“Racism” – It's Time to Repudiate the Guilt

Does any sane person who pays the slightest attention to the talking heads from the television (MSNBC) and cable networks (CNN), or the news and opinion writers for the New York Times or the Washington Post believe that racism is ever going to lessen anywhere in the western world? Only a fool would bet on that particular outcome. Why? In a word: “Racism” is the gift that keeps on giving.

How did this come about?  “Racism” in the 1950s was a term then with a much more precise, recognizable meaning than it has today. It was largely limited in its circulation to liberal intellectuals and academics who studied the history of slavery and contemplated racial segregation in post-WWII America. Jim Crow was in place then with segregated schools, public facilities and businesses, double standards of expectations and accountability for blacks and whites, all premised on a widespread white perception that blacks were … well, generally, less capable, less reliable, less intelligent than whites. The segregation was well entrenched (de jure in the south; de facto in the north) and blacks in America were significantly poorer, less healthy, less educated than whites as well as feeling the daily sting of the indignities, along with suffering the hostilities, mistreatment and condescension of whites.

By coincidence, the American conquerors about this time were just finishing their occupation of defeated Germany, the occupation prolonged for years because the Americans felt they needed to remain as long as it took to make sure that the German people were completely free of this nasty “superior race” nonsense they had imbibed from the Charlie Chaplain mustachioed Austrian corporal and his henchmen who had brought most of Europe to ruins. Which proved finally to be a bit embarrassing for Americans, at least for those who recalled that their soldier boys, who were sent far across the ocean to dispose of the racist Hitler and stay and teach the Die Herren und Frauen to love democracy and recite Thomas Jefferson’s “self-evident” truth, “that all men are created equal,” came over in racially segregated units. President Truman’s desegregation order for the Armed Services didn’t come until 1948. Black American soldiers fighting oversees for equality came home to segregated public facilities, lunch counters and schools.

It was judged past time for a correction in these matters, and so it would be. Beginning in the 1950s, the dismantling of segregation and the criminalization of racial discrimination was launched. With the landmark “Brown versus the Board of Education” the Federal government forcibly desegregated the public schools. By the 1960s the conscience of white America was convicted of its racial iniquities. The correction was soon at top speed with the civil rights movement leading the way, and the rest, as they say, is history. In the five decades that followed the equalizing of black and white America became “mission central” with the legislatures creating and the courts enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the areas of housing, employment, government contracting and education, including the forced bussing of school children. Massive federal aid flowed to the heavily black-populated cities like Detroit, burned down by black rioters in the middle-late 1960s. Affirmative Action and EEOC, came into being with strict compliance requirements for universities and employers to make room for members of “underrepresented” groups. Across the country schools and universities focused their pedagogy on the evils of racism, the history of slavery and segregation and the moral imperative of “equality.” Blacks moved into prominent positions in every region of American culture and life, including the American presidency, Secretary of State, Attorney General and the U.S. Supreme Court. Utterance of the “n-word” for whites became a career-killer and a ticket to social ostracism.  An entire new industry, the “diversity” industry, came into being, its employees moving into business, education and government, tasked to promote the interests and guard the feelings of officially designated victims of discrimination, and to subject the would be discriminators to programs of reeducation where they learned about “white privilege,” microaggressions and how to “celebrate diversity.”

By 2009 with Jim Crow long dead and the jubilant inauguration of America’s first black President, elected in a still majority-white country, one might be tempted to think that the “racism” that marked racially segregated America in the 1950s had been vanquished or at least diminished enough to make everyone optimistic about the future of race-relations.  Wrong!  In the last year of his Presidency (2015) Barack Obama in an interview made the following observation:

Obama: “What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives — you know, that casts a long shadow. And that's still part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it.”

Interviewer: “Racism”

Obama: “Racism. We’re not cured of it.”

What then were we to make of this “DNA” metaphor? Unfortunately, few, if any of the cognoscenti who constantly lecture Americans 24x7 on the ubiquity of “racism” and daily pounce on yet another politician or celebrity who breaks the strict rules of “Diversity-Speak,” bothered to decode the President’s remarks so that the average American might get a sense of what he was in for. They can be boiled down to: “Racism has always been the defining feature of American life and will be far into the future.” What then, we might wonder, is the “cure,” and who gets to say that it has been successful and the patient is whole and released from treatment?     

These questions expose the disingenuousness typical of Obama on the subject of race. The “our DNA” is white DNA, and the “racism” that “we’re not cured of” is “white racism” – there is no other kind in today’s America that will be countenanced. Obama chose the wrong metaphor.  His view of race is better expressed in theological terms. “Racism” is America’s “original sin.” It was, and still is, committed exclusively by white people, and no matter what metaphor you care to use, consider it a permanent fixture of American society. “We shall overcome someday.” But, sorry Pal, not today. With sin comes guilt, and white America now finds itself confronted with guilt, virtually unlimited guilt.

