The Liberal Uses of Race

Sultan Knish

Racism is about many things but it isn't about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race they aren't speaking in the genetic sense, what they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another.

The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden. Class warfare was not really about the poor, it was about using a permanent social problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old class warfare clothes so that there is nearly no distinction between the two. Reformers gain power by attacking the failures of the system and positioning a social problem as an open sore that must be healed. But it isn't healing that they have in mind.

When your power is a product of social problems then the failure to locate social problems that are an open sore on society, a cry of conscience and a grievous crime that must be faced, leaves you powerless and irrelevant. Once you start running out of legitimate social problems to tackle, then you have no choice but to start creating them or exaggerating them. Whether the problems you are dealing with are real or unreal, your challenge is to find ways to make them worse in order to retain your power and the social relevance of your movement.

Race has very little to do with racial politics which rely on the older methodologies of radicalizing slums and using subsidies to elevate community leaders who will support the reformers, all tactics that date back centuries and long predate the politicization of race.

When the Democratic Party had its change of heart on race all it did was take the same methods it used on German, Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants and shift them to urban African-Americans who had come north and were living in the same neighborhoods formerly occupied by the immigrants. And so the party that during the Civil War orchestrated urban anti-draft riots by white immigrants targeting African-Americans was using the same methods to orchestrate African-American riots aimed at the second and third generation of working class immigrants that it had once fostered. What most people thought of as racial politics was just the Democratic Party doing what it had been doing all along.

Race hasn’t simply been politicized, the practical meaning of the word has been so thoroughly transformed that it does not refer to what most people think that it does. In the liberal lexicon race like class is an outcast term. It is a catchall term meaning those who are oppressed by the powerful majority. It is why the left will use accusations of racism in completely inappropriate ways that make no sense in relation to the dictionary definition.

Muslims are not a race, but they have been classified as an oppressed group. Socialism is not a race, but they are the official representatives of all oppressed peoples. To insult either one is to be “racist” because racism refers to majority oppression and nothing else. To be a racist is to oppose or denigrate the moral worldview of the reformers without reference to the skin color of any of the parties. Therefore African-American opponents of President Clinton were racists because the terminology of race had nothing to do with the preexisting racial construct. The idea of race as it had existed in the United States no longer applied. Words like racism were part of the Newspeak grammar which insisted on appropriating the moral force of the old meanings, but without actually employing those meanings.

This liberal lexicon is the Newspeak that is all around us. It relies on the moral power of words while first subtly and then grossly changing their definitions until they no longer have anything to do with the old meaning. The process begins with politicized terminology and ends when the core terminology of a free country like “rights”, “freedom” and “democracy” no longer have anything in common with their formal definitions. Their new definitions are those that serve the purposes of the ideology that commands them.

Regardless of what they are supposed to mean, progressivism, racial tolerance and social justice all mean the same thing. And so in the inverse, racism, conservatism and small government also add up to variations of the same idea in the liberal lexicon. Which might not be so much of a problem if it were not also the lexicon being used by the media, academics, politicians, judges and the entertainment industry to name a few groups who are invested in the altered meanings because they are also invested in the ideology that those meanings support.

Ideologies define a worldview where for compelling moral reasons the ideologues are the only ones who can be safely allowed to rule. Imposing this worldview on the people as often as possible and through every possible venue from news reporting to novels and from music to the educational system as allows for the perpetual power of the ideologues. So long as the cause is just then no possible overreach of power or abuse can ever justify removing the ideologues from their petty thrones.

The purpose of any ideology is power. To gain power the ideology must impose its notion of a crisis and its view of a solution as the right and natural one. Once the proponents of the ideology are empowered to impose a solution then they gain factional and personal power that allows them to remake the system in ways that will prevent them from being dislodged. Their first goal once in power is to worsen whatever crisis brought them to power without appearing to do so. Their solutions deepen the crisis while appearing to devote every resource to resolving it.

The growing prosperity of working classes in the West weakened the crisis of class warfare that had led the left to trumpet that the only alternative to their political reforms was a bloody civil war between the workers and the owners. That was when the left turned to race as their central crisis. Over time the left has broadened race back to cover the immigration exploitation that they had been engaged in during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As most of the new immigrants were now non-white, the left rolled their old new crisis into their new old crisis and continued to call the whole thing racism, even when as with Muslims, they were conflating religion with race.

Crisis is king. Crisis justifies a war on poverty and a war on racism which are actually wars on anything that is an obstacle to the absolute power of the ideology that exploits the crisis. That is why we are now forced to show photo ID’s in order to buy cough medicine when we come down with the flu, but any talk of showing photo ID’s at the voting booth is shouted down as racism. Why is it racism? Because the working definition of racism is anything that interferes with the progressive power structure. Questioning the existence of the crisis is the worst form of racism of them all.
Well over a century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and half a century after the civil rights movement, do we really need the Federal government looking over the shoulder of states to stop them from controlling their own electoral systems? Is it really in the name of equality that the Federal government steps in and ban non-partisan elections in the city of Kinston for fear that African-Americans won’t know whom to vote for?

Protecting African-American voting rights has become code for protecting the Election Day turnout for the Democratic Party. Preventing the wrong kind of redistricting is about maintaining the gerrymandered minority districts which are code for safe Democratic Party seats. Racial justice is the tail of the dog and the dog is a Democratic Party hound and it has nothing to do with the old fashioned kind of racism.

The Democratic Party has switched from suppressing minority voters to giving added weight to minority votes, both in violation of the law. The common denominator in both cases is that it does what serves its own interests and calls it defending the rights of the people. The distance between the Red Shirts and the New Black Panther Party, or the Redeemers and the Diversifiers is shorter than most Democrats would like to admit. The bottom line goal in all case was the power of the party.

Ideology is a vehicle for political power and all the Machiavellian outfits draped around the naked emperor of power do not change that. Western political parties in America, Europe and around the world have traded in the “Labor” ideology that banked on the dissatisfaction of the native working class for a “Diversity” ideology banking on the dissatisfaction of minorities. Such a transition would not have occurred, no matter how much the changing ideas of the left pushed it, if it did not serve the interests of the political machines driving them.

For decades now when we talk about race, what we are really talking about is the power and privilege of a political movement and its associated party. What we are really doing is reinforcing that power and that privilege.

Reform is natively antagonistic. It requires problems and crises and when those are exhausted, it needs to exploit or manufacture new ones. Class or race, religion and culture, it makes no real difference. What it needs is a source of dysfunction to maintain as its power base. When social problems are resolved then it must create them and transform them into the axis around which the wheel of the society revolves.

The engine of dysfunction grinds on making the society a much worse place until it is willing to destroy the society rather than give up the drive to create more dysfunction in order to justify its power and privilege.