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By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
WashingtonTimes.com
President Obama is inciting racial division. He rightly fears that the Democrats will suffer huge losses in November's midterm congressional elections. Republicans are within reach of retaking control of the House of Representatives. Even the Senate may be in play. His party's grip on power is threatened - and with it, Mr. Obama's radical socialist agenda.
Fear breeds desperation. Hence, Mr. Obama is resorting to the worst kind of demagoguery: playing the race card. In a video to Democrats, the president embraced identity politics; black, Hispanic and female voters are to be courted at the expense of white middle-class America.
"It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women, who powered our victory in 2008, stand together once again," he said.
Mr. Obama conveniently ignored the large chunk of white voters - suburbanites, latte-sipping professionals, environmentalists, labor union members - who voted for him in huge numbers. For Mr. Obama in the 2010 election, whites no longer matter - especially white Christian males.
In recent memory, no president has so deliberately and publicly sought to pit racial and gender groups against each other. The president is not simply the titular head of a party or the leader of government. He is the head of state and embodies the collective will of the American people. He is the president of all Americans - not just certain segments of his electoral coalition. Mr. Obama's rhetoric is reckless. It is fostering civil strife and racial animosity.
Imagine the media uproar had President George W. Bush, for example, in 2006 called for "whites, Southerners, Christians and veterans" to vote for the Republican Party. Mr. Bush would have been excoriated (rightly) for racist and sectarian pandering.
Mr. Obama is fracturing America. He is calling on the primacy of race and gender in order to perpetuate his national socialist revolution. He is championing a revanchist tribalism - the politics of grievance and racial victimology that undermines our common national identity. Just like his old pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Mr. Obama is an anti-American, virulent race-baiter.
Instead of seeing Americans, he classifies people according to their race and gender. Modern liberal identity politics is rooted in fascist doctrine. The most influential philosopher of the 20th century was Martin Heidegger. His 1927 classic work, "Being and Time," is widely acknowledged as profoundly influencing Western thought - especially the academic left and its embrace of postmodernism. It's the very culture from which Mr. Obama - by his own admission - comes.
The German thinker developed the theory of the primacy of race, blood and group identity in a secular, relativistic world. Heidegger rejected eternal Judeo-Christian principles of moral absolutes. Instead, he called for the will to power through racial communities and tribal solidarity. Heidegger adamantly opposed democracy, capitalism and market-oriented growth - denouncing them as unjust and oppressive.
What is conveniently ignored is that Heidegger also was a passionate Nazi. He admired Adolf Hitler. He was a member of the National Socialist Party. Heidegger believed that fascism - with its racialism, neo-paganism, economic corporatism, worship of state power, rabid environmentalism and hatred of Western civilization - represented the true future. Sadly, he may have been right.
Today's Western liberal elites are Heidegger's heirs. For decades, the American left has been obsessed with race, class and gender. It despises America's national heritage and common culture. The Founding Fathers' dream of a republic based on limited government and rugged individualism, the Constitution, the notion of American exceptionalism, our roots as an English-speaking, Christian civilization based on a distinct national identity - these idols must be smashed in the name of progressivism.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr. Obama's presidency is not simply about erecting European-style social democracy. It is more insidious and dangerous than that. It is an attempt at establishing a liberal fascist regime - Heidegger meets Jane Fonda.
The results are similar to what exists in other fascist states: a pliant dominant media, greater government control over all aspects of national life, a bloated public sector, economic sclerosis, a corporatist economy, permanently high unemployment, crushing taxes, a hostility to Jews (Israel), a growing intolerance to dissent, the demonizing of critics and an irrational cult of personality.
The most distinctive characteristic, however, is the incitement of racial conflict. Fascism thrives on fomenting ethnic divisions and hatred, targeting internal race enemies to galvanize supporters behind their leader.
This is what Mr. Obama is doing today. He and his Democratic allies have deliberately fanned the flames of racial tensions over Arizona's immigration law.
The state statute does nothing more than empower local police to enforce existing federal immigration laws. Overrun by Mexican drug cartels, a soaring crime wave and many illegal migrants, Arizona's authorities are taking action to protect the border in the wake of federal government inaction. The state's comprehensive immigration enforcement law is simply patriotic common sense and self-defense.
Mr. Obama, however, has blasted it as "misguided." The liberal media is comparing the law to Hitlerism, a form of apartheid and white supremacy, supposedly for its racial profiling of Hispanics. The Rev. Al Sharpton is leading an economic boycott of the state. The attack on Arizona's immigration law is an attempt to frighten Hispanics into believing that white Arizonans are seeking to impose a racial caste system. It is deliberately playing the races against one another to help Mr. Obama get higher voter turnout among minorities in November.
The consequences are the gradual Balkanization and breakup of America. The mainstream media refuses to report on one overriding reality: Racial violence has broken out in protest of Arizona's law. Gangs of Hispanic protesters in Arizona have been throwing rocks and bottles at police, spitting at them and denouncing them as "pigs." Massive rallies are planned across the country this weekend to demand amnesty for illegal aliens. Event leaders will use Arizona's law as a rallying point to channel ethnic anger and rage.
Mr. Obama is fueling greater ideological, political and racial polarization. Not since the Civil War have Americans been so divided. He is laying the groundwork for a possible race war. Welcome to Mr. Obama's fascist America.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and
president of the Edmund Burke Institute, a Washington think tank. He is the
daily host of "The Kuhner Show" on WTNT 570-AM (www.talk570.com) from noon
until 3 p.m.