Guilt that comes in unlimited quantities can be a very valuable commodity for the right sort of “entrepreneurs” who know how to make it pay out in long term dividends, particularly when those dividends are of, shall we say, a material kind. Guilt makes most people feel really bad, remain highly vulnerable and willing to do things of an extreme nature to be free of it, things that may have little to do with the source of the guilt and may be highly detrimental to their self-interest and well being.

Guilt, in effect, can open the door to a form of extortion, moral extortion, if you will. When you feel guilty because you believe that you have done something harmful to someone, the person you have harmed has a moral advantage over you, so to speak. That person is the innocent party; you are the guilty party. You are in his debt. You owe him … something.  It may be an apology, change of behavior or attitude, or maybe compensation.  Relieving the guilt becomes a moral transaction and both parties (the injurer and the injured) have a responsibility to act in good faith and bring the transaction to a conclusion.    

Ah, yes, “the conclusion” and here is the rub. Atonement is the performance side of guilt – giving what you owe to the innocent party, doing what you need to do to atone for the wrong. The corollary of unlimited guilt is unlimited atonement (no conclusion), and when what you “owe” becomes unlimited the person you “owe” is no longer innocent, and you are no longer a free, accountable person making moral-spiritual restitution. You are a pawn being manipulated, being used to someone else’s advantage. Good faith has given way to exploitation. From being the sinner, you are now the sinned-against.

Unlimited guilt is what makes Obama’s “racism” a tool of moral extortion. An extortionist never says, “OK, your debt is paid; your obligation is fulfilled.” No, the blackmailer always comes back for more and ups the ante. “Not enough; I need more – until you are cured. I’ll let you know when that happens. Trust me.” “Racism,” however, never, ever, diminishes. Rather it becomes ever more insidious, protean, if you will, with forms and manifestations, heretofore unheard of – “systemic racism,” “economic racism,” “environmental racism,” “institutional racism,” the inventory expands almost daily. Moreover, “racism has provided the “ism” template (“sexism,” “ableism,” “homophobia,” “Islamophobia,” “transphobia”) for the rapid expansion of the diversity industry, with other large groups of the suitably injured and aggrieved, recruited to leverage new categories of guilt and make them pay dividends. 

How does the “racism” create the moral leverage that makes the extortion work so effectively?  First, it opens up a vast moral distance between the accuser and the accused. When someone denounces someone else as a “racist,” this act publicly affirms both, the accuser’s moral superiority, and the moral degeneracy of the accused. Since racism is the very worst of human pathologies, deeply embedded in the personality, the accuser by virtue of both recognizing and confronting this evil individual, gives confirmation of a moral superiority and rectitude of the highest order.  And, since the targets of racist are members of oppressed and exploited groups, the accuser’s virtue shines even brighter since he is speaking truth-to-power, he becomes a beacon of moral courage, taking a stand against bigotry and hatred. 

There is another kind of leverage that makes the extortionist demand virtually invincible. With “racism” being in one’s “DNA,” as Obama put it, the guilt is indisputable and inextinguishable. Remember, “we’re not cured of it.” No white person has ever convinced his accuser that he is not a “racist” and never will. Apologizing (Please, I am not a racist) or indignantly denying it simply ups the extortionist leverage of the term while the accused squirms like a worm on a hook. It’s a Catch 22. Once “racism’ is entrenched (“in our DNA,” “not cured”), game, set, match. This, of course, gives a lie to the rhetoric of “healing,” “reconciliation” and ultimately to “forgiveness,” cover-language used to soften and disguise the coercion and give the extortion a patina of moral legitimacy. But the accuser has no interest in reconciliation or incentive to forgive. With reconciliation, the “gift” would have to stop giving. Diversity professionals would have to find another source of employment.  Al Sharpton would not longer be called, “Reverend, ” and would likely be in prison.

A turning point in American history was the 2016 Presidential election when the obsession with “racism” was raised to a level of collective hysteria with Donald Trump routinely characterized by the entire main stream media and the opposition party as another Adolf Hitler, a 21^st-century, pogrom-planning fascist, broadly supported by voters (62 million people) motivated entirely by racial prejudice and hatred. The most memorable and appalling moment of the contest was Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” denunciation of Trump supporters as “racists, sexists … you name it.”

With the improbable outcome of the election the hysteria has only increased, the most recent manifestation of its ferocity the unhinged outpouring of hatred from social media sources and the hostile and dishonest coverage of the national media of an incident involving a group of white, Catholic high school boys from Covington, Kentucky (Boyd Cathey) who encountered a native American protestor in Washington D.C. “The smile of one of the students, Nick Sandman, captured in a now famous photograph, was twisted by the virtue signalers into a disrespectful ‘smirk,’ a kind of  ‘racist dog-whistle,’ a symbol of ‘white privilege,’” all the standard tropes of today’s emboldened character assassins. Reigned down upon Sandman and his fellow students was a torrent of condemnations of in the thousands via social media that included death threats, demands to publish names and addresses, appeals to have them expelled from their school, rejected from universities, and encouragement to kill them and their families. All of this from Social Justice Warriors who decry the “hatred” of Trump supporters.

