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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
Amen and Amen.
Now I’ll go take that BP pill. Your excellent take on the inanity was worth it.
Well, if the GOP is cracking up, look for one of those factions to be Avik Roy’s and the AEI types that agree with him. ‘We’re not racist and here’s a bunch of good gov’t programs to prove it!’
I am disgusted!!!!
Hence the problem with nominating DJT, he offers nothing bigger than himself.
Thank you EJ. Your example of your son and his friend is a good one. They have something far bigger than their color or background that unites them.
It used to be that way for all of us. We were all Americans. The day we started hyphenating something got lost. Deep down we still are – unfortunately the only time we see examples is when something horrible happens. The policeman protecting the Black BLM protestor during the sniper attack comes to mind
Rather than embracing identity politics and “reaching out” to aggrieved groups we should be fighting for policies that help everyone : school choice would be my first hill to try and take.
I’m not sure I believe this. At a minimum he believes in stuff that works.
So Reagan, GHW Bush, and the man who founded the magazine where I first saw this guy’s name are all racists? Good to know.
It would seem that Ben Carson and his supporters are now a racist, so are the Cruz and Rubio and Jindal supporters who are even considering voting for the Republican in this election.
Republicans put forward a large and diverse field of candidates. Democrats put forward and all white, mostly old field, so clearly Republicans are the racists.
That’s racist.
Glad I didn’t waste any time on this week’s flagship podcast. Starting to become a habit. A quite sensible habit as it is beginning to turn out.
Wait, am I to understand that someone with an IQ greater than their body temperature opined that it is a good idea both morally and practically to discriminate against, and treat as second and third class citizens a very large and likely to remain very large contingent of humanity who have in their possession nearly all of America’s strategic assets, whose bodies stuff the vast majority of combat arms positions within the military, and are based upon the available data fabulously well armed?
This sounds like a plan so genius only a republican could think of it.
I have not listened yet, so I want to be sure I understand.
Roy is saying we need to embrace the whole “White Privledge” thing?
Roy is hung up on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the “Solid South.” Seeing as the median age of the electorate that put Obama in office was 44, very few were even barely aware of Watergate, let alone Barry Goldwater’s objections to the Civil Rights Act.
Therefore he has to believe in guilt handed down generationally. That, in a nutshell, is “institutional” racism. And that is the product of the east end of a west bound horse.
I’ve listened to a good chunk and i don’t see what’s wrong with what he’s saying or how this post and subsequent comments are even connected to what he’s saying.
I think that we react against what we hear instead of what is said. Peter seems guilty of this in the podcast too.
Wow. As a Son of the South I am really offended. Glad he is not in arms reach, and I will skip the Podcast as if Mike Murphy was on it. Thanks for the warning.
I am not a racist because I am white. To say such is to blame me for my race.
Either tribalism is all wrong or it is all right. If some races are to play the game, then all get too.
Casey: what did you think of Roy’s challenges: x% of republicans believe Obama was not born in America. X% believe Obama is a Muslim.
Wasn’t the implication therefore x% of Republicans racists? (Which made no sense to me since you don’t need to be white to believe either of those things but in Roy’s world you need to be white to be racist…?)
Now I’ve confused myself …
The belief of either of those is not inherently racist. You know, if words have any meaning.
But whatever.
Roy needs to get over himself, he actually has no place in the future and threw a hissy fit because he realizes it. I’d like to chain him to a chair and have him watch Hillary’s America.
I agree. I think him using them as examples was more telling than the actual statistic
Does Roy not know that had it not been for Everett Dirksen the CRA 64 would have never made it out of the Senate? Oh for those not in the know Dirksen was a Republican from Illinois and brought the vast majority of Republican senators along for the ride, including one Senator Sherman from Kentucky who had an Intern named Mitch McConnel, one of the more conservative senators in the chamber.
The other thing that needs to be addressed -and I know this will sound racist, but I don’t care because to some people anything sounds racist – is when did being racist become a capital offense? How effective is this tactic of proclaiming large groups of people racist in curtailing racism? Isn’t it all just more of the same? Like, isn’t it racist , or bigoted, to declare people who you don’t understand/agree with racists?
