Identity Politics As A Dead End For The Left?

Jennifer Senior of The Times fascinates us with this article about an eerily prescient book from 1998 which was brought back to life by Twitter and events:

Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming

Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book — its ranking soared on Amazon and by day’s end it was no longer available. (Harvard University Press is reprinting the book for the first time since 2010, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.)

It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Mr. Rorty, an American pragmatist philosopher, died in 2007. Were he still alive, he’d likely be deluged with phone calls from strangers, begging him to pick their stocks.

OK, not a bad call. I don't believe for a moment that "the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out" but obviously our fetally-positioned progressive class does.

Prof. Rorty was a lefty chastising his fellow lefties, the article explains:

His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting. Hope was part of its core philosophy. But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change. A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.

The result was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice. By 1997, when Mr. Rorty gave three lectures that make up the spine of “Achieving Our Country,” few of his academic colleagues, he insisted, were talking about reducing poverty at all.

“Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies,” he wrote, “because the unemployed, the homeless, and the residents of trailer parks are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense.”

That's debatable and sorta-kinda rebuttable. A recent election analysis I saw recently noted that Bill Clinton was the last Dem candidate to outpoll his Republican opponent among whites. Wild Bill's plan was to position himself as a moderate Democrat with working class appeal to bring home the Reagan Democrats, so as of 1998 the political rift of Dems and the white working class was manageable.

The article links to the original 1998 review; let me excerpt this:

His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting. Hope was part of its core philosophy. But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change. A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.

The result was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice. By 1997, when Mr. Rorty gave three lectures that make up the spine of “Achieving Our Country,” few of his academic colleagues, he insisted, were talking about reducing poverty at all.

“Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies,” he wrote, “because the unemployed, the homeless, and the residents of trailer parks are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense.”

That would be the "Blame America First" strand of thought excoriated by Jeanne Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican convention, so again, this idea was hardly new in 1998.

Can contemporary progressives back away slowly from identity politics and attract working class whites by returning to their class-based Marxist comfort zone? Some say they must! Here is Mark Lilla in a widely-circulated Times piece:

In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

Yes, but... Here is another recent Times piece by Morgan Parker, also in reaction to the rise of Trump. Any attempt of mine to summarize it will seem unkind but - basically, a young black woman is permanently depressed. Why? Because of slavery, Jim Crow, and white cultural ascendance. Her own biochemical issues get short shrift:

How to Stay Sane While Black

I wish I could point to the moment when I first understood I was a thing to be hated. The first “I’m just not attracted to black girls.” The first “Do you work here?”

When I was 15, I was told I have major anxiety disorder and moderate-to-severe depressive disorder.

“Black people don’t go to therapy,” my dad said.

I had been told to pray, but it wasn’t working. I was told to be strong. How strong do you need to be to want to die, and to be certain the world wants you dead, and yet to keep on living? As a little black girl in a little white suburb, trying to smooth down my hair and lick the ash from my elbows, I wondered, do white people have these thoughts? Is something wrong with me?

Thirteen years later, still plagued by the exact same garbage — and worse, used to it — I tell my therapist I never stood a chance of loving myself.

“Look at the ads in the subway,” I plead. “Look at my Tinder inbox. Look at the news!”

And so on. A bit more:

American slavery, the event, begot American white supremacy, the psychology. That psychology provides white Americans with privilege, power and the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, black Americans don’t and will never know our real names; commercials for Ancestry.com feel like a personal attack; we are expected to prove to our government that we “matter”; and we fear that, in the event of our death, our life will be scrutinized and we will be presumed guilty.

Sometimes I think my depression is the most normal thing about me. We should all get free therapy. We could call it reparations.

It isn’t just that I’m tired; it’s that my mom is tired, my nana was tired, her mom was tired (whoever she was). It isn’t that I’m single; it’s that society believes that black women are not beautiful, and so maybe I believe that, too.

Obviously the author will be welcomed into a safe space on any university campus, but I don't see her as a leader in a progressive movement away from victim studies and towards reconciliation with whites. "White privilege" is a race based concept, not a class-based one and its proponents aren't interested in the sad stories of middle age white guys who are now stacking boxes at Walmart because they lost their union job to Mexico, or illegal immigrants. The guy is privileged! Even if he doesn't know it.

And Ms. Parker is hardly an outlier. Consider this Times review of the progressive epistle on race relations by Ta Nehisi Coates, "Between The World And Me":

But here we reach a fork in the road. Baldwin, in writing to his nephew, does not deny the pain and horror of American notions of justice — far from it — but he repeatedly emphasizes the young man’s power and potential and urges him to believe that revolutionary change is possible against all odds, because we, as black people, continue to defy the odds and defeat the expectations of those who seek to control and exploit us.