So, in contemplating this grim state of affairs, we need to ask now: to where has this 60-year battle against “racism” taken us? Sadly, it has taken us to a point where it should be clear that “racism,” now saturating the commentary on every facet of American experience, is not a word that describes the behavior or personality of any particular individual.  “Racism” does not depict any state of reality. It is merely a word of condemnation to complete a ritualized chant. “You are a racist” is a performative act in an excommunication ceremony (an expulsion ritual) whereby decent, normal individuals are pronounced to be moral lepers, unfit for civilized society and cast into the darkness. Recall the conclusion of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” slur, “they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.” This expulsion ritual is now frequently and routinely conducted by a vast network of moral police who occupy positions in government, the media, education and entertainment. They target white Americans who look back and wonder why the massive, decades-long efforts of atonement for racism have only intensified black resentment and hostility, why Black Lives Matter thugs are allowed to rampage and tear down historical monuments, why blacks are still burning down the cities, why millionaire, celebrity black athletes scorn the national anthem. These targets recognize that the “racism in our DNA” is the veiled language of the extortionists who use guilt as an instrument of intimidation, domination and revenge.  The guilt must be repudiated. Whites who succumb to the accusation of “racism” are embracing a future of their own destruction.   

 

   

Stephen Paul Foster's  newly published novel

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                        

 

Is America a Democracy? Its Enemies Think Not

                                                                                     
 

“Stalin’s dictatorship, too would be expected to foster ‘a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home and abroad and/or by imposing upon the population gigantic tasks that would be unlikely to be carried out in the absence of the dictatorship’ as well as, ‘a charismatic image of the dictator,’ ‘a utopian goal, carefully kept in a remote future’ and ‘proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.’”

(From Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, p. 306)

Observations and reflections of seemingly no relevance to your daily comings and goings jump out at you sometimes and make a strong, unexpected connection to your unrelenting, consuming nightmares. Jumping out at me was the above reflection on Stalin’s dictatorship from a new biography by the prolific historian of the Soviet era, Stephen Kotkin. So, how does a long dead, mass-murdering Bolshevik connect to twenty-first century American politics now in a constant, wild frenzy over one of its most bizarre of improbabilities, a TV-reality show star and former real estate mogul with gorgeous wife numero tres sitting in the White House? 

The closest we have gotten to a “charismatic image of the dictator” in recent times might have been the cult of personality that enveloped candidate Barack Obama, The One, in 2008 replete with fainting maidens at his rallies, God-comparisons by serious journalists, and fake Greek columns for the backdrops of his speeches. Obama’s “healing the planet” magic was sustained for a season by the massive collective sycophancy composed of the media establishment, the entertainment industry and academia. The cult of Obama, however, was a celebrity cult and Americans in their embrace of celebrities are, if nothing else, a fickle lot. Obama is now (at least for the time being), past tense, the mystic, Oprah, the current fashionable buzz.  For better or worse, we have, as they say, moved on, and whatever one might care to say about Donald Trump, “charismatic” is not what first jumps to mind.

What strikes so close to home about Kotkin’s comments on Stalin’s rule is his noting of “a permanent condition of stress by creating enemies at home or abroad….”  It is safe to say, I believe, that “a permanent condition of stress” captures what so many of us now feel as we endure the daily irruptions of ideological warfare increasingly infused with the language of apocalypse and the denunciation of yet another enemy of “our democracy.” Nancy Pelosi, of the recent Republican tax bill, intoned, “It is the end of the world… The debate on health care is life/death… This is Armageddon.” In the head of this cognitively impaired septuagenarian, predicting how the levers move to arrange her thoughts might be an entertaining exercise, but she cannot possibly believe this. No one believes it, but American politics has descended into untrammeled tribal warfare, and warfare is all about friends and enemies. Obama let it slip out in a 2010 Univision interview, dropping his ‘g’s  in order to sound less like a President and more like a mob boss, “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends.” Obama, however, had stumbled on to something: enemies exist to be punished; that’s the whole point, and when you practice politics as warfare, that’s the only rule. 

The existence of these enemies Obama had put in his sights for punishment, I would suggest, is what makes our “permanent condition of stress” permanent. Moreover, it should be obvious that, whatever the particular threats political enemies might exude, persistence and endurance are of the highest importance, in a word, permanence. A completely vanquished enemy is no longer an enemy, and without him, the status-quo with all of its limitations and imperfections conveniently ascribed to his wiles, belongs entirely to the victor, an undisputed but tainted possession, however, that does not work completely to his advantage. On our enemies, we depend for our longevity more, perhaps, than on our friends.

