Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Group Identity Convenience
Avik Roy has started a firestorm. (Spoiler alert: Take your blood pressure meds before listening to to this week’s podcast.) As noted by King Prawn, Roy has decided that the GOP is the worst thing that the Left claims it to be – racist.
“The fact is, today, the Republican coalition has inherited the people who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the Southern Democrats who are now Republicans,” Roy says. “Conservatives and Republicans have not come to terms with that problem.”
That problem. But who really has the problem?
Group identity politics must be a neutral concept. By that I mean it can not be good for groups A, B & C but be bad for groups X, Y and Z. But the Left wants it that way. Roy’s answer is to surrender to it, part and parcel. Blacks may identify as being black and demand “group rights,” and the same for women, Hispanics, Asians, Gays, et. al. Whites must crucify themselves on a cross of their own whiteness (especially for the unholy Trinity – White, Christian and Male).
During the taping of the podcast this morning someone said to me, “But the country is changing. Society is changing. We either figure out a way to be relevant or we die. It’s not complicated.”
I’ve heard this argument before. The mainline Protestant denominations have been at it since the 1970s. They’ve become so “relevant” that they’ve almost completely put themselves out of business. When “relevancy” overtakes truth you’re doomed.
That “truth” for Conservatives (as opposed to the “truth” for Christians) is that freedom and liberty are based on the rule of law for each individual, not through guilt or absolution based on an identity, be it gender, race or sexual orientation. Otherwise the whole thing falls off the rails. If guilt in crimes should not be assumed because of group identity then neither can innocence. And worse than declaring innocence is declaring an excuse. Saying “Yes, your honor, my client committed the crime but must be excused” is not justice, social or otherwise. You don’t create justice through injustice.
The worst part of this group identity absolution was on display last night at the Democratic Convention. The parents of Capt. Humayun Khan spoke about the loss of their son in Iraq. If none of the perpetrators of death and destruction are emblematic of Islam, then neither is the late Capt. Khan emblematic of its absolution. If Nidal Hassan, Omar Mateen, Syed Rizwan Farook, Tashfeen Malik and the Tsarnaev Brothers are only individually guilty then only Khan himself was responsible for being an honorable American soldier. The fact that you may have to slow immigration to individually assess whether they are Khans or criminals is not proof of racism.
My son’s best friend in the Corps is an immigrant from the West Coast of Africa. Their racial and cultural heritage could not be farther apart. Yet when push comes to shove they each know they will have the other’s back. They know because they share the idea that the Corps, and what it stands for, is bigger than the color of their skin or whether they talk with a flat Midwestern accent or that of a mix of tribal dialect and French. Black or white, native or immigrant, they are brothers under the Eagle, Globe and Anchor.
If your main goal is to grow Conservatism or the Republican Party, declaring to the world that everything vile that the Marxists and race-baiters have been saying about you is true en masse is not the way to start. Self loathing unconditional surrender is the road to the concentration camp, the road to a totalitarianism that declares the law is nothing more than a tool of political revenge. It is not the road back to the American ideals of true equality and justice.
Instead you must, like the Corps, find that something bigger, that thing that unites. Will the GOP have undesirable elements vote for them? Sure. So do the Democrats. They accept it and move on. So should we.
Published in General
It seemed that he was leading up to something that was cut off so i don’t know that i have a good reaction but obviously there are some x% of Republicans who are racist.
We need an “Amen” button.
We can do this.
Do we have a picture for chaining people down and making them listen to the podcast?
I just don’t see how either of those stats prove anything, racist or otherwise.
Well yeah because the x% of any group is racist.
That’s really racist.
I laughed out loud at this
Sure, but then… if you are a racist and you want to join a political party, which are you more likely to choose?
Now, if you are someone who feels guilty about a racist parent or some racist feeling you once had, which party would you join?
Well, they don’t… but if we were sitting at a neighborhood bar and overheard a guy ranting about Obama being Muslim or his birth certificate or something and i said “I’ll bet you $100 the guy says something racist against blacks within the hour.” Would you bet against me?
I’m not sure Casey.
I have heard dozens of people ranting and raving about the birth certificate and religion for years.
There are two people in my life I’ve heard say racist things about blacks. One is a Dem, the other a Repub. Never heard either one discuss the birth certificate or whether he’s Muslim
that having been said I don’t spend a lot of time in bars and my world is small.
I’m not a conspiracy minded person at all and I always said if I found proof that Obama was not born in America I would shred the evidence. But I won’t be shocked if we find out someday he wasn’t born here.
Does that make me a racist ?
Yeah, the double-standard drives me nuts too. Back in college I decided to check out a copy of one of the books that La Raza-affiliated groups were putting in the curriculum at some school(s)- I forget the title.
Anyways, I was too lazy to read the whole thing, but I did read a section towards the end where the author lamented the outcome of an election in Texas in which a white Republican was voted in as governor instead of his Hispanic Democrat opponent (I think this was the first Hispanic to run for governorship). The author basically said whites voted for the Republican because they were racist, and that the many Hispanics who also voted for the Republican were “misguided,” since they didn’t vote for the candidate who would have, if he had won, been the first Hispanic governor of Texas.
