Some wit , and I wish I knew who, remarked, "once in a while entire societies go bat-shit moon-barking crazy". You can't discuss, or argue, or persuade, crazy, any more than one can reason with a bully. One can step back, and let them run headlong into reality, but in the case of a country , or a culture, it is tough to not get sucked into the undertow of whackydoodle. What was the saying, "the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent?" Same thing, only different.
Raven, I'll disagree with you somewhat because there are some possible drivers for what we see happening in this area. Not that the outcome is necessarily the result of rational thought over emotion, however.
1) Eight years of being able to make the lazy "That's racist!" argument when anyone disagreed with Obama.
2) Thirty years of the 'emerging Democrat majority' equal the one they enjoyed between 1932 and 1994 never quite emerging.
3) Fifty years of using the 'Southern Strategy' argument to deflect responsibility for Jim Crow and then straight up bribing blacks to vote Democrat.
I think the Democrats know at a gut level that if whites ever start voting as Republican as non-whites vote Democrat (the vast majority of people who identify as Republican are white but whites are evenly divided in political orientation) they are screwed politically unless they get every non-white group voting for them at the level blacks do currently. That's true even if whites are not a majority of the population but still a large plurality.
Thus the terror at the thought of even thirty percent of non-whites voting Republican. That's still a vast majority of non-whites voting Democrat but it wouldn't be enough to sustain a majority if a reverse image seventy percent of whites regularly voting Republican.
CRT has metastasized out of the academy as a two pronged political attack. One prong is to reinforce and justify non-white solidarity behind a 'non-white' party that's still majority white in identification. The other prong is to keep whites divided politically to avoid the formation of a real white voting block.
Again, this isn't an actual strategy that some consultants put together in some conference. It's the result of the interplay between the shifting racial and political make up of the U.S. population, and the way that political campaigns have been organized since about the 1990s.
Just when you think the folly can't go farther, the media manages to excel itself. Lewis Carrol's Humpty Dumpty must have been a journalism school instructor. ("When I use a word, . . it means just what I choose it to mean. . .")
Some wit , and I wish I knew who, remarked, "once in a while entire societies go bat-shit moon-barking crazy".
ReplyDeleteYou can't discuss, or argue, or persuade, crazy, any more than one can reason with a bully. One can step back, and let them run headlong into reality, but in the case of a country , or a culture, it is tough to not get sucked into the undertow of whackydoodle. What was the saying, "the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent?" Same thing, only different.
I think the answer is no.
ReplyDelete"Why?" might be an interesting question.
Raven, I'll disagree with you somewhat because there are some possible drivers for what we see happening in this area. Not that the outcome is necessarily the result of rational thought over emotion, however.
ReplyDelete1) Eight years of being able to make the lazy "That's racist!" argument when anyone disagreed with Obama.
2) Thirty years of the 'emerging Democrat majority' equal the one they enjoyed between 1932 and 1994 never quite emerging.
3) Fifty years of using the 'Southern Strategy' argument to deflect responsibility for Jim Crow and then straight up bribing blacks to vote Democrat.
I think the Democrats know at a gut level that if whites ever start voting as Republican as non-whites vote Democrat (the vast majority of people who identify as Republican are white but whites are evenly divided in political orientation) they are screwed politically unless they get every non-white group voting for them at the level blacks do currently. That's true even if whites are not a majority of the population but still a large plurality.
Thus the terror at the thought of even thirty percent of non-whites voting Republican. That's still a vast majority of non-whites voting Democrat but it wouldn't be enough to sustain a majority if a reverse image seventy percent of whites regularly voting Republican.
CRT has metastasized out of the academy as a two pronged political attack. One prong is to reinforce and justify non-white solidarity behind a 'non-white' party that's still majority white in identification. The other prong is to keep whites divided politically to avoid the formation of a real white voting block.
Again, this isn't an actual strategy that some consultants put together in some conference. It's the result of the interplay between the shifting racial and political make up of the U.S. population, and the way that political campaigns have been organized since about the 1990s.
I would add that "white supremacy" no longer has much relationship to actual white supremacy. It just means "bad thing, something, something, race."
ReplyDeleteJust when you think the folly can't go farther, the media manages to excel itself. Lewis Carrol's Humpty Dumpty must have been a journalism school instructor. ("When I use a word, . . it means just what I choose it to mean. . .")
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1