by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
RightNetwork.com<\/p>\n
The people have spoken, and what they have said concerns more than just the wrong-headed policies the Democrats have inflicted upon us in the past few years. This election was never just about policy \u2013\u2013 it was also about Barack Obama and the repudiation of a public persona manufactured from racial identity politics and progressive ideology.<\/p>\n
All the media-concocted narratives that created and marketed the Obama persona to the voters have collapsed. The \u201cpost-racial\u201d candidate who could transcend the divides of racial animosity has been exposed as a creature of an identity politics predicated on racial grievance.<\/p>\n
Yet why should we be surprised? Obama\u2019s whole career has been fueled not so much by ability as by the notion that he is \u201cblack,\u201d and so can satisfy the liberal establishment\u2019s \u201ccommitment to diversity\u201d \u2014 meaning leftist groupthink dressed in ethnic costumes. No matter that little in Obama\u2019s life was consistent with the conditions in which most black Americans live. By the old Jim Crow \u201cone-drop rule,\u201d he was just black enough. The absence of other markers of black identity, such as a Black English accent, made him even more attractive to white liberals, whose love of diversity usually runs skin-deep.<\/p>\n
Once in office, Obama\u2019s lack of experience in the real world of accountability, complexity, and consequences immediately became manifest. His political missteps, embarrassing foreign policy ignorance and na\u00efvet\u00e9, and tone-deaf arrogance soon revealed him to be the affirmative action president: a polished mediocrity whose middling abilities and talents had been inflated into genius by the racism of low expectations. Believing, as they do, that blacks are always victims and hence inferior, white liberals always compensate by over-praising the minorities whom they elevate not necessarily on merit but on the white compulsion to demonstrate inclusiveness and tolerance. Like Samuel Johnson\u2019s quip about lady preachers, liberals are astonished not that black people can do something well, but that they can do it at all.<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s supporters gave the game away when the President\u2019s wrong-footed policies and thin-skinned narcissism began to draw legitimate political criticism. In order to deflect scrutiny from Obama\u2019s inexperience and incompetence, Democrats defended their Potemkin President by hurling the charge of racism at his critics, the standard response to anyone who questions race-politics orthodoxy and preferences. Thus the Congressional Black Caucus and their abettors in the mainstream media lit a few racialist Reichstag Fires, accusing Tea Party supports of spitting on black Congressmen and indulging racial epithets, charges to this day still unproven. And trying to score an \u201cOctober surprise,\u201d the NAACP last month released a \u201creport\u201d in which the Tea Party is chastised for giving a \u201cplatform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.\u201d<\/p>\n
The voters weren\u2019t buying it. Indeed, such\u00a0ad hominem<\/em>\u00a0smears of people voicing legitimate policy concerns further disenchanted voters with the President.<\/p>\n In truth, most contemporary Americans have no particular racial animus toward black people, and recognize that talent and ability abound in the black community, as they do in every other. What critics of racialist politics and policies dislike is the way the government, media, and universities ignore merit and promote the less qualified simply to display a specious \u201cdiversity\u201d that in fact is an instrument for imposing ideological conformity.<\/p>\n Which brings us to the second reason why the voters are unhappy with Obama \u2013\u2013 his progressive ideology.<\/p>\n Obama\u2019s domestic policies reflect the statist agenda of increasing government control over the economy and individual choice; and his foreign policy is predicated on the \u201cblame America first\u201d interpretation of interstate relations and conflicts. Voters have rejected Obama\u2019s creeping statism because they know from experience that free individuals are the better managers of their own lives than are unelected government functionaries.<\/p>\n Voters know that the government-sponsored social-engineering elites are not as competent as they profess to be, and so should interfere as little as possible in complex social and economic relations.<\/p>\n Voters know that government control rests on coercion and the limitation of freedom, and that government largess breeds a crippling dependence. And they also know that responsibility and accountability are the necessary correlatives of liberty, and that surrendering personal responsibility for a mess of entitlement pottage leads to diminishing personal freedom.<\/p>\n In foreign policy too, Americans have grown tired of the progressive penchant for running down America and apologizing for its crimes in order to curry favor with presumably more sophisticated internationalists. And they are tired of hearing progressives blame the United States for a global disorder that is more often the result of the cultural pathologies and dysfunctions afflicting so many countries.<\/p>\n Most Americans know that, contra President Obama \u2013\u2013 who dismissed American exceptionalism as a parochial, subjective prejudice \u2013\u2013 America is indeed exceptional, its freedom and generosity historically unprecedented for a country wielding such immense global power. Thus we have grown impatient with a bankrupt internationalism whose reliance on ineffectual diplomacy and unenforced treaties has endangered our security and compromised our national interests. We prefer to rely on our own judgment of those interests and how best to pursue them, rather than submitting them to the hypocritical standards and self-interested agendas of other countries.