In other words, “Whites voting for a white guy = bad, racist,” but “Hispanics voting for a Hispanic = solidarity among the oppressed, good, a Hispanic’s duty.”
I wondered if the author had ever for a moment contemplated that maybe he was being hypocritical in his views.
No but that’s not the point I think he was leading up to. And then they steeped away from that point. He spent an awful lot of time explaining himself though. Seemed pretty clear to me.
I think the important thing here is that before Trump, we thought Republicans were the conservative party. But at best it was half conservative. Conservatives were the face and most vocal but there were all these other people there too. Trump revealed that there was this ugly slice of the party and he suddenly motivated them to show up. They aren’t invisible any more. They are really there. We need to acknowledge that.
That’s not the same as you are that. But you are in their party right now.
Humans are capable of rationalizing just about anything.
What I always found it fascinating the leftist correlation between heritage, pigment and politics. Hispanics must be liberals. Except those that actually experienced communism. Oh, those are just Cubans…
As soon as the Democrats acknowledge and repudiate their lunatic fringe.
I disagreed with much of what Roy said, especially when he says “white identity politics.” That is absurd. There are about a million different kinds of white, and we’re all the same because we’re not urban black…. I think Roy adopts some of the left’s mistaken conventional wisdom.
But he was correct about the way voters may latch onto the ends while ignoring the principle, and I’ve seen this a lot. I think the die-hard Trump fan, or the “greed is good” type of Republican is a really good example of this. People who like what republicans may end up doing, but who lack any real understanding of the conservative principles behind why we do those things.
Roy takes it a step too far, but he does correctly observe a real phenomenon.
obviously not, nor does supporting trump. That these things may appeal to racists does not mean that they appeal only to racists…
You are confusing me tonight.
We’re not going to improve our party until they improve theirs? Why?
Well, liberals are all about ethnic diversity. You know, just what’s skin-deep. Actual intellectual and philosophical diversity? Ah, heck, no!
Because the bottom line is first past the post. They don’t separate the votes into categories. At least not yet.
Democrats understand that well. The dead, the delusional, the fringe – that party finds a place for all. Communists, advocates for cop killers… When was the last time you heard any Democrat say, “Man, we need to kick people out.” No, they just strategically ask them to shut up several months before an election.
Only we get self righteous about ourselves, creating rifts not to our benefit but to the Democrats.
He’ll have a place at Vox or HuffPo or Media Matters or wherever it is he’ll end up working.
I would love that EJHill but I’m worried that identity politics is inescapable.
On what horse?
I actually don’t care who is first past the post. I have no feelings for the Republican party. I only care about conservatism.
If you compromise the idea to win then what have you won?
This point needs to be repeated and expanded.
It is now obvious that people tend to cluster based on their demographics – a phenomenon which is not racist, but a passive result of human nature (i.e. most people move into communities as adults which resemble the ones they grew up in). This means that different ethnic groups will have different (and often competing) economic and political interests, not based on their ethnic heritage but simply due to the fact that they’ve passively formed different clusters over the years.
This clustering means that color-blind policies will nonetheless almost always benefit one ethnic group more than another. For example, policies which spend money targeting impoverished urban areas will likely represent a transfer of wealth from whites to blacks.
Much of the Trump phenomenon is about certain white clusters simply saying “I want more attention”. They’re not saying “I think blacks/Hispanics/etc. should be ignored”. However, the effects of many of Trump supporters’ preferred policies would be a net shift of resources/attention from minority groups to certain white groups.
I think most of us on Ricochet need to accept that principles hardly mean squat to an average voter.
Principles are really just window-dressing to make people feel good about voting for policies which favor them over others.
Conservatives like to tout having color-blind principles. But if those principles lead to policies which favor certain white clusters, those white voters are likely going to support Republicans only due to the ends of those policies. Any purported support of conservative principles by those voters is likely little more than lip-service.
And the exact same phenomenon is just as strong on the Democratic side.
Conservatives have been bad at making the leap from idealpolitik to realpolitik. Push come to shove ideals are a means to an end. Its one thing to communicate the rightness of your ideology, its quite another to prove its good effects. Not just good effects, but good effects for me within a relevant time horizon.
I agree with the philosophy. But in practical terms, affirmative action hurts unprepared blacks the most (look up the mismatch theory) and Asians the second-most. Whites come in third.
I think in that particular case they both come into play, because the principle is so basic, just simple fairness. The harm to blacks is indirect and less focused, while the harm to whites is much more visible. They can live with the fact that ending it will help people other than themselves, because of the fairness aspect.
Piffle.
I was in favor of a strong national defense when I was a know-nothing liberal and when I was a Libertarian (that libertarian principle of non-aggression is eyewash). I was in favor of a strong defense when I started to work for defense contractors and when I stopped working for defense contractors and now that I’m working for defense contractors again.
The primary focus of the Federal government should be defending the coasts and delivering the mail. “The coasts” don’t necessarily have to be ours, and they stink at “delivering the mail,” so maybe that one should be revisited. Anything else they can accomplish is just ducky as long as it doesn’t cost too much and they don’t screw it up too badly, but most everything else is outside their core competencies and should therefore be avoided.