Coates’s letter to his son seems to be written on the opposite side of the same coin. Rather than urging his son to awaken to his own power, Coates emphasizes over and over the apparent permanence of racial injustice in America, the foolishness of believing that one person can make a change, and the dangers of believing in the American Dream. “Historians conjured the Dream,” Coates writes. “Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories”; Dreamers are the ones who continue to believe the lie, at black people’s expense. In what will almost certainly be the most widely quoted passage, Coates tells his son: “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”

Little hope is offered that freedom or equality will ever be a reality for black people in America. “We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.” If his son held out any hope that the emerging racial justice movement on the streets of Ferguson, New York City or Baltimore or beyond might change hearts and minds, Coates seems determined to quash it. “Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: To awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white . . . has done to the world. But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.”

There is not a lot of seeking of common ground visible here. And where do progressives see this headed? The cultural and physical presence of whites is making black people mentally ill and physically endangered. Where is the road to reconciliation?

 

Comments

[daddy]

First! (But not first to read what TM wrote---thats gonna' take me another 15 minutes:(

[Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki]

Yeah, the problem was she didn't mention all the groups and those not mentioned felt excluded.

The actual problem is precisely that identity politics by definition must pit tribe against tribe and it is remarkably hard to do that without excluding some groups.
People feel excluded because they ARE being excluded.

[buccr morgan]

The Dallas shooter had tennessee on his reading list

[buccr morgan]

Good gravy, this is 24 carat foolishness,

Now I don't think trump is that man on horseback, anymore than marius was.

[Joan]

Wish I had some answers for people like that poor girl who is depressed because she's black. There won't be a road to reconciliation until people who view the world through their race or skin color change, problem is, they won't. From the beginning of time, this world has suffered from hatred and prejudice and brutality and war -- even between people of the same color but different tribes or villages or religions or countries. And, if blacks here in the States would be honest, black people in the African continent enslaved other black people. Evil and brutality are part of the human condition.

Slavery here in the States was a great evil. Discrimination after the war was despicable. Those times are over. Perhaps if people would get over their obsession with their own skin color, some peace and reconciliation might show faint signs of life.

[daddy]

TM,

Your links numbers 5 and 6 do not work.

[Boricuafudd]

There cannot be any reconciliation for if there was it would mean that they would lose the power that they currently have.

The Progressives assigns power to victimology, the higher the suffering the higher on the hierarchy you are. This had served well to African-Americans in the past but they are being surpassed by other victims (Hispanics, LGBT, etc.), just as it happened to the white working class.

The election of Obama was their peak, but as their population is flattening, and because of their own identity politics, self-segregate their political power dwindles. Other groups, (Hispanics who's population is growing, women) are now the ones that are being courted marginalizing them further.

That is what Ta Nehisi Coates and Morgan Parker are lamenting that the Black culture that they adopted, with Progressives cheer leading them, has left them behind, while other groups surpassed them.

There can be no reconciliation, as it would mean assimilation and accepting that they were wrong.

[buccr morgan]

The last on doesn't too. Much agitate to take in. Mr. Dixon, a product of St. Albans and Columbia us much the same way.

[daddy]

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy.

Point 1---Why repugnant?

Point 2---I cannot think of any moment when Hillary was:
(A) at her best or
(B) uplifting.

Hillary was and is incapable of uplifting. She was and is deadening, drudgening, drearying, depressing, demanding, dishonest, duplicitous, uninspiring, and soul killing.

As for at her best, I must have missed it. She has no best.

We do live on different planets.

[daddy]

Heels kicking Chaminade butt at the Maui Invitational 91-53, with 6 minutes to go.

[buccr morgan]

They on omicron persei 8, goodnight.

[Dave (in MA)]

Hillary was at her best when she took the 3 AM phone call on 11/9 and sent Podesta out to face the crybabies.

[Another Bob]

Re. Rorty? He wasn't exactly prescient to realize that an "otherized" majority - the ones footing the bill and being spat at for the privilege - would eventually rebel. The last graf was the tell - just another prog huckster threatening the plantation workers.

The real problem is none of this is fixable. The likes of Parker and Coates are NEVER going to admit their profound error and change their ways. And the prog kultursmog will keep producing more of them.

Add in the left's propensity for violence, and we have very interesting times ahead. And maybe an explanation for Trump's "non-conservative" outreach to the various clans of the plantation?

None of this is new - right-of-center types have been saying it for most of my adult life. And being called racist for doing so.

[Another Bob]

A comment I read: " Hillary was a reptile piloting a lifelike human suit, with zero charisma, and entitlement issues, who got the candidate she wanted to run against the most and she STILL LOST."

