by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Since the election, some fatalistic Washington conservative elites have accepted \u2014 and Obama operatives have rejoiced in \u2014 a supposedly new and non-white-male ethnic electorate: Americans will be categorized, and collectively so, on the basis of largely how they look and, to a lesser extent, how they sound. Republicans, then, better get with the new tribalism and remarket themselves to address the new minority monolith.<\/p>\n Accordingly, the enlightened and redeemable liberal elements of the otherwise now played-out old white majority, when combined with the new ethnic minorities, will result in a permanent progressive majority \u2014 one that rejects the archaic, if not toxic, racialist values that have been in the past so injurious to the idea of what the United States might have otherwise become. Just imagine a better world with no more required reading of white male Greeks, no more inordinate focus on Shakespeare\u2019s Shylock, no need to suffer through Twain\u2019s N-word or Tolkien\u2019s\u00a0stereotypical dark-skinned orcs<\/a>\u00a0[1] \u2014 or indeed, the one-dimensional and boring world we inherited from a Jefferson, Madison, Melville, Lincoln, Grant, Edison, Bell, TR, Salk, Nimitz, and Ike.<\/p>\n You Are a Nobody without Your Tribe<\/strong><\/p>\n Yet the new emphasis on tribe is not necessarily a liberal vision. It ignores all human individuality and assumes that friendships, marriages, and alliances will not dare trump racial and ethnic solidarity. Ours is now instead a Galadriel\u2019s mirror of the Balkans, of India\u2019s castes, of Rwanda, but no longer of a multiracial melting-pot America, where our allegiances were to be political, economic, and cultural and not necessarily synonymous with how we looked. Obama\u2019s identity politics would create a Frankenstein of patched-together victims, and yet he will rue that it is a different story to use such a creature for constructive purposes. Such monsters are quite valuable when running for office, but can turn on their masters when it is time to govern.<\/p>\n When I eat lunch with a Mexican-American childhood friend, I feel no greater affinity with the white waitress by reason of our shared appearance; in the new America am I to high-five the white stranger in the Selma Wal-Mart, by virtue that, out of hundreds there, we two alone look more alike? I am sorry; I just cannot accept that. I have far more in common with Steve Lara, my friend of 50 years, than a David Gergen or Chris Matthews.<\/p>\n Beneath all the pseudo-healing rhetoric, this is the divisive tool by which Barack Obama ran twice \u2014 the hyphenated African-, Latino-, gay-American re-election committees for Obama, the son who might have looked like Trayvon Martin, the people of color who had \u201cthe president\u2019s back,\u201d the nation of cowards, the country where we punish our ethnic enemies and fight against the police who all stereotype, in which Joseph Lowery tells us what particular race belongs in hell and Rev. Wright identifies whose chickens must come home to roost and the Rev. Jesse Jackson names the real segregationists who long for the Confederacy. Only in the hyper-racialist America can we take quite distinct Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Chinese third-generation citizens and create from them the artificial rubric \u201cAsian\u201d in their shared antithesis to \u201cwhite,\u201d or take disparate Cubans and Mexicans and likewise reinvent them as identical Latinos, or take Jamaicans, Ethiopians, and American blacks and call them all \u201cAfrican-Americans\u201d on the similar logic of not being something equally artificial like white \u2014 which I guess covers Americans who used to be Greeks, Irish, Armenians, Jews, Poles, and Danes.<\/p>\n Not Telling the Whole Truth and Nothing but \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n Some House Democrats are alleging that\u00a0reservations<\/a>\u00a0[2] voiced about a potential nomination of Susan Rice as secretary of State\u00a0are both racist and sexist<\/a>\u00a0[3] \u2014 and do not concern the fact that on five consecutive occasions she misled the nation about the nature of the Benghazi murders of four Americans (peddling an improbable story, which both the CIA and the president of the United States were, at least now and then, on record denying).<\/p>\n But stop and ponder the charges of prejudice. We have not seen a proverbial white male secretary of State since the inept Warren Christopher stepped down over a decade and a half ago. How could a sexist and racist country nominate and confirm a Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton as consecutive secretaries? Maybe such accusers confused State with the white-male-only office of attorney general? But no \u2014 there we have seen Janet Reno, Alberto Gonzales, and Eric Holder. I don\u2019t recall these congresswomen alleging racism when white males in Congress tore into Alberto Gonzales and forced him to step down from the office of attorney general.<\/p>\n The New Wars<\/strong><\/p>\n We talk about a war on women. But a majority of college graduates are now female. Most fathers know that it is easier for their college-educated daughters to find good jobs than it is for their sons. When I advised graduating seniors about professional schools, it was common knowledge that the white male, A-student from Tulare was out of luck, in a way my Asian, black, Latino, or white women students were not. Stranger still was the notion of affirmative action musical chairs (as in don\u2019t dare leave your seat) \u2014 the white liberal guys that came up through the old-boy network were exempt from the ramifications of their own ideology.