The politics of disunity

"I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Hispanic panhandler," said Ted Cruz to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce yesterday. "And the reason is, in our community it would be shameful to be begging on the street." I guess stages don't count. (Neither does implied, ethnic superiority.)

Nor, to our Princeton debater, does even the faintest of scrupulous arguments. "President Obama … could have chosen to be a leader on race relations and bring us together," continued Cruz. "And he hasn’t done that, he’s made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions that have divided us rather than bringing us together." Against Obama's well-known Howard Bealean rants and infamous ethnic favoritisms, Cruz, as president, would instead opt for the Priebusian charade of softer "tone and language and rhetoric," he said. He would also strive to "appeal to our shared values" — a strategy, once again, wholly rejected by Obama's divisive playbook, according to Cruz.

And then there's the real world, the world in which Obama once intoned "that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren."

That's from presidential candidate Obama's historic Philadelphia race speech, whose cardinal theme of national unity he has, as president, repeated time and again. But his speech, we should never forget, was also contemplatively historical and forbiddingly proleptic:

Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism….

We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

And nothing has. Why? Largely because, as sociologists and anthropologists tell us, our racial disunity is "structural." But also because the party of Lincoln has chosen to squeeze every last white vote from its monitory rhetoric about the shiftless takers among us, the welfare whores, the terror of affirmative action, black crime, political correctness, reverse racism, and any other distraction it can think of. The GOP has no actual political program, but it does have racial disunity going for it — and the party exploits it for all it is worth.

In fact, "we [need not] speculate on whether white men will all flock to [whatever Republican] in the general election regardless of his policies." That, gentle reader, is a given. 

 

Comments

[Bob]

To my understanding a favorite social engineering ploy of US aristocrats has always been to distract what they consider the dogs of society by setting them against one other. In addition to Cruz I recently heard wannabe candidate Kasich call President Obama racially divisive. What not long ago might have been breathtaking hypocrisy is now just a stock talking point on the right.

The distraction is meant mostly to obfuscate some serious economic priority issues in the US, and has little to do with race. I've been back and forth with Peter G about how the US economy has changed since NAFTA but would now like to share a running news story with everyone. NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994. Hopelessness in this small, 97% white, former manufacturing area began in the late '90's: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-indiana-hiv-20150401-story.html

Also, Hillary has joined the discussion with an excellent speech. She seems to be finding her voice: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/hillary-clinton-weighs-baltimore-criminal-justice-system-30674851

[Peter G]

I have seen Hispanic panhandlers in many places in this world. Desperately poor places they are. Cruz has not seen one because he wouldn't be caught dead in such a place. No television cameras to preen before or ready supplies of hair gel.

[Bob]

I just realized the article about Scott county I picked doesn't make my case. It does mention the manufacturers there, but doesn't mention that they've faded since the '90's. A list of current employers can be found here: http://www.city-data.com/city/Scottsburg-Indiana.html by scrolling down to "Businesses in Scottsburg, IN." The article does mention that Scottsburg is drawing employment from Austin.