[daddy]

This Am Thinker story is frightening so Legal guys please have a look:

Danger! Obama could put Merrick Garland on Supreme Court in December

"Last week, I warned that if Congress adjourned for the year too soon, it could open a window to give President Obama a Supreme Court pick. That's because of a provision of the Constitution that allows the president to make recess appointments that can last two or more years. Now we get word that Congress is planning to adjourn early, which will give Obama an opportunity to appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court."

Not being a Lawyer, I have no idea, but we aren't known as "the stupid Party" for nothing, and we do know the other side is totally unscrupulous.

[FTL]

President Trump will not fix race relations in four or eight years, but the situation will be greatly improved by next Thanksgiving.

Community agitator Obama never missed even the most contrived opportunity to malevolently stoke the flames of racial discord in this country. Just removing that depraved individual from the highest bully pulpit in the land will be better than buying everyone in the world a six-pack of cokes.

[daddy]

What a surprise. According to the Daily Mail it appears that many of the "Hamilton" cast members that lectured VP Elect Pence, didn't vote, and haven't voted for years.

REVEALED: Number of Hamilton stars haven't voted in YEARS despite clash with vice president-elect Mike Pence over his political persuasions

There are no records available for this year, so it's unclear if the cast members voted in 2016, but years prior show many were absent on Election Day...

...Javier Munoz who plays Hamilton, hasn't voted since the 2006 midterm elections....

...Brandon Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr...records show he didn't vote in 2012

[daddy]

Virginia JOMers,

Any updates on the investigation and hopefully punishment meted out to this JMU Democrat student leader, who admitted, after getting caught, that he signed up dead people on the voter rolls?
(29 Sept) Student admits to voter fraud in Harrisonburg, investigation ongoing

His name is Andrew J. Spieles, James Madison University. I've been googling his name off and on for 2 months now but I can never find any updates at all. If we don't prosecute these voter fraud guys when we catch them in the act, we're simply telling them we don't care enough about it in the first place, and others will learn the lesson they can do it with impunity.

[Account Deleted]

The new thread on the Left--- the article citation is a target rich environment.

The first paragraph took me on quite a ride. I'm a veteran of the culture wars on the University of Vermont campus back in the 90s, that campus' version of the tumultuous Free Speech/Vietnam war student movement era at Cal Berkeley.

This is long, but it reflects a perspective that I hope lends itself to a deeper understanding of just how sclerotic the American Left and all of its wings have become.

It's 2am PST. Nitey nite. And for all you early risers out east, I hope the coffee tastes great!
>>>>>>>
Rorty: “But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change. A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.”
>>>

The 60’s counterculture movement spawned a “new left.”

Those legions were the children of America’s greatest generation, the industrial working class which put the country over the top victoriously over Germany and Japan.

Within two decades following the end of the war, the new left was born.

The “old left” was born out of necessity to improve lives of workers affected by life and death labor issues. The old left was predominantly white and working class.

The new left was a different beast.

There was to be no more allegiance to organized labor issues given the pronouncement that the new way to freedom and liberty was through absolute rejection of values held by “anybody over 30”. And the guiding mantra was “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

The new left was a movement of affluence centered on college campuses and bohemian coffee houses. Art studios, theater stages and poetry dens were the new “shop floors” replacing the realms of skilled tradesman and shop stewards.

The social protest movements of the 60s, which McCarthy and McGovern had mainstreamed into the Democrat Party mainstream platform by 1972, called for rejection of the very affluence and means that made it possible for the youth of that era to be attending college in record numbers without the obligation to train for jobs and service within the national economy.

This “new left” was against the tangible formation of capital into working and owning classes.

The new left was protesting the war in Vietnam, the war economy, degradation of the environment, and the injustices perpetrated against racial minorities.

The “new left” was predominantly white.

During that same era when the new left emerged Black freedom struggle informed some of the new left’s emerging agendas. Black freedom struggle wasn’t monolithic. There were cultural divides over racial identities and political splits demarcating acceptability of competing civil rights philosophies, strategies and tactics.

But there was a clear separation within the new left between white and black, between affluence and survival.

Simply stated, black freedom struggle was driven by the will to survive predicated on a palpable, deep desire to participate fully in the life of our free society.

Priorities of the most radical white leftists, among the likes of the Students for a Democratic Society’s Weather Underground, were focused on revolution and overthrowing the American government and destroying the industrialized economy. On the lower intensity points of the political spectrum, college educated, middle and working class leftists sought “change from within.”

