Trickle-Down Racist Antiracism By Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness
This reactionary and neo-Confederate return to racial stigmatization and hatred is not going to end well.
Elected governments were rare in the past. They did not appear until over four millennia after civilization first emerged in the Near East. Constitutional systems were fragile at birth. And they are on the wane today. Nation after nation seems to be devolving into autocracy. Multiethnic, multiracial consensual governments have been even more brittle and sporadic in history.
The Roman, Ottoman, and Soviet empires were multiracial. But they were not consensual. Instead, they required a degree of force to ensure calm among rival tribes and warring peoples—violence that we would find incompatible with our notions of modern democracy.
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Today, India and Brazil are large multicultural and multiethnic democracies. But neither, so far, has guaranteed their citizens either prosperity or security.
So present-day multiracial America is a great experiment in the unknown. Can its various tribes, and races unite around the Constitution? Or will they inevitably revert to form and give their first loyalties to those of shared superficial racial or ethnic affinities?
Regressing to the Color of Our Skin
Until about 2008, it was generally believed America had made great strides in rendering race incidental rather than essential to our characters. We were moving away from the racial collective of our past to the individual. That was the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., who emphasized content of character over color of skin.
Barack Obama’s presidency, however, resurrected tribal identity politics. He rebooted the banal word “diversity” and made it synonymous with anyone and anything “nonwhite.” Thereby, he instantly diminished class as the true barometer in postmodern America of who was oppressed and who the oppressor.
As a result, rich Punjabi immigrants, Korean-American orthodontists, Obama himself, or Oprah Winfrey (the victim, supposedly, of being denied a look at a $38,000 crocodile skin bag) all supposedly shared some sort of oppressed solidarity by virtue of not being completely white.
Millionaires, CEOs, American presidents, and surgeons—anyone not white but in the upper classes and rich—supposedly now found group cohesion through the color of their skin, their nations of origin, or their ethnic affiliations, a more sophisticated, but also more insidiously divisive, version of Jesse Jackson’s old “rainbow coalition”.