Stalin was extremely fortunate in the early stages of his dictatorship to have had Hitler and Mussolini as his enemies. The racial and national superiority claimed by the Nazis and Fascists and their affinity for violence and military aggression made them the perfect foil for the Soviet’s phony “peace” propaganda and the promise of humanity’s revolutionary march of progress toward a world of equality, harmony and plenty and a socialist workers paradise. The Soviets were the “progressives” of the 1930s; they had divined the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice and were, in stark contrast to the Nazis, bending right along with it. Though Nazi Germany was militarily vanquished by Stalin (with massive assistance from the capitalist powers he had vowed to destroy) the imagery of fascism was embraced by the Soviets up to its collapse in 1991 to define its enemies, including its primary cold war enemy, the United States.

Who then are the enemies that now foster this “permanent state of stress” that seems to plague American politics? These are “enemies within,” those who oppose or are indifferent to the coercive moralism of the self-proclaimed “progressives” who now own the Democrat party. These enemies, in continuity with practice of the Soviet-era progressives, employing the ominous swastika-blackshirt imagery of the 1930s, continue to be smeared as fascists; “fascism” meaning opposition or resistance to progress. Only moral defectives and mental pigmies can be against progress which is why “fascist” rolls so effortlessly off the tongue of a progressive whenever he encounters someone not of his ilk. 

Progress, however, is conveniently and hopelessly abstract and remains always an elusive goal, one, as noted in Kotkin’s observation above, “that is carefully kept in the remote future.” The future is never where we are at, and thus it serves to defer accountability for current failure and as the ideological fulcrum to justify the application of whatever force is necessary to prepare everyone for arrival, someday, at that morally pristine destination of perfect equality, progressivism’s ruling motif. All progressives, whether of the 1930s Bolshevik-genre or 21^st century American social justice warriors, are enthusiasts for coercion, since not everyone comprehends their current fallen state and only those who are willing to submit to the purification rituals get to continue moving toward the promise land. Those who do not are, as Hillary Clinton put it so bluntly during her 2016 Presidential campaign, “irredeemable.” With the shift of a few electoral votes, the future for anyone belonging to this class, would have looked even less promising. When you have the power, what exactly will you do to a large, intractable class of irredeemables that will not involve massive coercion? Hillary’s irredeemables would have felt her revenge; a bit like Stalin’s kulaks of the 1930s.

For today’s progressives, so enthralled with the promises of Obama and now in desperate “resistance” to President Trump, their “friends” and “enemies” no longer break out into Bolshevik-theorized hostile classes (oppressed-proletariat versus oppressor-capitalist) but into racial tribes (oppressed-people of color versus white-oppressors). The vehicle of this relationship is racism, and it is barely an exaggeration to say that twenty minutes cannot pass without Americans being reminded by some angry or condescending “authority” from the chattering classes what a racist society they live in. They watch the mobs assault historical monuments, benignly regarded for hundreds of years, now proclaimed “racist.” Speech that does not conform to the standards set by self-proclaimed victims of racial discrimination and oppression is proscribed as “hate speech,” and harassment and banishment meted out to the transgressors. Whiteness and white-privilege are officially the marks of moral turpitude and require the bearers to undergo confessional “struggle sessions” reminiscent of the Mao’s Red Guard in action during the Cultural Revolution.          

Racism, Obama revealed to us late in his Presidency, is “still part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it.” This was not good news, at least for some of us “folks.” Translated into practical-political terms this means that racists are here for the duration, enemies, you might say, of a permanent nature. What punishment might be in store for them is a matter of grim speculation. Obama’s metaphor of the “cure,” clearly, is a euphemism that barely conceals the growing hostility and resentment for the heritage and traditions of white European America and the determination to erase them.

There was no push back on Obama’s “diagnosis” from any notable within our culture shaping institutions. Indeed, this seems to be the received, state-enforced wisdom, the foundation of the ruling orthodoxy, and so once again Kotkin’s text on Stalin’s last-century terror-state bears out a certain resemblance to the descent of 21^st century American politics into a soft dictatorship. We now, as did the Russians in the 1930s, face the “proscription of any deviating values, supported by threats and acts of repression.” The dictatorship we live under today has no mustachiod, grey tunic-wearing party General Secretary who personally sets the standards for “correct” thinking enforced by an elaborate apparatus of state-terror. The proscription and repression for us is of a different more insidious, sophisticated order. Instead, we have a hoard of mini-Stalins (race-careerists, political opportunists, left-wing globalists, and cultural Marxists) throughout the land sniffing into every corner of American society for any scent of racism. The American-Stalinist orthodoxy is the judgment that racism, the defining core of American history, dominates every aspect of its social order. Redemption comes only by remaking America into a multicultural rainbow that reflects the diversity of the planet. This is not a debatable proposition: to raise questions or doubts is a high-risk enterprise. Your career can be destroyed, Nobel prize winning geneticist, James Watson, for example, for publishing research on race and IQ. You cannot speak and may be assaulted on a university campus if your views on race related matters do not meet official approval, Charles Murray and his faculty escort, for example, at Middlebury College last year. Professional advancement, academic respectability, social approval and mobility, all rest heavily on conformity to the affirmations of the fixed faith.