The goal was to improve by “resisting.” And while resisting, the white radicals would get law degrees, masters of social work degrees, marketing MBAs, and teaching certifications and PhDs so they could ply their political trades while earning “a comfortable living.”

In the 60s and 70s Black freedom struggle included radical elements such as the militant arm of the Black Panther Party. The militants engaged in armed confrontations with police and fomented violent riots which dwarfed the Ferguson era riots of today. They were subjugated by the US Department of Justice, their leaders jailed or forced into exile.

The same pattern was replicated in Latin, Asian, and Native American radical movements.

But there was a marked contrast between the affluent “hippie” protestor’s concerns—clear and consistent access to cash, leisure pursuits, drugs, non-committal recreational sex without marriage, and as much education as one could consume—and the full-spectrum concerns of black Americans, Mexican American farm laborers, middle-class black American tradesmen and skilled industrial workers, teachers, inhabitants of inner city ghettos and barrios, and almost invisible lives of both rural reservation Indians and their urban relatives.

The color line dividing the human elements within the new American left which emerged from the 1960s protest movements separated political intentions based on two contrasting objectives.

For the white camp, political action was destined to support “what we are against.”

For people of color, political action was destined to support “what we hope to gain and become as full citizens participating in the life of the Nation with all rights ensured.”

The white way was to protest what was contrary to a broad general philosophy, a secular moral code unbound to any religious dogma, seeking to underpin its legitimacy with a mélange of “spiritual” beliefs and practices unbound by Judeo-Christian traditions, preferably of Asian or East Indian origins.

The more exotic the better to distance the protestor from their own foggy ancestral roots or any blatant ties to a Catholic or Protestant religious upbringing.

The protests of ALANA people (African, Latin, Asian, and Native Americans) were centered on the restoration of cultural heritage lost during the diasporas and resettling by immigrations and forced relocations over two centuries.

To do so would require economic stability, ending poverty line demarcations of where and how ALANA people participated in the economic and political life of the Nation.

Economic stability for ALANA people meant fighting for the right to vote, to have equal access to employment, education, and resources for building self-reliant communities such as personal and commercial credit for acquiring property and appreciable assets--- the tools for building an American dream.

These are the tools for securing membership in the American middle class.

Today, when we hear Democrat politicians speak about “middle class Americans”, do we hear them speaking with words and phrases that include ALANA people?

Or are there special sets of words used to separate “constituencies”? The answers are “no” and “yes” respectively. Neither answer needs proof or anectodal evidence.

This is why “A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.”

Because the new Left, brought into the Democrat party of the early 70s, was a split-level constituency the white contingent stood on the shoulders of the genuine achievement and striving of the ALANA contingent.

The legitimacy of the new Left was rooted in the existence of the freedom struggle movements of ALANA people.

The new left was deeply disturbed by the barbarity perpetrated against ALANA people all around the country. “This must change.” Today’s left says “Not in our name.”

But the urgency of participating for keeps in freedom struggles is muted by affluence. Affluence is status determined by options, by “choice” as it were.

Every white leftist had the practical option of supporting or not supporting ALANA freedom struggles.

There were “Freedom Riders” and there were “Merry Pranksters.”

What those scenarios had in common was that one was either “on the bus or off the bus.”

Many white leftists did give their support. Some gave their lives. But it was a tiny minority.

Think of how many white liberals today, who are now 60 something, have some vague affiliation with protest movements back in the day.

Then, gauge how many fewer have any credible association to ALANA freedom struggles anywhere in the country: Selma or Montgomery, Alabama; Delano, California, Pine Ridge South Dakota; Oakland, California; Newark, New Jersey; East St. Louis, Missouri; Navajoland; San Francisco, California; Placherman’s Parish, Louisiana--- the sites are numerous.

Yet, it is a more specific conversation one might have with them should the topic turns to their pursuits of “personal freedoms” guaranteed by their presumption of civil “liberties” whereby they might dissent to reject anything having to do with “the system”, even if that meant making bombs, killing cops, destroying private and public property, hiding from the draft in Canada, or joining the Communist party.

On the other hand, freedom struggle movements of ALANA people drove passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.

Color inspired the white-centered political movements for sex and sexual orientation equity.

Affirmative Action was the embodiment of the spirit of the Equal Employment Opportunity laws.

And AA/EEOC laws benefited primarily white females and their pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness as defined by emerging feminist theory.

The direct non-proportional statistics on employment, income disparities, and educational achievement bear this out.

The motivation to change society and its impediments to liberty and freedom came from ALANA freedom struggles which had continued unabated since the founding of the Country.

Dissatisfaction is the mother of all motivation to change one’s circumstances. And the new left was not exempt from that fundamental truth about the human psyche.

