Sam Tanenhaus says the Republicans are the party of white
people and his magazine, the New Republic, calls that “original sin.”
Me?
I wonder if Sam – or the people who write his headlines,
anyway – is telling us that white people who know what’s good for them should be voting Republican.
I wonder if the New Republic is saying it’s a sin for white
people, though not others, to be concerned about what’s good for them.
Having voted for Obama twice and being pretty sure no un-rich American of any race with an ounce of sense and a glimmer what’s good for him
will ever vote Republican for any office during the rest of my lifetime, I find
all this confusing.
Being white myself, I mean.
Am I perhaps the one making a terrible mistake?
Sam, like liberals generally, by far prefers to cast the
central contemporary opposition between the Republicans and the Democrats as a
clash of races, or rather as a clash of one race against all the others and a
clash between whites who deny and others who comprise and celebrate American diversity.
Like liberals generally, he has abandoned the other vision
of that opposition that cast the Democrats as the party of the people, of the
common man, of the vast American majority and the Republicans as the party of
the rich.
He prefers to narrate American history as a racial conflict and
even thus to exacerbate it for political gain, though that narrative slanders
and maligns and even alienates the tens of millions of whites who voted for
Obama and without whom the Democrats still cannot win, and will not be able to
win for many decades to come, if ever.
And it slanders as well the millions of whites who vote Republican
because they are rich and want to keep what they have laid hands on by hook or
by crook, because they accept the moral and political vision of the libertarian
bumper-sticker that says “socialism is fine until you run out of other people’s
money,” or because they are devout Christians who reject the contemptuous and
grossly immoral secularism they see as dominant among Democrats.
And he does all that just as a majority of the professional
white left has done since the race riots of the sixties and 70’s when they
virtually guaranteed the success of the “southern strategy” by repeatedly
siding, at least rhetorically, with the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X,
and the Panthers against the whites who feared them and the police who fought
them.
Not to mention the black rioters who, in those days and in
city after city, slaughtered whites whenever they could as the professional
left told America whites had it coming and the rioters were exacting moral and
racial justice.
Oh.
Many conservatives over the last 60 or 70 years have
lionized Edmund Burke, a champion of monarchy and aristocracy against the brilliant
revolutionary republicanism of the French on the continent.
Considerably fewer over all that time have ever had a clue
who Calhoun was, and he nearly disappeared from conservative propaganda altogether
between the civil rights era and the recent emergence of neo-confederate
thought that has lionized pre-Civil War nullificationists and secessionists of
the South like Jefferson and Madison and of the North like Webster, Stevens,
and most of the abolitionists.
All the same, a history lesson is a good thing, once in a
while.
Even if the liberal bias of the thing is so pronounced.
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