PrintJuly 17, 2010
Free at Last: Endgame of Liberal Racism
Back when they were asking us if we were ready for a black president, we all know what Americans were thinking. If we elect a black president, could we do a deal? Could we stop calling everyone racists?
It was easy back then to indulge in a hope for change. Back in July 2004, State Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) wowed the political nation with his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention:
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.
That was the hope. Under President Obama, there's change: Liberal racism is worse than ever.
Americans don't believe in taking that kind of change lying down. So it's time to bring out the great American one-liners.
"Mr. President, Don't Tread on Me."
Six years later, Americans are feeling like Charlie Brown after Lucy snatched the football away, one more time. It's clear that whatever young Barack said back then, the Obama administration today believes in full frontal race politics. In the words of Department of Justice whistle-blower J. Christian Adams:
[T]here is an open and pervasive hostility within the DOJ towards using the voting laws to protect all races. Instead, the laws are viewed by many in the DOJ -- particularly by the political leadership, such as Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes -- only as tools to protect national racial minorities and increase their voter turnout.
But it is now becoming clear that liberal race politics is coming to an end.
"Mr. President, what do you think I am, dumb or something?"
It is coming to an end not because President Obama is delivering on his promise of July 2004, or because he has cunningly finessed his promise. It is coming to an end because he and his administration are so clumsily reneging on his promise.
After electing a black president and being forced to view the moral quagmire of President Obama siding with a powerful black celebrity against a humble Cambridge, MA cop; after experiencing the U.S. Department of Justice bailing on the most blatant voter intimidation case in our lifetimes; after the naked hypocrisy of the Obama administration suing the State of Arizona for presuming to enforce laws that the feds don't care to enforce; after the "N"-word claims that didn't hunt; after all that, Americans are about to tell President Obama and the Democrats and the liberals and the professional race hustlers to get lost.
"Frankly, Mr. President, I don't give a damn."
Even the most hardened racist Southern white sheriff of liberal memory would have had the decency to cloak his racism in a euphemism, the tribute that vice pays to virtue. But in these Obama times, we have, in New Black Panther leader King Samir Shabazz, a man whose racist rants would be outrageous if they weren't so comical.
And they said that President Bush was stupid.
For one shining hour in the 1960s, liberals stood tall on race. They passed the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s even though President Lyndon Johnson lamented that Democrats would lose the South for a generation.
Let us honor our liberal friends for that.
In that liberal hour, Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) famously declared that he would personally eat the Civil Rights Bill if it contained anything to do with quotas.
But the moment the Civil Rights Act was signed, liberals resumed identity politics as usual. African-Americans became just another identity group whose support liberals bought with our money.
It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when liberals, in their 19th-century clothes as Progressives, utterly deplored identity politics and the blatant corruption of big-city political machines. It wasn't 'til FDR came along that the modern Democratic Party was created by combining high-minded liberalism with down-market corruption in a single-minded pursuit of power and loot. The liberals came up with the high-minded rationalizations, and the machine politicians did the actual cheating for them.
So now, the identity politics that Progressives sneered at has become the defining philosophy of modern liberalism.
Let us paraphrase Dirty Harry's famous one-liner.
Go ahead, Mr. President. Send out more of these comically inept racists and ward-heeler Justice Department attorneys to racialize the enforcement of federal law. You are doing the work of conservative activists for them.
Americans have always argued about justice, and we always will. But we Americans react to injustice with cold fury.
"Mr. President, we have just begun to fight."
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
