Posted on 05/28/2009 5:30:19 PM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
I'd like to take a moment to discuss Obama's recent choice of Sonia Sotomayor as the replacement for David Souter on the Supreme Court. Not so much what her ideology is (far left wing, of course) nor what her judicial temperament has been from past experience (radically activist). Rather, I'd like to address all the hoopla about her being the first Hispanic on the United States Supreme Court. Once you cut away all the other fluff, this is why she was selected by Obama. She is, essentially, a political trump card, and one that Obama skillfully used.
Obama – whose own personal background and his experience as a community organizer among Chicago's radicalized black community give him a special concern for the issue – is even more skilled at the game of racebaiting than are most of his Democrat colleagues. Either way in the Sotomayor case, he wins. Her race (and to a lesser degree, her gender) give her the perception of untouchability – to criticise, question, or vote against her on the part of the Republicans will be perceived as being tantamount to an admission that they are just racists who hate Hispanics. If confirmed (and the odds against it are long indeed), Sotomayor will play a valuable role to the Left as a voice for racial hatred and tribalism on the Court – a role she has already indicated on several occasions that she will fulfill gladly.
One thing that conservatives need to understand is that the left-wingers are always obsessed with race, because race is one of the tools they use to divide people and set them against each other. Racial animosity is a key part of the Gramscian-Marxist playbook for undermining the stability and solidarity of the American social system. By inciting racial hatred and sensitivity, the Left hopes to maintain themselves at the top of the social heap – able to direct and make policy as they choose (and fleece the system while they're at it) without the bothersome hoi polloi getting in the way.
Do you think I'm being a conspiracy theorist here? I'm not. In fact, just this sort of strategy was implemented in the past. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the white Democrat ruling class did just this to keep poorer whites and blacks separated and at each others' throats. Playing upon the then-current fears of “crazed rapist Negroes” and the like, the white ruling class in the Southern states fomented the overt and institutional racism against blacks that lasted for over a century. The Democrats are doing the same thing again, except this time the roles are reversed – blacks are the aggrieved group, while whites are the scapegoats.
In a perfect world, there would be no such thing as affirmative action. There would be none in the sense of refusing, for instance, to promote high-scoring firemen to command grades because they were the "wrong" ethnicity (i.e. nonminorities), as happened in the Ricci v. DeStefano case. Incidentally, it was Judge Sotomayor who racistly ruled against the rightly-aggrieved white firefighters who saw their chances to advance in their profession stifled because they made the mistake of scoring higher on a proficiency test than did their black colleagues. Likewise, there would be no affirmative action in the sense of making sure that a nominee to the Supreme Court has to fulfill certain racial special-interest group criteria before she is nominated. In a perfect world, the best person for the job - regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. - would get the position.
Unfortunately, that goes against the vested interests of the Democrat Party and the Left in general. If the focus of the discussion were on the individual abilities and qualifications of a person, then people might start getting the idea that it's the individual, not the group, that matters. The lefties don't want that - to them, garnering votes by inventing and/or exaggerating grievances between racial groups is what matters. To those on the Left, the individual - with his or her individual accomplishments, abilities, etc. - must be subsumed into the tribalistic group structure and then played off like chess pieces against other groups.
Those on the Left have a vested interest in two things:
First, in generating grievances among minority groups through the constant drumbeat of reminders of past injustices, and the present invention of imaginary "racism" on the part of whites. I fully agree that slavery was a terrible injustice. I fully agree that Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings, gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, etc. were terrible injustices. But those were all in the past. I refuse to live in the past. I also do not believe that the United States is an endemically racist country today. Opportunity is open to all, if they will grab the ring and take it.
But the grievance industry among racial minorities in the USA doesn't have this same commitment. It exists to keep minorities in a constant state of agitation about the past – which perversely helps to keep minorities powerless and controlled by the grievance-mongers (which is, of course, the whole point). Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, La Raza, and their gaggle of local imitators in every inner city and barrio in America understand clearly an important lesson – a person who is self-sufficient, who lives in the present and strives for the future instead of living in the past, is a person who cannot be controlled by hate and fear-mongering. They don't want that. They want racial minorities in America to remain powerless, so they can be controlled.
Second, the Left has an interest in encouraging reverse racism on the part of minority groups as a means of setting them against the lower and middle class whites with whom they share more natural affinities than they do with rich limousine liberals. Let's face it – your average minority individual who is, say, a mechanic or a construction worker, has much more in common with working class whites who are also mechanics or construction workers, than they have in common with the elite limousine liberal crowd (such as the Obamas) who wear $500 sneakers to visit homeless shelters.
In short, it's a divide and conquer tactic. See, all other things being equal and lacking the artificial hatreds instilled into them by decades of Democrat indoctrination, blacks and Latinos more naturally would and should be Republicans. Polls have shown that both of these groups tend to be more socially conservative than the average American, and that both groups tend to be open to conservative economic policies such as balanced budgets, lowered taxes, and school choice (so long as the name "Republican" is not attached to them by the pollster). This means that most blacks and Hispanics are actually a lot like working and middle class whites - who tend to share the same views on social issues and whatnot. But, by continually screeching "racism" about everything under the sun, the lefties have successful convinced blacks and Latinos to throw in their lot with rich, white, elitist limousine liberals who couldn't care less about poor and middle class minorities, other than to use them as cheap votes.
The single best thing that the Republican Party could do to reach out to minority voters would be to confront them with the truths about what their own “leaders” are doing to them. Conservatives and Republicans need to encourage minority voters to think for themselves instead of blindly following the grievance-mongers. This won't be done through slick multimedia presentations or expensive outreach programs with celebrities and token minorities. The GOP has spent decades of time and millions of dollars trying to court the black vote, only to have that vote turn out in record numbers for Obama – for the most part (if the many blacks I spoke to personally are any indication) because he shared their skin color. Before the GOP can make inroads, they first have to figure out a way to break the hold of tribalism and grievancemongering on the minds of blacks and Hispanics. That may be a tough row to hoe, but it would be worth it to break the back of the Democrat Party by stealing some of its most loyal constituencies.
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