The white youth of the 60s protest movements were disturbed by the violence perpetrated by Jim Crow southerners and institutionalized bigotry throughout the country.

Their dissatisfaction with “the Establishment” escalated lock step with the escalation of the Vietnam war. It reached a tipping point with the implementation of the draft.

Their concerns intersected with the same survival concerns of ALANA youth who were dying overseas and dying with their elders and families here at home in ghettos, barrios, rural communities, and Indian reservations.

The new left created a flash point of enormous impact which resulted in the opening of the Democrat Party to its agenda for change.

The Democrat Party subsumed the entire constituency and saw its political DNA modified forever. But the distribution of rewards and the access to wealth, privilege and power have remained disparate over the decades since.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been progress for ALANA people in America. There has been. But how much? And has that progress been optimal given the amount of government spending and the number of subsidies created to “float all boats” with a rising tide of taxation?

Here is an obvious comparison, and admittedly overstated for effect: ALANA constituents of the Party do not have Clinton Foundation level access to resources or political sway for autonomous power brokering within party enclaves.

There has been uneven representation of ALANA people in seats of power, numbering far less than whites who came out of the same protest movements of the 60s.

Ability isn’t the benchmark for determining who is in and who is not. Representational concerns prevail. “Well, whites are in the majority so…..” And, admittedly, the ability blade cuts both ways.

Plenty of aging lefties have been passed over in the name of AA/EEOC principles, have taken one or more “for the team.” But when the base numbers of a constituency are significantly less than the dominant camp, the blade cuts deeper.

Is this the way that a free meritocracy runs its affairs? Does the best man or best woman run the committee, the department, the city, the state, the executive branch of the federal government? Or is it based on something else?

Ironically, the left and its main political party, the Democrat party- including its progressive wing, is hamstrung by its own history. The once “new left” is now faced with destruction in detail as outlined in Mr. Rorty’s analysis. It is now old. And it is worried.

There is an odd navel gazing the Democrat party does over “victimhood.” By its very organization as a “big tent” party of identity groups, there are representational disparities which are the logical building blocks of the party around which the many players cohere.

Yes, more ALANA people than ever are in positions of influence and power than ever before. And, the country elected a half-black president and nearly elected its first female president.

But there is hand wringing over “not doing enough” and “why has it taken so long to change” our institutions to “look like America.”

Does the Party looking at all of the white people benefitting from their legitimate access to wealth, privileges, and power? Are the Party’s keepers looking at color at all as they turn their view upwards to the Clinton level echelons?

Or when the hands wring, is it over “the less fortunate”? Might that be a strategic distraction, a misdirection that mystifies why the Left moves in “such mysterious ways”, why things seem to never change?

Who are the less fortunate?

And compared to whom are they less fortunate?

If the less fortunate live in undesirable circumstances that they seem not to be in control of enough to change those circumstances, are they not victims as opposed to autonomous players in an equitable system where everybody has a fair shot at getting what everybody else knows is the promise of the American dream?

Wasn’t this what disturbed the white legionnaires of the new left back in the day?

The despair amongst academics and other elites has crystallized in plain view. And it sounds like this: “Oh my god! We’ve become that which we loathed when we first began to fight!”

So of course, the American left and its Democrat party and its independent Progressives have no alternative but to focus on the *foundation* of their very existence---- ALANA people----- as victims, as people they contrast themselves against, to be able to define themselves.

It provides fuel for the messianic fervor needed to mask moral bankruptcy. The Left renounced God at the 2012 Democrat National Convention on their way to re-electing a half-black president.

“We aren’t black but we re-elected a man who was almost black. It’s change we can believe in. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. It takes a village.”

They themselves are not victims. But they cannot feel whole if they do not have victims to control.

Their “other half” is the victim side of the equation. Those are the people who have been waiting for autonomy and control over their own destinies, like Hillary and Bill Clinton, like Bill Ayers, like Bernie Sanders, like Howard Dean, like….

Yet the autonomous controllers are the very people who demand that their political opposition must be forced to accept their prescriptions as the only viable solutions for the victimhood their Party, their victimologies foist upon ALANA people.

But isn’t all that false? Can the political force in society, the very force that creates this co-dependence of identities for the sake of creating and conserving power, assume the role of arbiters of fairness and equity?

Albert Einstein said “Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them.”

[😙]

Reconciliation? That's not the goal.

[Free James D!]

The cultural and physical presence of whites is making black people mentally ill and physically endangered. Where is the road to reconciliation?

As long as progs are rewarded by society for teaching block people (and other minority groups) that they are victims and that victim hood is their only true identity, there can be no reconciliation.