In government, the mini-Stalins busy themselves opening the borders to millions of third world people and denouncing as “racist” Americans who resent not only the financial and social burdens they impose, but also fear the loss of their culture and heritage. The journalists and media advocacy-functionaries, perform Pravda-like, rewarded for their fawning with access to corridors of power. From the corrupt, dissolute entertainment industry, we are subjected to productions of obscenity-laced nihilism and a steady barrage of barely disguised works of leftwing agitprop. Little-Stalins infest the workplace as sensitivity enforcers policing such things as the use of gender pronouns, searching for micro-aggressions, expanding the world of victims whose feelings require constant protection from the bigots who fail to grasp the imperatives of diversity and inclusion.   

In this dictatorship that the overlords continue, laughingly, to call “our democracy,” we – white, European, Christian Americans – are the enemy, the permanent enemy. Apologies for slavery and racism and copious confessions of white privilege will not change that. Reparations will not change that. Diversity indoctrination, sensitivity training and absorbing more lectures on tolerance will not make us less toxic. Reverence and worship of Martin Luther King and attendance at MLK prayer breakfasts will make no difference, will impress no one and will not diminish the hostility and rancor held against us. Nothing we say or do will make “whiteness” other than a permanent moral stain. The first practical order is to stop pretending otherwise and collaborating with the engineers of our destruction. What comes next should be obvious.     

                                                                     

"Our Democracy" -- What is it Really?

“We need you to take this seriously. Our democracy is at stake. Elections matter. Voting matters.”  Barack Obama, November, 2017

From community organizer to President of the United States – now, back to community organizer. Obama cast these pearls of wisdom (above) before an adoring crowd in Richmond during a Virginia Governor election campaign stop. The ex-President continues to be a walking compendium of clichés of which he seems determined to flaunt as profundities. Vacuous they may be – nevertheless, they have served him well – to wit, the culmination of Obama deep thought –“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Unlike other ex-Presidents, he has eschewed dignified retirement, and so, given his relative youth, many years lie ahead for him to inflict on us the weight of his massive ego and the steady stream of flagrant banalities delivered with all the condescension of an obnoxious adolescent lecturing his captive elders about how to fix that awful mess they have made of the world.

But there is more to Obama’s public interventions than just the usual dispersal of vapid nostrums for consumption by the useful idiots. They still cannot seem to figure out why, after eight wonderful years of Hope and Change, a former real estate mogul and reality show host is now resting his jackbooted feet on the White House coffee tables. Not to mention that poor old Bill Clinton had to disappoint that bevy of future White House interns he had recruited from his flights with Jeffery Epstein on the “Lolita Express.” 

So, Obama is hitting the trail with the scary “Our democracy is at stake.” The former Golfer-in-Chief who defiled the White House with regular guests such as Al Sharpton and criminal rapper, Rick Ross, is the now the basso profundo in the chorus of Chicken Littles intoning the demise of our system of government. You see, “our democracy,” the one that elected him twice, has been mysteriously swept away with the tides of Trumpian Fascism. When you win, it’s democracy in action; when you lose, the sky is falling.

Members of this distinguished chorus are out and about. Recently, Our Revered Lady of Chappaqua waddled into a Toronto bookstore peddling “What Happened” and told the Canucks, now having to stomach the best Canadian Democracy has to offer – Justin Trudeau – that: “Democracy is under attack everywhere. It's not only my country….  But I also want a concerned world to recognize that democracy is under assault.”  Well, no doubt, when Hillary speaks, the “concerned world” wakes up and listens. She can keep her finger on the pulse of the concerned world or whatever other nebulous abstraction that pops into her head, but an ambassador and embassy staff under siege on her watch? What difference does it make, now?

Moving along then toward the immanent collapse of America, there is Former Attorney General under Obama, Eric “My People” Holder who recently told Rachael Maddow that “Our democracy is under attack.” For those with a short memory, Holder was a highly useful Clinton errand boy who helped secure Bill’s notorious pardon of Marc Rich when he was Assistant Attorney General around the time the Clintons were looting the White House on their way out. The quid pro quo? Bill Clinton got a half a million dollars for his Presidential Library from Rich’s ex-wife and Holder would be the new AG in an Al Gore administration. If there were a perfect fit for “deplorable” and “irredeemable” would it be the man who bought the pardon or the man who sold it? Perhaps Hillary could help us out with this dilemma.  From Slate:   

“Rich was a pioneering commodities trader who made billions dealing in oil and other goods. He had a habit of dealing with nations with which trade was embargoed, like Iran, Libya, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa. Rich also had a habit of not paying his taxes, to the point where one observer said that ‘Marc Rich is to asset concealment what Babe Ruth was to baseball.’ The United States indicted Rich in 1983, hitting him with charges—tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, trading with the enemy—that could’ve brought life in prison. Rich fled the country.” 