<\/p>\n The rejection of Obama and the Democrats, however, is just the beginning. Now begins the hard work of returning this country to the traditional political virtues too often forgotten by both parties. We need again a prudence based on the acceptance of the complexity of our problems and the imperfections of human nature, not to mention the iron law of unintended consequences. Such recognition means that attacking problems like rising healthcare costs or illegal immigration must proceed slowly enough for stock to be taken of each incremental policy\u2019s effectiveness, rather than trying to achieve a grand solution in one fell legislative swoop.<\/p>\n We need to again discover and promote a genuine patriotism and affection for this country, one based not on hiding the imperfections we should expect from flawed humans, but on realizing that those all too human flaws do not negate our country\u2019s manifest virtues like freedom, opportunity, openness, and generosity. From that acceptance comes the confidence in the justice of our decisions and actions, and such confidence will in turn give us the strength to take the difficult actions and make the hard-trade offs necessary in a world filled with murderous ideologies and those who through weakness or self-interest enable them.<\/p>\n So it is up to Republicans whether this election turns out to be another 1980, or another 1994\u2013\u2013the beginning of another political revolution that puts us back on the road to greatness, or of another Pyrrhic victory that returns us to a petty business as usual.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com The people have spoken, and what they have said concerns more than just the wrong-headed policies the Democrats have inflicted upon us in the past few years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,504],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-im","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2373,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-post-racialism\/","url_meta":{"origin":1138,"position":0},"title":"The End of Post-Racialism","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 4, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPageMagazine.com So much for Obama striking a new tone on race. President Obama\u2019s response during his press conference to the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates \u2014 that the Cambridge police officer \u201cacted stupidly,\u201d despite Obama\u2019s confession that he didn\u2019t know what really had happened\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3300,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-race-card\/","url_meta":{"origin":1138,"position":1},"title":"Obama’s Race Card","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The liberal media are in full Captain Renault mode, \u201cshocked, shocked\u201d to find race injected into the presidential campaign by a \u201cSwift-boating\u201d John McCain. How shameless can you get? The Obama campaign\u2013\u2013indeed, the whole of Obama\u2019s public existence\u2013\u2013is about nothing other than his perceived\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":694,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-potemkin-president-disintegrates\/","url_meta":{"origin":1138,"position":2},"title":"The Potemkin President Disintegrates","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 18, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine After nearly four years in office, the tinsel and cardboard persona of Barack Obama is starting to fall apart. The political unifier who claimed, \u201cThere is not a liberal America and a conservative America \u2014 there is the United States of America,\u201d has been\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1067,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-racial-politics\/","url_meta":{"origin":1138,"position":3},"title":"Obama’s Racial Politics","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 19, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried \u2014 as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes. Yet from late 2007 to 2012, Barack Obama has been establishing new rules of racial referencing. In general, his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Identity Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Identity Politics","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/identity-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":663,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/get-ready-for-more-charges-of-racism\/","url_meta":{"origin":1138,"position":4},"title":"Get Ready For More Charges of Racism","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 4, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine The implosion of the Obama administration will create more and more desperate narratives on the part of progressives as we head toward the November election. With no record of achievement to run on, Obama must try to misdirect voters by shifting blame elsewhere: so far\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":602,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-medias-racial-prison\/","url_meta":{"origin":1138,"position":5},"title":"The Media’s Racial Prison","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 31, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine Two incidents last week suggest once more that our confused, hypocritical, and politicized notions of race and relations will play a huge role in the presidential election. In the first, Virginia state senator L. Louise Lucas, part of Obama\u2019s \u201cTruth Team\u201d campaigning for the president\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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