Party of Trolls: How Race Dominates U.S. Politics
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Then senator and presidential hopeful Barack Obama at the Presidential Health Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, March 24, 2007. What race will play a role in the 2012 presidential election?
Photo Credit: Center for American Progress Action Fund, Washington, DC
With the next four years at stake, the only topic of conversation is the Race Card. The left plays the Race Card and then accuses the right of playing the Race Card. There are dogwhistles in the air that only white middle-aged pundits can hear and arguments over whose diverse lineup truly represents the philosophy of the future and whose is just shameless tokenism.
The media madhouse insists that a half-black man who went from the Illinois State Senate to the White House in 5 years is proof that we are a racist country and that Southern Europeans whose ancestors moved to this continent are an oppressed racial minority. Arguing with this insanity is a sure way to get called a racist. Ignoring this insanity means being charged with privilege. Privilege being the ungodly power to ignore someone else’s assertion that privilege through victimization should begin and end every single discussion on every topic, up to and including the moon landing.
The Democratic Party and its media affiliates have become a party of trolls who only know how to hijack every discussion with an obsessive insistence that every issue can be boiled down to race and that the difference between the two parties is that one of them is racist and the other has good taste in fonts.
It’s hard to know what the Democratic Party stands for anymore. All we know is that it is against racism. Never before has an entire election been run around a single negative issue that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual challenges facing the country. Instead we have the national spectacle of members of minority groups being pitted against each other by two parties to prove which of them is less racist.
There is no precedent for a country facing two major crises, an economic depression and a war at the same time, holding an election that is somehow about race. If we’re going to make the 2012 election about race, then we might as well also make it about childhood obesity, green energy and all the other idiocies of a failed administration that can’t tie its shoes without a bailout.
For the last three years, the left has responded to every criticism of their candidate, their party and their incompetence by bleating about racism, as if having a black candidate and a large share of the black vote makes them honorary minorities. And as if their bleating had anything to do with real issues like the unsustainable national debt and an economy that still can’t get back on its feet.
The left imagines that it is somehow better than the lunatics of the Westboro Baptist Church who randomly show up at funerals screaming about homosexuality. It’s not. Not when its members show up randomly brandishing nooses or dressing up as body parts and screaming about racism or sexism. There’s no hint of responsible leadership in tactics like that. It’s the behavior of a debating club loser who has memorized only one winning point and will shout it no matter what the issue is.
Everyone wants to prove that their ideology, whether it’s showing up in the country with 50 cents and becoming successful by building a business or showing up in the country with 50 cents and becoming successful by getting a Ford Foundation grant to community organize the hell out of a local group, is universal and can apply to everyone regardless of skin color, gender, religion or fashion sense. And once we’ve done that, it still falls to us to deal with problems that depend on math, not race.
The real issue at stake here is whether the working class will end up being squeezed out by the government class. It’s an issue that affects the rich, poor and middle class alike, and the Republicans are coming dangerously close to articulating it in between applause breaks. The Democrats would like to avoid this line of conservation as much as possible, because once the debate is fully underway, Americans will start assessing their individual economic stakes in the fight, instead of assuming that their economic interest is joined at the hip to their racial identity, gender or choice of bed partners.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Jewish Press.
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I have noticed that whenever someone makes a comment against obama in any article, someone chimes in and calls that person a racist. It's a ridiculous defense since he is half white and half black and the comments have nothing to do with race, but the man's poor performance.
How has he performed poorly? And, don't you hold the house republicans at least a little responsible for blocking his every initiative to try and help this country? They have purposefully sabotaged his presidency.