These are the Clintons et al … making “our democracy” work for them. What greater opportunity for the most extravagant cynicism when people like this try to put us into a state of fecal incontinence by prattling about “the assault on our democracy.” This is post-modern politics at its best: every serious activity becomes (wink, wink) a parody of itself. Language is disconnected from reality, its meaning always temporized by the speaker’s relation to power.

The initial temptation is to say that if what we as citizens get out of “our democracy” are the likes of Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Al Franken, Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake, then perhaps “democracy” really means “kleptocracy,” and “our democracy” is just a euphemistic bouquet intended to cover the stench wafting up from the capitol city cesspool of corruption and decadence, a special place run by poseurs and hypocrites who devote their energies to self-enrichment by selling political influence to the highest bidder. Added to the injury of their shameless corruption is the insult of their arrogance and condescension, their pretense to wisdom, moral superiority, selflessness and compassion for the oppressed.  

  

Whatever a serious observer might wish to call what the average citizen gets out of participating in the American political process, a “democracy” is not what would first jump to his mind. Democracies, supposedly, “are states in which all sane adults participate in making political decisions.” (Minogue, Kenneth. The Liberal Mind, 2580-2581. Ingram Distribution. Kindle Edition.)  By a rough count, there are approximately 200 million registered voters, official participants, so to speak, in U.S. political decision-making. How many of them are sane (or stoned or literate or dead), of course, is anybody’s guess. So then, for each and every one of you, my fellow citizens, your participatory share of American democracy is about 1/200,000,000^th. Imagine being informed that you were named a distant heir to an estate worth $200,000,000, then your reaction to learn that you were in the will for a whole dollar. Well, that is how excited you should be about how much power you wield in American politics, or, how worried you should be the next time Obama (taking time out from proof-reading the ghost-writing of his $40 million memoir or Hillary now worth a hundred-plus million from her selfless devotion to women) tells you that “our democracy” is in great peril. 

A more accurate, prosaic description of American politics is that it is a client-patron system. The politicians compete to be patrons (elected officials who sell access to power) for clients (officially designated victim groups). The quid pro quo is obvious: the votes of the victims put the patrons in power; the victims get to be favored by the patrons over non-victims. “Favored” means rent-seeking privileges and political and legal support to leverage your official victim-status for social-professional-economic positioning. The patron also helps his clients with the stigmatization of the non-victims as bigots, those responsible for making the victims into the victims (best to ignore the irony at this juncture). Much of what now passes for political campaigning is simply a language game that separates the victims from the non-victims with code-words (“racist”, “sexist”, etc.) used by the patrons to secure and align their client coalitions and morally isolate the assigned bigots bearing their particular stigmata.

A client-patron approach to politics leads to an escalating state of “victim-inflation” because being a victim (a client) means you get to go to the front of the line. With no patron to advance your claims to victimhood, you to back of the line, if you are lucky to make it to the line at all. Client-patron systems, however, would seem to be highly entropic, moving toward completely disordered and chaotic end states like Venezuela and Detroit.

When Hillary tells her campaign audience that Trump supporters are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it,” she is not simply intending to insult a particular voting block. She is signaling prospective clients that she will be their devoted (vote-purchased) patron who will use her power to assure their protection and favor and to punish the “irredeemables” because punishment is what racists and other designated bigots most deserve. “You name it” is not, I repeat, not a throw away phrase. It is an open invitation for the not-yet-initiated to get in the game, to help themselves and help her to expand her client base – more victims, more favors, more votes, more power … then, more Marc Riches and Eric Holders – fewer deplorables. Welcome to “our democracy”, politics in 21^st century America.  If it is under attack, bring it on. Better late than never.

Democrats, Pronouns, and Muslim Immigrants

 

 “We go forward together. And we go forward stronger than ever. We're not going to let them win...We'll go about our business. Be New Yorkers. Live your life. Don't let them change us.”

Crocodile tears, Andrew Cuomo style. This was the New York Governor at a news conference shortly after Sayfullo Saipov, an immigrant who came in 2010 on a lottery “diversity” visa from Uzbekistan, killed eight people and injured 14 others with his rented truck on bike path in the Big Apple.  It was no surprise to learn from ABC News that he was quite proud of it all.

                 

How well does your gag-reflex work these days? This is the sort of ass-covering drivel one expects from the likes of Cuomo, the kind that comes out when suddenly he has to interrupt his daily glad-handing, smiley shakedown routines, fake a somber visage for the cameras and reporters, and do a “Show’s over, folks – time to move along” shtick. It was a bizarre concoction of insult, misdirection and non-sequiturs, not to mention a curious display of the contempt Cuomo must hold for the intelligence of the New Yorkers who elected him.

