A Party of Trolls
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
With the next four years at stake, the only topic
of conversation is the Race Card. The left plays the
Race Card and then accuses the right of playing the
Race Card. There are dogwhistles in the air that
only white middle-aged pundits can hear and
arguments over whose diverse lineup truly represents
the philosophy of the future and whose is just
shameless tokenism.
The media madhouse insists that a half-black man
who went from the Illinois State Senate to the White
House in 5 years is proof that we are a racist
country and that Southern Europeans whose ancestors
moved to this continent are an oppressed racial
minority. Arguing with this insanity is a sure way
to get called a racist. Ignoring this insanity means
being charged with privilege. Privilege being the
ungodly power to ignore someone else's assertion
that privilege through victimization should begin
and end every single discussion on every topic, up
to and including the moon landing.
The Democratic Party and its media affiliates have
become a party of trolls who only know how to hijack
every discussion with an obsessive insistence that
every issue can be boiled down to race and that the
difference between the two parties is that one of
them is racist and the other has good taste in
fonts.
It's hard to know what the Democratic Party stands
for anymore. All we know is that it is against
racism. Never before has an entire election been run
around a single negative issue that has absolutely
nothing to do with the actual challenges facing the
country. Instead we have the national spectacle of
members of minority groups being pitted against each
other by two parties to prove which of them is less
racist.
There is no precedent for a country facing two major
crises, an economic depression and a war at the same
time, holding an election that is somehow about
race. If we're going to make the 2012 election about
race, then we might as well also make it about
childhood obesity, green energy and all the other
idiocies of a failed administration that can't tie
its shoes without a bailout.
For the last three years, the left has responded to
every criticism of their candidate, their party and
their incompetence by bleating about racism, as if
having a black candidate and a large share of the
black vote makes them honorary minorities. And as if
their bleating had anything to do with real issues
like the unsustainable national debt and an economy
that still can't get back on its feet.
The left imagines that it is somehow better than the
lunatics of the Westboro Baptist Church who randomly
show up at funerals screaming about homosexuality.
It's not. Not when its members show up randomly
brandishing nooses or dressing up as body parts and
screaming about racism or sexism. There's no hint of
responsible leadership in tactics like that. It's
the behavior of a debating club loser who has
memorized only one winning point and will shout it
no matter what the issue is.
Everyone wants to prove that their ideology, whether
it's showing up in the country with 50 cents and
becoming successful by building a business or
showing up in the country with 50 cents and becoming
successful by getting a Ford Foundation grant to
community organize the hell out of a local group, is
universal and can apply to everyone regardless of
skin color, gender, religion or fashion sense. And
once we've done that, it still falls to us to deal
with problems that depend on math, not race.
The real issue at stake here is whether the working
class will end up being squeezed out by the
government class. It's an issue that affects the
rich, poor and middle class alike, and the
Republicans are coming dangerously close to
articulating it in between applause breaks. The
Democrats would like to avoid this line of
conservation as much as possible, because once the
debate is fully underway, Americans will start
assessing their individual economic stakes in the
fight, instead of assuming that their economic
interest is joined at the hip to their racial
identity, gender or choice of bed partners.
Race is a distraction, but it's more than that. A
false argument is like a mask. You can put it on,
but after a while you can't take it off. The more
time that the left spends immersed in the grammar of
racial grievance, the less able it is to speak any
other language. The Democrats aren't just cynical,
they are also becoming illiterate and unable to
articulate ideas that don't revolve around a great
split between races, genders or two groups, one
oppressed and one oppressing.
The Democratic Party's poverty of ideas is
self-inflicted. Snide progressives may sneer at
Rand, but what exactly are they packing besides TED
talks and trendy books that exist to make their
owners feel smart for not reading them? Democrats
rarely talk about guiding philosophies now because
they don't exist. They have no grand plan to make
the country better. Even Alinsky is nothing but a
blueprint for consolidating power in a spurt of
postmodern multicultural Machiavellianism.
