Over the weekend I got suckered into watching a video of Democrat operative Joe Trippi laying out some sucker bait to a fresh-faced interviewer from the libertarian Reason magazine.
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Trippi contends that there are lots of libertarians over on the Democratic Party and that there’s a good argument for a libertarian alternative to the two party system. And anyway, according to Trippi, the Republican Party is about maxed out with white people: Romney got 60 percent of whites in 2012.
Trippi’s nonchalant notion that 60 percent is about as far as the GOP can go with the white vote got me to thinking. The Democrat’s identity politics – encouraging black racism, separating women and gays from the mainstream into identity ghettos, and all the rest – works for one reason only: White middle-class Americans are ashamed of white racism, and don’t vote on a race basis.
Read: The 4 reasons Democrat consultant Joe Trippi believes “There will be a libertarian president”
The liberal race game works because, over the years, liberals have become expert at maintaining white shame on race by shaming whites as racists whenever possible. Meanwhile liberals flog their own voters into separate tribal silos with naked race, class, gender appeals and call it diversity.
But suppose the day comes when an evil and cunning Republican presidential candidate realizes that he can only win if the white vote goes 65 percent GOP? He might be tempted to break the 50 year taboo on race; he might make a direct racial appeal to whites. Or he might figure out a way to divide Hispanics from blacks, which shouldn’t be too hard given that Hispanics think that blacks are lazy.
Here’s Isabel Wilkerson in the New York Times during the Trayvon Martin affair:
A study released in 2006 by Duke University on attitudes on race in Durham, N.C. found that an overwhelming majority of Latinos — 78 percent — felt they had the most in common with whites, while 53 percent of them felt they had the least in common with blacks…Nearly 60 percent reported feeling that few or almost no blacks were hard-working or could be trusted, while only 10 percent of whites held that view.
The Democrats’ race politics has worked so far because GOP politicians have been too decent — or too timid — to respond in kind.
The modern world works because people in the cities that live and work in the capitalist economy have transcended the tribal boundaries of race and clan. We teach ourselves to trust anyone that’s trustworthy, no matter the color of their skin or their national origin.
The whole program of the left amounts to putting people back into tribes. In the 19th century it was tribes of class: the rich and the poor; then it broadened into an identity politics that divided people up by race and gender and now sexual orientation.
We know instinctively how the left’s project will end. It will end by blowing up the modern system and the prosperity that came with it.
There is a way to stop the left. We can do it by reversing the shame game, and making liberals ashamed of their cruel identity politics.
Our lives, and our children’s lives, may depend upon it.