It will only change when we stop allowing people to make a living encouraging and teaching victimhod. When Tennis Coatrack and his ilk can't find anyone to pay them anymore, then reconciliation will become possible.

[henry - drunk on prog tears]

It could have been Mother Teresa instead of Trump, and the left would still use the "strongman" label. Meanwhile the strongmen of recorded history were all socialist/communist. Standard dishonesty from Rorty.

[Miss Marple the Deplorable]

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/307134-trump-aide-on-media-meeting-he-didnt-explode-in-anger

[Appalled]

The actual problem is precisely that identity politics by definition must pit tribe against tribe and it is remarkably hard to do that without excluding some groups.
People feel excluded because they ARE being excluded

Iggy, when did you turn anti-Trump? ;)

[Miss Marple the Deplorable]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/magazine/glenn-beck-is-sorry-about-all-that.html

[Miss Marple the Deplorable]

http://royalcentral.co.uk/blogs/only-one-taxpayer-will-fund-the-buckingham-palace-repairs-the-queen-71930

Even the Queen is lies about in the press.

[Miss Marple the Deplorable]

http://www.wibc.com/news/national/bus-driver-arrested-fatal-crash-killed-six-children-tennessee

[Miss Marple the Deplorable]

Too big to post as a pic, but a good quote from Mike Rowe:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cx04QUrW8AALIMy.jpg

[pagar, a bacon, ham and sausage supporter]

Looking for the facts.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-21/rand-corp-blasts-%E2%80%98truth-decay%E2%80%99-%E2%80%93-wants-facts-determined-appropriate-leaders

[pagar, a bacon, ham and sausage supporter]

Daddy @ 05:03 "Any updates on the investigation and hopefully punishment meted out to this JMU Democrat student leader, who admitted, after getting caught, that he signed up dead people on the voter rolls? "

Daddy, IMO there are just so many things that need investigation. Here's another terrible example.

http://www.weaselzippers.us/309059-thousands-of-immigration-green-cards-are-missing/

[pagar, a bacon, ham and sausage supporter]

Thanks for that link, Miss Marple @06:19.

[Miss Marple the Deplorable]

Donald J. Trump Verified account
‏@realDonaldTrump

I cancelled today's meeting with the failing @nytimes when the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not nice

[DebinNC]

I'm sure there's method to Trump's media smack downs, but I'm not yet seeing it.

[pagar, a bacon, ham and sausage supporter]

The insanity continues: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2607940/

"DOJ fines Denver Sheriff Dept. for excluding noncitizens when hiring"

"The department will also have to go through old applications to find applicants who were eliminated because of their citizenship status and reconsider them for future jobs."

The US DOJ must really hate Americans, IMO.

[DebinNC]

Jeff Sessions can't become AG soon enough for me.

[Another Bob]

Trump and Sessions first order of business should be to fire all the USAs

[Beasts of England]

Enjoying my new favorite hobby of watching the left go nutz; I'm particularly enjoying Thomas Freidman's random neuron string on Rose's show. He thinks he's being coherent, but he keeps using the term 'climate refugees' - and he's trying to weave this back to Moore's Law. Uneducated whites are the problem. Unexpectedly. Again, I am not making this up. He sincerely and emphatically believes the crap he's spewing.

To wrap it up - he calls Trump's victory a 'Moral 9/11'. I'll stop before I have to go all [redacted]. Truly a fool. He lost. :)

[DebinNC]

BOzo, who's handed out far more Medals of Freedom than any other president, will be giving out a lot more this afternoon, mainly to celebrities. Oh, how BOzo will miss doing this.

[henry]

Speaking of going crazy, courts invent new rules for redistricting... apparently Dems losing is a Constitutional nono these days.

[DebinNC]

He sincerely and emphatically believes the crap he's spewing

Thomas Friedman's house/estate does not reflect a sincere belief in the imperative of saving energy.

[DebinNC]

Ripple was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, Crabb by Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Griesbach by Republican President George W. Bush

Sounds like time is on your side, henry.

[Beasts of England]

Of course that's his house, DebinNC!! Animal Farm taught me everything I needed to know about would-be totalitarian, so-called elites.

[Cecil Turner]

It will only change when we stop allowing people to make a living encouraging and teaching victimhod.

What he said. And the first step to that is getting the government money out of the community organizing slush funds. (Like porkulus "stimulus" social funds, justferinstance.)

[James D]

Beasts, Friedman was hawking his new book:

His thesis: to understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the planet’s three largest forces―Moore’s law (technology), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)―are accelerating all at once. These accelerations are transforming five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community.

[DebinNC]

Some good news: Trump-Republicans working on plan to shrink obscenely bloated government workforce and regain the ability to fire those who need firing and bring gov pensions in line with those in private sector.