<\/p>\n If one truly believes in affirmative action, could not a white male, after, say, 20 years of tenure, step aside from a senior post to let someone of a different gender or race have a turn? Would that be to pay your fair share? Did you really build that professorship, that movie career, that law firm? Cannot a Chris Matthews at last call it quits and move over for those who did not have his contacts, power marriage, and insider pull? At some point in your life, haven\u2019t you accrued enough privilege?<\/p>\n We Are All Minorities Now<\/strong><\/p>\n Are there any minorities in California? In fact, everyone here is a minority. In my town, Latinos are the vast majority, as they are now in most San Joaquin Valley schools and colleges. Are they \u201coverrepresented\u201d here or at CSU Fresno? Should we have bussing to achieve proportional \u201cdiversity\u201d at the local grammar school two miles away that is 99% of one ethnic grouping?<\/p>\n Are Asians \u201coverrepresented\u201d at UC Berkeley \u2014 or are the 20% of the student body who are white males the ruling establishment? Are blacks \u201coverrepresented\u201d at the US Postal Service, but \u201cunderrepresented\u201d at the DMV? Such are the absurd questions that arise in a tribal society where one\u2019s primary allegiances are not to universal values or collective traditions and customs, but are first pledged to those who look most like oneself.<\/p>\n So many wars Barack Obama has waged \u2014 young women against anti-abortionist old white men, Latinos against nativist old white men, blacks against racist old white men, Asians against stereotyping old white men. But, President Obama, will there still be enough oppressors from such a fading group for so many victims? Old white men are also apparently at war with young white men. And bad, right-wing old white men are also at war with good, liberal old white men? And also at war with old white (but good) gay men?<\/p>\n Again, are there enough conservative old white men to go around anymore? If we lose half our oppressors by the nature of their gender, we are left with only 160 million or so suspect males. Then we must exempt another 30% as minority males (to the extent anyone is so easily stereotyped in an intermarried and integrated society).<\/p>\n Of the remaining 90 million potential oppressors, further subtract, say, forty percent who are exempt from the oppressor category due to their allegiance to liberal causes now epitomized by voting for Obama. That leaves only, say, 40 million.<\/p>\n Yet subtract another, say, 10 million for the good youth from the bad group, who may vote for a Republican now and then but nobly believe in climate change, gay marriage, abortion, and multiculturalism. Then there is another 3% for the even better gay adult males. We may now be down to the hard core of 20-30 million bad old white male problem-makers who need to \u201cget over it\u201d and give others \u201ctheir turn.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet are the 30 million straight, mature, politically incorrect white males enough to serve as the needed nativists, homophobes, polluters, misogynists, and racists, at least to justify the far greater number of millions of victims?<\/p>\n Remember that in\u00a0the new tribal America<\/a>[4], victims\u00a0de facto<\/em>\u00a0cannot double as oppressors. Latinos cannot be really biased against blacks. Blacks cannot be cruel to gays. Asians cannot treat women unjustly. Women cannot be biased against Latinos. The Rev. Joseph Lowery and Rev. Wright cannot be racist when they express hatred for those who do not look like themselves. We are told only that Mormons, not blacks, voted against gay marriage in California.<\/p>\n Who Is Who?<\/strong><\/p>\n Is the 20 year old who is one-quarter Mexican-American still a minority? And so, why is not the much-darker-to-the-eye, one-hundred percent Pakistani a victim \u2014 at least for purposes of affirmative action? The daughter of the Goldman Sachs financier counts as progress when she enrolls at Yale Law School, in a way that the Bakersfield son of the Oklahoma diaspora would not?<\/p>\n So hard, this collective search of ours for victimhood. Elizabeth Warren is the ultimate expression of our anguished dilemma: when her gender did not quite land her onto the Harvard Law faculty, her self-referenced high cheek bones did \u2014 and her further assumption that she is a victim by assertion that she is a victim. In Warren\u2019s case, we were to believe two things: she said she was liberal and Native American and \u2014 presto \u2014 she was; and second, therefore, all Native Americans are discriminated against and owed proper compensatory action \u2014 like being hired at Harvard in a manner her publications, or chance, or fate might otherwise not have ensured. I wager that those supposedly high cheek bones were worth five major scholarly books. Is she now the first Native-American woman in the Senate? If Ward Churchill said he was Native-American, he was, and he was deserving of special treatment. So was it blatant racial prejudice to fire him?<\/p>\n How surreal are all these Washington white talking heads pontificating on the black vote, the Latino bloc, and the Asian minority, as if their own gender (if female), politics (if liberal), or\u00a0mea culpa<\/em>\u00a0confessionals (if conservative white male) exempt them from the logic of their own tribalism. Do I exaggerate? Read this snippet from a celebratory column in the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u00a0from one Harold Meyerson about the new California Democratic congressional representatives:<\/p>\n