 “We... we...we...” the Governor with this fake, weasel pronoun hoping to make the echoes of “Allahu Akbar” quickly disappear. So, who exactly is the “we ” going “forward together...stronger than ever”?   What “forward” means for eight of the “us,” the audience for this disgusting, patronizing riff, is a slab in the morgue and a cemetery plot, plus the grief and sadness that will long engulf the lives of their friends and families betrayed by the multi-culturalists who launched this on-going train wreck and then have to pretend that they care about the damage. “Live your life” pours obscenity on the wounds, making a mockery of innocent lives snuffed out in service to the corrupt ideology that Cuomo lives by. And “stronger than ever”? Who is he trying to con? Not likely in the cards for the fourteen broken bodies who survived this assault.

 

But before we curb our “Islamophobia,” resume the celebration of our diversity and, at the behest of the Governor, “go about our business,” let’s dumpster dive deeper and see where Andy’s fetid, pronoun shell game takes us. We’ve noted the fake “we…we…we”, but what is he up to with “them”?  “We’re not going to let them win.” Leftwing politicians like Cuomo, Obama and Hillary often speak in code, and so you should have your hermeneutical decoder ring handy and be ready to start twisting away. Who are the “them” who are not going to win, and how would we know if they did?  Cuomo can pretend not to notice, but unfortunately, there is already a clear winner, who happens to be Mr. Saipov, patched up from his wounds, celebrating the death of those eight infidels he ran over and enjoying, it seems, the anguish of their families, clearly the losers. So, in keeping with the Governor’s admonition to not let them win, somewhat might want to ask New York’s Chief Poseur, what should a pedestrian or bicyclist do the next time one of our imported jihadist is bearing down on him and his wife and kid in his truck? 

Don’t forget, however, those who designed, manage and promote the system that lets the sort of people into the country who enjoy killing and maiming their hosts. It is not as if there is not some recent history with markers that would reliably indicate what sort of folks they might be and where in the world they might be coming from. These deep thinkers apparently concluded that New York rather than Uzbekistan, with no infidels to speak of to irritate the faithful, was a more suitable place for a man whose given name, Sayfullo, translates as “Sword of Allah.” Are they winners or losers? Perhaps one of the Governor’s “diversity” advisors can shed some light on this. 

Finally, we need to decipher “Don’t let them change us,” one last slippery pronoun in this verbal smog to ponder as we twist the ring. Who does this man think he is talking to? Eight people, very much alive on a bike trail having a nice outing have already been permanently changed – into corpses by an angry Muslim in a rental truck. “Change” doesn’t get more profound and irreversible than this, and, as noted above, somebody, obviously, let this happen to us, somebody who should have grasped the obvious, that fewer angry Muslims in the U.S. means safer sidewalks and bike paths and, for those who care, less Islamophobia. How do we make sense of what seems to be apparent nonsense straight from the Governor’s mouth? 

What we learn from the decoder ring is that the “them” Cuomo is imploring us to resist are not the fanatics, completely open about what they are about, imported by the cult-Marxists to make us more tolerant and diverse. An occasional, unpredictable mass-murder is price of admission paid by the victims. The “them” are those millions of Americans who populate the “basket of deplorables,” the racists, Islamophobes and xenophobes who Hillary fingered last fall during her failed Presidential campaign. These are the folks who Cuomo is signaling are not going to be allowed to win. They recognize that Muslims in America are the left’s latest clients and need their protection as one more victim class, and hence are inclined to challenge their betters to justify the treachery they have put into place. Hence the invention of “Islamophobia” to create one more class of bigots to demonize and shut them up when they complain when they see people in their own country murdered by devotees of the religion of peace.  

Now the man makes perfect sense, ideologically speaking. Cuomo’s pronoun shell game is another artifice of the left. The “we’s”,  “us’s” and “them’s” are elusive and protean, very useful to confuse, distract and misdirect. They are the basic elements in the left’s “science” of attention management, the success of its practitioners measured by how well it augments their power and the extent to which the American people continue to embrace the illusion that they are free citizens rather servile (“irredeemable”) subjects and that their leaders can be held to account for their crimes.

Where is the Refuge in Post-Obama America?

In 1989 Zbigniew Kazimierz Brezezinski, a premier theorist of totalitarian political systems, published The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. He lived a long and eventful life and unfortunately sold the services of his formidable Polish intellect to the likes of Lyndon Johnson and the feckless, attempted rabbit slayer, James Earl Carter Jr. (For those taken with odd coincidences, Brezezinksi was awarded his Harvard Ph.D. with a dissertation on Lenin’s terror-command state in 1953, the same year Stalin turned room temperature, leaving his second-string in charge of the one Lenin had created.)

One also cannot help but wonder whether Brezezinski ever came to regret that portion of the sub-title he gave to his book – the “Death of Communism” – having died in 2017, a couple of months after Barack “Mugabe” Obama was done with the “transformation” he had earlier promised of the United States of America back in 2008. In his mistitled book, Brezezinski made an observation that really jumps out at a discerning reader: “Communism thus appealed to the simpletons and the sophisticates alike…” Yes, except for the past-tense of the verb. Moreover, these days it can be a challenge to separate the sophisticates from the simpletons.

