Summary: Once again the tide of factionalism threaten to wash over America. Again race is the divider — given a new lease on life by the GOP’s great betrayal of its principles in the 1960s, a bomb now detonating as the Democrats’ abandon their long goal of a color-blind society in favor of a race-based one. The 1% watches and laughs. We are on a path to an ominous future, but can still step off it.
The Founders feared “factionalism” above all the many risks to the Republic. Our generations might prove them right, as leaders of both Left and Right seek to divide us to gain power for themselves — stoking hatred in their communities of the evil genocidal others. Here is a look at some of America’s social arsonists.
Let’s start with “How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power” by Thomas Chatterton Williams, an op-ed in the NYT.
“Amazingly, despite his near godlike status within white liberal circles, in the collection’s finest essay, “The Case for Reparations,” originally published in The Atlantic in 2014, Mr. Coates worries that “today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything.” It is a jaw-dropping sentence if you take even a moment to consider the current discourse in progressive circles. …
“In ‘The First White President‘, Mr. Coates’s blistering jeremiad {he says that} “White tribalism haunts even more nuanced writers,” …training his sights on The New Yorker’s George Packer. This was an incredible accusation to which Mr. Packer was forced to respond. …For having the temerity to defend himself, Mr. Packer was accused on social media of ‘excusing racism’ and ‘whitesplaining.’ Such logic extends a disturbing trend in left-of-center public thinking: identity epistemology, or knowing-through-being, somewhere along the line became identity ethics, or morality-through-being. Accordingly, whiteness and wrongness have become interchangeable – the high ground is now accessible only by way of ‘allyship,’ which is to say silence and total repentance. …
“The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race – specifically the specialness of whiteness – that white supremacist thinkers cherish.
“This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist ‘woke’ discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural.
“For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a ‘talisman,’ an ‘amulet’ of ‘eldritch energies’ that explains all injustice; for the abysmal early-20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a ‘meta-biological force,’ a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring. …
“{w}hat ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr. Coates have lost sight of, is the fact that so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes. We will all be doomed to stalk our separate paths.”
Note how the extremes of both left and right often use the same language. For example, seeing themselves as threatened by genocide (threats existing only in their imaginations). As in this statement by Enoch from “Birth of a White Supremacist: Mike Enoch’s transformation from leftist contrarian to nationalist shock jock” by Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker (it’s a scary article).
“’We’re here to talk about white genocide, the deliberate and intentional displacement of the white race,’ he said. ‘Have we heard this conspiracy theory of white privilege? This is a concept that was brought to us by Jewish intellectuals, to undermine our confidence in ourselves.’”
Here is a powerful article about America sliding towards third-world levels of factionalism: “How Not to Marginalize the Alt-Right” by Dan McLaughliun at National Review.
“Coates is a figure of enormous cultural power, the most enthusiastically praised political writer in American history. He has used that position of power and privilege to promote a vision of America in which individuals mean nothing and race is everything …. Yet the irony of the fires he plays with continually escapes him. In his ‘amulet of whiteness‘ essay, Coates angrily accused Trump and his supporters of evaluating Obama’s policies solely through the lens of Obama’s race: …
“Whatever the merits of this charge as applied to Trump or some number of his supporters — and surely there are those who think this way — Coates is the worst possible messenger for this complaint, and he seems oblivious to his own role in promoting the very thing he denounces. Coates in his own writing makes clear that he himself always saw Obama as the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. In his most recent book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
“Having pushed this perspective into the political debate for eight years, Coates and {Jamelle} Bouie are now shocked, shocked that some of Obama’s political opponents might see things their way. The malignancy of the Coates/{Richard Spencer} ethos of irrepressible conflict between two monolithically antagonistic races as a pervasive element of American society is shown in Coates’s willingness to court violent revolution, ranging from his 2014 efforts to compare the Ferguson riots favorably to the violence that led America into war with Britain to telling Vox recently that he sees our society headed for something like the Terror of the French Revolution …
Even imagining that world, Coates makes ample space for tragedy. When he tries to describe the events that would erase America’s wealth gap, that would see the end of white supremacy, his thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and the terror. ‘It’s very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don’t tend to happen peacefully. For Coates, even hope can be covered in blood.
“Even with his signature ‘fade to vague’ move at the end, what Coates is dog-whistling here is not hard to understand. If you were designing rhetoric to inflame people who feed on fever dreams of ‘white genocide,’ you could hardly aim your words more precisely than this. What Coates perhaps unintentionally pursues, and what Spencer eagerly seeks, is to ‘heighten the contradictions’: delegitimize the center-right and center-left (mainstream conservatives are always the first target), so that nothing remains but the extremes, who share the same philosophy and differ only in who gets the spoils after the bloodletting stops.”
Squabbling to keep the 1% in power
See the Leftists clash: read Ta-Nehsi Coates’ attack in “The First White President” vs. George Packer’s response at The Atlantic. See them squabbling to keep the Democrats a minority party, fueling factionalism so that the 1% can continue to rule. See how well they’ve succeeded (maps from the WaPo).
The Third Law of Psychohistory
Psychohistory is the merging of psychology and history to better understand the past and predict the future (see Wikipedia). Its origins go back to 1919. It was popularized in Isaac Asimov’s 1951 science fiction novel Foundation
“For every action there is eventually an equal and opposite reaction.”
Which is why the Right’s embrace of racism in the 1960’s and the Left’s focus on race (and gender) have set in motion a self-reinforcing cycle (positive re-enforcement). While useful for these factional leaders, they keep us divided and so weak — unable to successfully challenge the 1%.
This is unlike the politics of class, which could unite us against the 1% — forming an alliance like the progressive-populist which created the New Deal.
For More Information.
If you found this post of use, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Also see all posts about the far-right, about the far-left, about racism, and especially these…
- 2016 revealed the true nature of America’s left & right. It’s bad news.
- Our Right & Left have lost their way. Saul Alinsky points to a better politics.
- On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, let the GOP remember its great betrayal.
- About a cause of America’s rising tide of hatred. We can still stop it.
- The photo that made Nathan Damigo leader of the alt-Right.
Our history can help us understand what we can do.
John Adams
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
