Boxing People In

I have a friend who talks the same way about Donald Trump voters, except on the male/female rather than white/black divide.
...the deepest rift is with the apologists, the “good” Trump voters, the white people who understand that Mr. Trump says “unfortunate” things but support him because they like what he says on jobs and taxes. They bristle at the accusation that they supported racism, insisting they had to ignore Mr. Trump’s ugliness. Relying on everyday decency as a shield, they are befuddled at the chill that now separates them from black people in their offices and social circles. They protest: Have they ever said anything racist? Don’t they shovel the sidewalk of the new black neighbors? Surely, they say, politics — a single vote — does not mean we can’t be friends.

I do not write this with liberal condescension or glee. My heart is unbearably heavy when I assure you we cannot be friends.
From June of last year, we were in a binary choice between surrendering the Constitution or accepting Donald Trump as President. The Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court was going to be filled by the next President, and a President Clinton was going to appoint a fifth doctrinaire "living Constitution" Justice. The 'living Constitution' is of course no Constitution at all; if the Constitution means whatever the powerful would like it to 'evolve' to mean, then it means whatever the powerful want. A constitution that means whatever the powerful want it to mean is not in fact a constitution at all, because a constitution's purpose is to restrain the government's use of power. The choice really was between the end of a Constitutional form of government, or this bullying blowhard from Manhattan.

That's not a great choice. Some went one way, and some went the other. It disturbs my friend, and this writer, that some could stomach voting for Trump in spite of his 'unfortunate' remarks. It disturbs me that some could stomach voting for Clinton in spite of the fact that it would have meant the end of a system of Constitutional limited government; indeed, I think they saw that as a feature rather than a bug of a prospective Clinton presidency. At long last, the Constitution would never hobble them from using the government to pursue the goods they wanted. We would hear the Supreme Court rule that the Constitution existed only to limit Americans' freedom to exercise racism or sexism or whatever-else-ism, never that it forbade the government from exercising some power 'to do good.' Rather than restraining the government, the Constitution would have been nothing more than one more weapon for the government to exert itself against the people.

What I just said will sound to them as if I meant, "I couldn't vote for Clinton because she would have turned the Court into a weapon against my right to exercise racism and prejudice." The real issue is completely opaque to those making these arguments. Indeed, I think this writer is so invested in the identity politics that it might not be possible to sever the issues conceptually. Perhaps the writer imagines that this sense of the indivisibility of identity from justice, which seems so self-evident to him, must necessarily be equally in the minds of everyone else as well.

10 comments:

  1. I've mentioned a time or two before that the Left projects rather than reasons.

    Yankah is quite correct: we cannot be friends as long as he insists on creating himself my enemy.

    Eric Hines

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  2. ColoComment7:11 PM

    "I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust. Much sooner than I thought I would, I will have to discuss with my boys whether they can truly be friends with white people."

    Good lord almighty, he sounds like the worst of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Do black people have no agency at all, in this dream and drive for a color-blind society? If the social & economic legislative efforts of the last 50+ years have had no positive impact, have not exemplified the sincere attempts by the white majority to ameliorate the disadvantages suffered by black people due to government-mandated slavery, then segregation, then WTH?

    Let's just repeal all those do-gooder social and economic programs, then, and throw up our collective hands in surrender: there is obviously nothing, nothing, that anyone can do that would appease those who wallow in self-pity and victimhood, and worse, WHO TEACH IT TO THEIR CHILDREN.

    This makes me sick.

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  3. Eric Blair7:37 PM

    That guy should be very careful what he asks for. He just might get it.

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  4. Anonymous7:48 PM

    Excellent analysis, the Republic was at stake. And still is.

    The very thought of another Ruth Bader Ginsberg who holds that a foreign body or legal precept should be considered when making a Constitutional decision based on our law is abhorrent to the very sovereignty of this nation.

    And I would say the same of any other nations "judges" who deigned to consider another nation or collective body of nations in a deliberation based on domestic law.
    nmewn

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  5. That guy should be very careful what he asks for. He just might get it.

    He already is. There's a growing black movement in our colleges and universities to reintroduce segregation. To provide safe spaces.

    Eric Hines

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  6. Posted by mistake in the thread above this one.

    I'm reminded of President Woodrow Wilson's remark when he began resegregating the Federal government to the point of spending tax money to build separate buildings for black employees. When called on that by black journalists, Wilson said, segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.

    Eric Hines

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  7. I was wondering where you were going with that in the thread above.

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  8. Nowhere in particular, apparently.

    Eric Hines

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  9. Oh, his heart is unbearably heavy, is it? I hope he bears up well under the strain, and will check back in with us at some (possibly far distant) point.

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  10. Ymar Sakar6:03 PM

    The Republic is dead.

    The US Constitution barely has any jurisdiction on the USA territory under divine laws. The protections of the covenant have been mostly stripped by now. City, geographic, and individual contracts are still in force, but the covenant between the government of the USA, federal level, and Jehovah, is null and void. There will no longer be lucky breaks or divine protections such as what the Pilgrims got, making the US territory immune to foreign nations and invasions.

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