[Jim Eagle]

Breaking News:

(AP - Belltown, DE) Two people have died as a result of injuries incurred in a violent accident at the merge of US Rt. 8 and Delaware Rt.1 outside tht he hamlet of Belltown, DE. Early Tuesday morning around 3:15AM, a semi-trailer hauling live feed chickens collided with a 2017 Chevrolet sedan Hertz Rental Car as the sedan seemed to ignore the flashing red light at the notorious intersection of two major roads that lead to Rehoboth Beach.

Delaware State Police have not been able to identify the driver of the sedan and have sent fingerprints to the FBI's national data base for assistance. However at a press conference at the scene of the accident, a police spokeswomen was able to provide some details that hopefully will assist in the identification of the driver. He was approximately 45-55 years old, dark hair, slavic facial features, wearing a worn camel hair overcoat, dark scarf and gray fedora hat.

In addition, his radio had been tuned to WTOP, the talk radio frequency for Washington, DC where at the time of the crash there was a report about the FBI dropping it's investigation of the purported child sex ring at a local Chevy Chase Pizza Parlor, popular with a number of Washington, DC politicians.

Alcohol was not believed to be a factor. More information will be provided as it develops.

[Beasts of England]

That's correct, James D. I tried to give him a fair shot, but it's hard to stop laughing when one element of his personal unifying theory is an unproven hypothesis. He's a silly boy. :)

[James D]

He doesn't deserve a fair shot, Beasts.

Even when he does accurately identify a trend or phenomenon, his prescription for what to do about it is inevitably as wrong as wrong can be.

[DebinNC]

getting the government money out of the community organizing slush funds. (Like porkulus "stimulus" social funds, justferinstance.)

Candidate Trump, asked if he was a conservative, said iirc, "It's the Republican Party, not the Conservative Party." Read somewhere this morning Trump's plans being compared to Eisenhower with his huge interstate highway building projects and JKF with his huge space exploration projects. IOW, hopefully, the money spent under Trump will have visible, tangible results and employ visible, tangible "workers" very different from BOzo's Houses of Sand already crumbling into dust.

[Neo]

That achievement, coupled with the personal trust Trump has in him, uniquely positions Kushner to be a power broker of the highest order for at least four years. "Every president I've ever known has one or two people he intuitively and structurally trusts," says former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has known Trump socially for decades and is currently advising the president-elect on foreign policy issues. "I think Jared might be that person."

LUN

[Beasts of England]

Huge space exploration projects? I'm gonna need get a bigger boat!! 😎

[Cecil Turner]

I'm not worried about Trump initiating any such spending programs, but I'll be pleasantly surprised if he can get rid of all (or even most) of the ones already out there.

[James D]

Deb @ 6:57

I haven't always seen the method to his madness either, but he won the nomination and then the Presidency against ridiculous odds with that madness, so I'm willing to go along for the ride.

That said, I think I do see the method with his attacks on the media.

Part of it is setting a tone. He does not view them as friends or colleagues, pr professionals worthy of respect. Unlike past GOP leaders, he is sending a clear message that he does not want or need their approval, and he's not going to roll over and play "nice doggy" to get it.

Part of it is divide-and-conquer. He puts them all on notice, and then, at some point, he'll single out one outlet or reporter to be shunned and cut off from access - and he knows the rest of them will value keeping access over standing in solidarity with whomever got frozen out.

Part of it is that he knows they are going to attack him viciously and dishonestly regardless of what he does, so he may as well do what comes naturally to him and smack them in the head.

And part of it is playing to his base. They distrust and despise the MSM, and Trump is speaking for them when he berates and embarrasses Stephanopoplous and Chuck Todd and everyone at CNN and the NYT, etc.

[Appalled]

I'm sure there's method to Trump's media smack downs, but I'm not yet seeing it.

Big media makes a great "other" for populist Trump to whack on. And the press loves to talk about themselves, so they will talk about Trump's vendetta against them, rather than something that might be more important.

[lurkersusie]

Excellent article,

Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House

By June the GOP nomination secured, Kushner took over all data-driven efforts. Within three weeks, in a nondescript building outside San Antonio, he had built what would become a 100-person data hub designed to unify fundraising, messaging and targeting. Run by Brad Parscale, who had previously built small websites for the Trump Organization, this secret back office would drive every strategic decision during the final months of the campaign. “Our best people were mostly the ones who volunteered for me pro bono,” Kushner says. “People from the business world, people from nontraditional backgrounds.”