I have zero respect for these people. They are abusing the language and making the term racist meaningless, negating their supposed aims to combat this thing they call “racism”. All they are actually doing is trying (and failing) to prove superiority, which has it’s own implications…
If I am remembering the podcast correctly, which I listened to a few minutes ago, Roy was arguing that white grievance mongering is what has been picked up since 1964, not racism and he made a distinction between the two (even though I did not exactly agree with it). I don’t think I agree entirely with Roy’s diagnosis of Goldwater; I would argue that while Goldwater won some states and Nixon would too, that the South did not fully join the Republican Party till the 1990s since even Jimmy Carter was able to win Much of the south from Ford.
The south joined the Republican Party because of generational changes caused by desegregation (kids growing up together in public schools with no government imposed segregation) and due to the Democratic Party’s leftward trend which continued to offer less and less to its southern constituents (especially in support of institutional racism).
However, it is true that white identity politics has seen growth in the Republican Party with one prime example being Pat Buchanan. The whole talk of certain American sub cultures being “real America” with no regard towards others (I don’t have New York values, I have Iowan values) and those two areas having demographic differences can be seen as racist. Trying to do what the left does to minorities with whites as trump does is leftism and thus a failure in Roy’s eyes.
But Roy also pointed out that conservative principles can be applied politically to any race or group. Conservative values are not inherent to whites or blacks or anyone. And when you sell conservative principles actively to all these groups they are usually perceptive as he pointed with how Hispanics vote republican in large numbers in Texas at the state level and how there is no real animus between Hispanics and whites in the state , barbecue and tacos go well together.
That is why trump is an issue to Roy. trump does the same thing but in praise to industrial workers, as if they are “real america” and advocates policy which benefits them at cost to the rest of society through tariffs. trump also amplifies the leftist racist caricature by making comments about bias of judges due to their skin color and blames certain nationalities for harming America and advocating policy to set things aright.
trump essentially uses the leftist steal from some and give to others while stoking their hate equation but with different groups. Two wrongs do not make a right.
I think it’s a worthwhile question, especially since racism is a fairly common human phenomenon which has existed (and been tolerated/mitigated) for millenia.
And I think a large part of the answer is due to our past, specifically the fact that America was founded (and thrived for a period) on chattel slavery, which now runs absolutely counter to our moral code. The sin of slavery is so unforgivable on a societal level that white-on-black racism has become a unique sin of its own, much worse than any other type of racism – (like anti-Italian or anti-Chinese racism in the early 20th century).
There is a similar phenomenon in Germany, which prides itself on free speech, but where giving a Hitler salute will tarnish your reputation for life (and may even get you thrown in jail).
We want our morals to be logical and consistent, and defining one type of racism as much worse than the others violates that desire. But real life is messy. We have a natural tendency to want to rectify some of the sins of our forefathers. But since we can’t redo the past, we exaggerate certain taboos in the present to compensate.
All of American thrived on Chattle Slavery? America itself as a nation was founded on that institution? I doubt those statements. America indeed had the institution and the South thrived on it after the invention of the cotton gin which was in the 1790s. So at best half the nation was thriving on slavery from 1800 to 1860 and even then that the was the lesser populated and economically advanced geographical half.
I was oversimplify for the sake of brevity in an otherwise long comment. I think we all know US history well enough to be aware of both the contribution and nuances of slavery in the US.
I was more or less making sure you didn’t mean it, at least in an absolute sense. Because I assumed, as you do, that we know the history well enough that such a statement wasn’t very accurate.
But it has to be forgivable. If not then you’re inviting an endless cycle of hatred and recrimination like the Jews and the Arabs where the only end is seen in one side’s complete annihilation.
It’s not like America didn’t pay for her sins. How many headstones equal redemption?
I would agree with that. But for now let’s just focus on what Roy said in the podcast. What was the problem with that?