Progressives can rage and sneer, roar grievances
and pose as the oppressed, but what do they actually
believe in except the evil of their opposite numbers
on the right? The Republican Party is no towering
wall of ideas, but the Democratic Party has
forgotten everything but bigotry. If it has to speak
without relying on its racism props, then it mumbles
something about marching together to the future,
throws in something about families, children,
technology, clean energy, environmental challenges
and soaks up the applause of its captive audience.
Ask Obama why he should be reelected and he tells
you that it's to "finish what we started." Not "he".
For once the great ego who uses "I" like the letter
is about to be removed from the alphabet resorts to
"we", because he is already passing the blame to
someone else. What is it that we started? No one
knows. There's something about health care reform,
the auto industry and killing Bin Laden. Not to
mention holding Wall Street accountable in between
Wall Street fundraisers and of course, protecting
our values, whatever those are.
With the passing of time it becomes difficult to
figure out what, if anything, the latest Democrat
actually stands for. From JFK onward, there was no
longer a legacy, just a strange disastrous mix of
incompatible policies and spiraling destruction. The
incoherence has only grown worse with time. Bill
Clinton was the deregulating draft dodging radical
who would occasionally bomb things when the mood
suited him. John Kerry was the anti-military
military man volunteering for duty to keep our
country safe from military solutions. Obama is here
to lead us into some vague future with lower tides,
drones strikes and racism for everyone.
Obama is running on a program of bank bailouts and
bank accountability, an end to wars while winning
all the wars, including those he started, and
including those he lost. He's running to cut our
dependency on foreign oil by killing domestic
drilling and make us all better people by confusing
the hell out of us. This rigamarole wouldn't have
gotten past Stage One in the Democratic Party two
generations ago. It's barely passing muster now,
only because no one is paying attention, and to make
sure no one pays attention, the usual suspects troll
everyone by dealing out some race cards.
There is no area of his governance that could
survive a detailed 5-minute discussion with anyone
who isn't a halfwit. All that's left is trolling the
Republicans to cover up the basic weaknesses in an
agenda so incoherent that even few of his own
supporters would sign on to it. And this isn't new,
it's just more shameless than ever.
Progressives have become intellectual illiterates,
they have memorized reams of political diagrams and
are experts on the sufferings of obscure people in
obscure places. They pride themselves on thinking
that they know all the secret sufferings of the
waitress who brings them their check, but this
tawdry New Age empathy does not translate into an
ability to help her or to help anyone else. They are
forever priding themselves on their willingness to
help people and using that pride to justify their
own wealth and power. They are always on the verge
of helping someone, but they never get done helping
anyone except themselves.
Race atones for this sin and for all sins. It
answers all objections, it fills in the giant gaps
in their knowledge and competence. It is a disguise
that they once put on, but can no longer take off.
It has become their reason for being. It is the one
subject that is so simple and elemental that they
can thoroughly control it. Poverty is complicated.
So are jobs and wars. Race however is simple. There
are bad people and there are good people. The
oppressed and the oppressors. And that paradigm,
that one talking point that they store up and
unleash at every occasion is the sum total of their
contribution to every debate under the sun.
Their race card is as big as America now. It is
America. There is no longer an America for them,
just a collection of race cards that they shuffle
and deal and shuffle again, playing solitaire with
themselves until the economy goes down. In their
America it is always 1963 in Birmingham. It will
always be Birmingham, 1963, even for those who have
never been to Birmingham and who did not even exist
on this planet in 1963.
Birmingham, 1963, is a myth to them. A story that
they want to be part of. It is their version of the
Warrior's Tale. The one that isn't true, but that
inspires the younger members of the tribe to be like
the mythical warrior. It is the story that they tell
us incessantly because they don't really know who
they are or we are anymore. All they know is that
the story makes them better than us. They don't know
where they are going or where they have been, only
that they are marching forward to some bright
future. And that the very act of marching forward
means that they are progressive and makes them into
the children of the future.
And the economy? Who cares about that.