Kushner structured the operation with a focus on maximizing the return for every dollar spent. “We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote,” Kushner says. “I asked, How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?” FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as the Clinton campaign did.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/2/#e15cc7f5b841

[Truthbetold5]

PEDO BROS. SMOKING GUN: The Podesta Brothers & Madeleine McCann

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K3m87-hM96o&ebc=ANyPxKqN-A2YyCRb3iYbln8lfWvC-gwKL5C0afs1CpbsJaPapLlgyztmQmUVmfA7aSFNNF2P0cFgmWTe8SsEP1EbjU3uo-fACw

[Beasts of England]

It was entertaining, James D. He was so certain, so strident, and so satisfied in being 'right', that I wonder: do they not have anyone who loves them enough to let them know that they're floating in an intellectual bubble? Charlie Rose was bobbing his head as if he were getting a first glimpse at the Rosetta Stone...

[Old Lurker]

JOM Lawyers...please do read Daddy's AT link posted at 4:28AM and let us know what you think...

[Beasts of England]

What Trump is doing with the media is playing offense. And they've had the damned ball so long, they must be terribly confused.

[PD]

That Powerline link posted on the previous thread about death threats to EC electors was troubling. Not just because of the death threats, which are appalling. But the article mentioned only the electors deleting those emails. It did not say they were turning them over to the authorities. Isn't threatening someone like that criminal activity? And don't the threats themselves constitute an attempt to tamper with a Federal election? Isn't that a crime?

I hope some of these electors are passing on the evidence to the FBI.

[PD]

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/307134-trump-aide-on-media-meeting-he-didnt-explode-in-anger

Gosh. The media is promoting fake news about the meeting?

Also, from what I've read, the meeting was supposed to be off the record, so someone is leaking. Not the way to impress Trump that what he thinks about them isn't true.

[DebinNC]

That Forbes article Neo and lurkersusie linked to above is a must-read imo. I feel very reassured and relieved after reading it, knowing he has such a wise confidant near at hand.

[James D]

lurkersusie @ 8:32

Great article, thanks for posting that!

Compare Trump's quiet, secret, frugal (and SUCCESSFUL) data operation to Romney's big, public, expensive (and FAILED) counterpart in 2012.

[Truthbetold5]

Jack

Did you see that the New York Times is now trying to rescue the Podestas and Alefantis?

Fact Check: This Pizzeria Is Not a Child-Trafficking Site

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this-pizzeria-is-not-a-child-trafficking-site.html

[Stephanie despicable me]

OK JOMers...

Morning exercise:

What song will you be playing the moment Obama leaves office???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu5hzc2Mei4

[DebinNC]

“We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote,” Kushner says. “I asked, How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?” FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as the Clinton campaign did [Forbes]
Traditional campaigns are now dodo birds. Thankfully, Team Crooked Hillary didn't realize that.

[Porchlight]

Run by Brad Parscale, who had previously built small websites for the Trump Organization, this secret back office would drive every strategic decision during the final months of the campaign.

Brad Parscale is from San Antonio. I've heard him interviewed a couple of times and he did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on The_Donald. Very modest and down-to-earth. Sounds like he and Kushner made some significant contributions (though he did not talk about this data operation in the interviews I heard).

Trump knows how to pick 'em.

[Momto2]

From local reporter WSB in Atlanta:

Chris Camp
‏@WSBCamp
JUST IN - driver of #Chattanooga school bus asked the students if they were "ready to die" .. what mom w/kids on the bus tells @CBSNews

[Porchlight]

Hmm, I will have to think about that one, Stephanie.

[DebinNC]

Trump is just toying with the Mittster now imo and enjoying every minute. I'm really enjoying it too.

[DebinNC]

School bus driver was 24 yo. Wouldn't be surprised if his mom was an enabler like the Sandy Hook mom and Oregon Community College killer's mom - knowing your son is mentally unstable and shouldn't have access to anything capable of killing innocents, but saying nothing and hoping for the best.

[anonamom; formerly adorable, now deplorable.]

While I can, I wish all a Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful for the insight, information, and support that JOM provides, and grateful that TM gives us the opportunity to gather here.

I am headed north, to the gray and cold that is conducive to gathering and cooking and eating and drinking and cards and football...

My young friend went back to her duties yesterday at work. Thank you for holding her in your heart and prayers.

[Beasts of England]

We Are The Champions / We Will Rock You. Too pedestrian?

[lurkersusie]

New thread

[Appalled]

This thread has died.
Thanks for the ride.
And if you have more to say
The next thread is up the way.
But for some, this news is worst
Somebody has already posted "first"

[sbw]

Rats!

[mockmook]

Curiously, TM, I wasn't fascinated by any of this.

How you can continue to find sport in pointing out stupid things in the Times is beyond me as well.