This insight does help to dispel the mystery of Obama’s rapid ascendency – from a no-account, back-bench, corrupt state senator to “heal the planet” President of the United States. Obama is a simpleton who passed himself off as a sophisticate with a great deal of assistance from high placed, fake-sophisticates like New York Times columnist, David Brooks. Recall, that it was Brooks, who after interviewing candidate Obama, was so smitten with the combination of his blackness and well-pressed slacks, gushed that that he was destined be a great President. Then, of course, there was Senior Newsweek Editor, Evan Thomas’s comment on Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Here is a clue as to how it unfolded, how Obama rose to divinity, happily documented for us by, again, the New York Times long before the thin, street agitator from South Chicago, Hawaii, Indonesia, or wherever he was from, proclaimed himself as The One. 

BOSTON, Feb. 5, 1990 — The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.
The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.
''The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress,'' Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ''It's encouraging.” 

What the NYT scribblers omit in this article, one of their typical “first black fill-in-the-blank” panegyrics, is more interesting and relevant than what we get to read. But skipping through the boiler plate, reverential tripe, here, luckily, we have Obama captured, unaware, on record as the self-promoting simpleton he is and has always been. “The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress…. It’s encouraging.” Perhaps, but the little we know about Harvard and the lot we know about Obama suggest that this election had nothing to do with what most people think of as “progress.”

His remarks in fact do tell us all we need to know about the career path Obama had in mind and the fake sophistication that would be layered around him as he hustled his way up to the highest ring on the boss-ladder. “Progress” is a gem of Obama-Speak, one that captures the solipsistic equation of his personal advancement with “that arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice.” Recall, this was a Martin Luther King apothegm, a favorite of OHB, used during his reign to keep reminding those “folks” out there that the course of his presidency and the “moral arc of the universe” were pretty much on the same track. This sort of theatrical moralizing yourself into the woven fabric of the universe is a common adolescent trait, usually forgivable because most adolescents grow up and wise up. Obama did neither and ended up convinced that the banalities that always seemed to be popping into his head and out of his busy mouth were profound moral revelations. “If you're walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.” Ok, well maybe this inspiration came to Obama after channeling that old Nancy Sinatra tune: “These boots are made for walking and that's just what they'll do. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you,” which, when you think about it, is what happened to the American people when Obama started walking down his path.

But, on to “It’s encouraging.” Always the master of misdirection and condescension, even at 28 years old Obama was already posing as the sage elder who has divined the “right way” everyone needs to go and, if politely asked, is willing to point in that direction.

It was certainly encouraging for Obama, enabling him to tout himself later in quest of another presidency as a constitutional law scholar even though during his tenure as editor of this “most prestigious” journal he skipped on one of the standard expectations for appointment to the post, never publishing a single paragraph on the law or anything remotely related. In fact, he never published anything other than two books about his favorite subject, himself, and there is ample reason to suspect that, even with those, he had a lot of help. All of this was fairly common knowledge, but for the sophisticates in journalism and the commentariat (Brezezinski’s sophisticates, including his airhead daughter, Mika, it seems) it was time for white America to atone for its racist past. Obama was the right black, platitude-polishing slickster to make it happen, endorsed by the illustrious Senator Harry Reid for his “light-skinned” appearance and speaking patterns “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

We are in the post-Obama era, the bad news being that the eight- year-long lobotomy he performed on the country was successful. How else to explain that in the 2016 Presidential election campaign, the Obama-endorsed candidate, who was under a federal criminal investigation with a decades long history of graft, influence peddling and subornation, got almost 66 million Americans, the plurality in the country, to vote for her. 
  
Obama’s Presidency with its culmination in Cult-Marx, identity politics vastly expanded the population of Brezesinski’s simpletons who swoon when the “free stuff for everyone guy” comes along and says things like “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Identity politics, crudely reductionist in its approach and primitive in its emotional appeal, makes the natives even more restless. The mad scramble is on. All the incentives are to join, if you can, one of the communities of the marginalized and oppressed, articulate your grievances, agitate for revenge and demand the assistance of the state in taking it. If none is immediately available for membership more are under development, and barring that, you can resort to being a self-flagellating advocate for one of them. There are many self-serving options.

The moralists who call the shots now are all about structuring this new social order so as to protect and reward the oppressed, and then punish the oppressors after they are outed. Most importantly, in such an order it is obviously neither healthy nor prudent for anyone to risk being branded as an oppressor of any sort, or even suspected as such. Which is why in the post-Obama era not-being-a-racist certification has become the most coveted social prize. “Please, really, I am not a racist. How can I convince you? I’ll do anything.” Consider for a moment the power dynamics in play here, and then you quickly understand why political resistance has almost completely collapsed to the moral-extortion racketeering that Obama and his minions institutionalized and now operates openly in both parties.
   

In her great work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed.” Written long before the arrival of The One, it is comforting to believe that if she had been alive to contemplate the crackpot of Hope and Change, she would have been a one of the few sophisticates who did not fall for the scam.