is, the real core of racism and sexism today, is the Democrat party.
Put another way, Jonah… it’s called projection.