Re: Racists

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Easy, as you assert, it is undeniable that the recent charges by the Left of racism are transparently made up out of whole cloth. The question we have to ask is, why? If there is no evidence whatsoever of actual racism, what is driving these people? Is it just a particularly ham-handed attempt to stifle debate and win political points? Or is it something deeper?

I would submit it is something deeper. Below the belt politics is the natural recourse of your average partisan, but most politicians and political commentators who are among the leadership of any party or movement refrain from such things, if not for any other reason than they are sophisticated enough to know that it is usually counter-productive. And yet, in this case, we have a former President, Jimmy Carter, as well as Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, various and sundry Congressman, and eminent columnists in The New York Times, all weighing in with the racism charge. Indeed, it has been so pervasive and consistent a charge from all levels of the Left as to make it seem as if it is a formal Talking Point distributed among the faithful. But that would mean that the White House was involved in directing this crude campaign, and I just can't believe they would be that stupid.

There is another factor important in all of this. And that is the way the Left, so quick to label anyone criticizing blacks as a racist, has no problem at all attacking blacks who might happen to be conservative. Michael Steele has had to put up with such race-baiting tactics as being called an "oriole," ie, black on the outside, white on the inside, along with other more subtle smears, for years, with nary a peep of protest from the self-righteous mavens of race relations. In their time, Condoleeza Rice, Janice Rogers Brown, Ward Connerly and Alan Keyes have been the subject of scathing, crude attacks. And the most onerous example of all, Clarence Thomas was subjected to what he rightly termed "a high-tech lynching" in his Supreme Court confirmation Hearings, a lynching joined in by a wealthy, privileged white man, Ted Kennedy, with feverish intensity. And yet, Senator Kennedy did so without any fear that he might be excoriated for racism. How did he know that he would be immune from the racism charge?

The answer to that question, I think, points us to the deeper reason for these racism charges.

Continue .....
I do not intend to charge the Left with Marxism, at least not in the gross sense of that term. But it is undeniable that Marxism is a root or ground of the modern Left, and in many ways the Left thinks in Marxist analytical terms.

In the popular imagination of those on both the Left and the Right, Marxism is all about the inevitable clash between the Rich and the Poor, with the ultimate goal being the synthesis of the two into a classless society of pure economic equality. This is clearly influential on the Left, with its incessant harangues of Capitalists, the Rich and the Powerful, in common cause with the Poor and the Weak of society.

But Marxism also contained a third class of people within the societal struggle, the so-called bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie were the middle class. In Marxian thinking, they were a dull, unimaginative group, living dull, unimaginative lives. The burgermeisters, the fat uneducated shopkeepers, the frumpy dithering wives, all going about their humdrum daily lives with no passion, no cause, no consciousness of the grand drama of society's struggles for betterment. In contemporary terms, think of the vapid, alienating culture of 1950's suburban America, as depicted in so many Hollywood movies (Pleasantville, The Graduate, etc.).

In this simplistic picture, clearly the Poor is Good and the Rich are Bad. But what is the bourgeoisie? It is the despised, because by the very inertia of their frumpen culture they support the Rich Bad People and prevent the Poor from winning the great class struggle. Picture the Rich as a humongous, ugly statue in the public square. The bourgeoisie is the even bigger base upon which it stands. If the statue is to be pulled down, the base must first be destroyed.

Pull this analysis forward into contemporary Leftism, and you have, I believe, a reflexive revulsion of our contemporary bourgeoisie, the middle class, aka average Americans. President Obama's famed "bitter clingers" remark captures this wonderfully. He said that average Americans cling to their Bibles and their guns out of ignorant fear in times of stress, disclosing in a stroke his contempt for the middle class. The middle class is just not down with the struggle, as they say, and so they must contain any and every odious characteristic humans are capable of.

Which brings us to racism, the preeminent odious characteristic in American culture today. The Left sees racism where there is none because they see average Americans as incapable of any higher aspirations at all. So when the middle class appears to be demonstrating for political purposes, genuinely passionate about a cause, well, that can't be true, because the middle class by definition (that is, Marxian definition) has no passion for any higher ideals. If they had such passions, then they would not be the middle class, but in fact fellow travelers of the Left, struggling against the Rich in the grand drama of history.

So, these protests by average Americans can only come from something dark and unseemly, and the darkest, most unseemly motivation in contemporary America is racism, QED.

In essence, for the Left, middle class center-right conservatism is not a political position that might be held by some racists, it is in fact racism, and an integral part of the existing racist structure of society which serves, as the old bourgeoisie did in Marx's time, to support the Rich and Powerful at the top at the expense of the Poor at the bottom. So, all average Americans are at base racists, even if, be it noted, they happen to be black. In fact, black conservatives are natural targets for an especial venom from the Left, because their skin color marks them as traitors to their own kind.

As in most analysis by the Left, this sort of thing does not stand up to the barest scrutiny. There is simply no evidence whatsoever that the recent protests were motivated by racism. And in a more general context, conservatism as expressed in the American culture is not motivated by racism either, but in fact is an aspiration for freedom for all peoples. The American society that has grown and matured under its founding conservative principles is the most free, open and egalitarian society ever achieved by Man. It is not perfect in this respect, of course, but nothing in this world ever is. It's only the best Man has been able to do thus far.

The Left, blinkered by its own ideology, cannot see this and never will. For the rest of us, we best just get used to the spurious charge of racism, until such time as the Left slinks back to the obscurity of the fringe of American culture where they belong.