{"id":9383,"date":"2016-07-13T11:01:51","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T18:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9383"},"modified":"2016-07-13T11:01:51","modified_gmt":"2016-07-13T18:01:51","slug":"fundamentally-transformed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fundamentally-transformed\/","title":{"rendered":"Fundamentally Transformed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have we reached a point of no return? <\/span><\/p>\n

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n

M<\/span>ulticultural societies \u2014 from 19th-century Austria\u2013Hungary to contemporary Iraq, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda \u2014 have a poor record of keeping the peace between competing tribes. They usually end up mired in nihilistic and endemic violence.<\/p>\n

The only hope for history\u2019s rare multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious nations is to adopt a common culture, one that artificially suppresses the natural instinct of humans to identify first with their particular tribe. America, in the logical spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, was exceptional among modern societies in slowly evolving from its original, largely European immigrant population to a 21st-century assimilated, integrated, and intermarried multiracial society, in which religious and racial affiliations were incidental, not essential, to one\u2019s public character and identity.<\/p>\n

But such a bold experiment was always tenuous and against the cruel grain of history, in which the hard work of centuries could be easily torn apart by the brief demagoguery of the moment. Unfortunately, President Obama, ever since he first appeared on the national political scene in 2008, has systematically adopted a rhetoric and an agenda that is predicated on dividing up the country according to tribal grievances, in hopes of recalibrating various factions into a majority grievance culture. In large part, he has succeeded politically. But in doing so he has nearly torn the country apart. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that no other recent president has offered such a level of polarizing and divisive racial bombast.
\n<\/p>\n

Most recently, without citing any facts about the circumstances of the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana, Barack Obama castigated the police and the citizenry on their culpability for racial disparity and prejudicial violence. \u201c[T]hese fatal shootings are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal-justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.\u201d Obama did not yet know the race of the policemen involved (as in the case of Baltimore, the Minnesota shooting involved non-white officers), the circumstances that led to the shootings, or the backgrounds of either the officers or their victims.<\/p>\n

Shortly afterwards, twelve Dallas law-enforcement officers were shot, and five of them killed, by a black assassin who declared solidarity with Black Lives Matter and proclaimed his hatred for white law enforcement. That outbreak prompted Obama to take to the podium again to recalibrate his earlier message. This time he amplified his gun-control message, and somewhat delusionally added that the upswing in racial polarization did not imperil national unity \u2014 in much the same way that, in years past, he had announced that al-Qaeda was on the run, we were leaving behind a stable Iraq, and ISIS was a jayvee organization. Note the Obama editorial method in the case of police incidents, from Skip Gates to Louisiana and Minnesota: He typically speaks before he has the facts, and when subsequent information calls into question his talking points and theorizing, he never goes back and makes the corrections. Nor does he address facts \u2014 from Ferguson to Dallas \u2014 that do not fit his political agenda. Finally, a police shooting of an African-American suspect is never an \u201cisolated event,\u201d while the shooting of an officer by a black assassin is isolated and never really thematic of any larger racial pathology.<\/p>\n

We were introduced to Obama\u2019s idea of career enhancement through racial polarization during the 2008 political campaign. Obama had earlier, when he saw it as being to his advantage, emphasized to the Chicago Sun-Times<\/em> that as a devout Christian he dutifully attended Rev. Wright\u2019s church: \u201cYep. Every week. Eleven o\u2019clock service.\u201d Indeed, Wright offered inspiration to Obama with his trite \u201cAudacity of Hope\u201d refrain, which Obama borrowed for the title of his 2008 campaign booklet.<\/p>\n

Once Wright was exposed on video as an uncouth racist and anti-Semite, Obama made the necessary adjustments, as \u201cevery week\u201d transmogrified into spotty attendance that explained why Obama was shocked \u2014 in Casablanca<\/em> style \u2014 when his spiritual mentor was publicly exposed. In that era of Obamamania, most people shrugged that Obama surely never bought into Wright\u2019s racist and anti-American sermonizing, but simply put up with the venom spewed every week at Trinity United as a political investment, both establishing his radical street credentials and bolstering support among the members of Chicago\u2019s black churches.<\/p>\n

But there were plenty of markers in Obama\u2019s own turns of phrase to indicate that racial tranquility is not where we were headed: \u201cTypical white person\u201d and a litany of divisive campaign sloganeering followed (\u201cbring a gun to a knife fight\u201d and \u201cget in their faces,\u201d along with the stereotyping of the white working class of Pennsylvania, who had failed to appreciate Obama\u2019s singular brilliance in the state\u2019s Democratic primary).<\/p>\n

Nothing much changed when Obama entered the Oval Office (and why should it, when Obama won record majorities of minority voters in 2008 and would again in 2012?). Attorney General Eric Holder, who almost immediately dropped a likely successful voter-intimidation prosecution against the New Black Panther Party (a group to which the Dallas police assassin at one time claimed affinity), set the new tone of the Obama Justice Department by referring to African-Americans as \u201cmy people\u201d and deriding Americans in general as \u201ca nation of cowards.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPunish our enemies\u201d characterized Obama\u2019s approach to race and bloc voting. Each time an explosive racial confrontation appeared on the national scene, Obama \u2014 always in his accustomed academic intonations \u2014 did his best to exploit the issue. So the Skip Gates farce was leveraged into commentary about police stereotyping and profiling on a national level. The police officer in the Ferguson shooting was eventually exonerated by Obama\u2019s own Justice Department, but not before Obama had already exploited the shooting for political advantage, as part of a larger false narrative of out-of-control racist cops who recklessly shoot black suspects at inordinate rates to the population (rather than in the context of their national incidence of contact with police).<\/p>\n

It mattered nothing that the signature line of Ferguson, and the founding motto of Black Lives Matter \u2014 \u201cHands up, don\u2019t shoot\u201d \u2014 was exposed as a myth by Eric Holder\u2019s investigators. Right in the midst of the ongoing Trayvon Martin shooting trial, the president of the United States, in carrion fashion, weighed in by speculating whether the son he had never had would have looked like young Martin \u2014 not merely risking prejudicing the case (although the newly dubbed \u201cwhite Hispanic\u201d George Zimmerman was nevertheless exonerated by a jury of his peers), but reminding the country that our racial heritages are the basis of tribal resonance.<\/p>\n

Black Lives Matter was founded on a separatist and radical racialism. When an inept Bernie Sanders tried to suggest that \u201cAll lives matter,\u201d he was bullied into silence by activists who rushed the podium. \u201cPigs in a blanket, fry \u2019em like bacon\u201d became a Black Lives Matter marching slogan last summer in Minnesota \u2014 rhetoric amplifying the calls for \u201cDead Cops\u201d in an earlier New York City march that was in turn logically reified in Dallas by the assassin who \u201cdead copped\u201d white policemen.<\/p>\n

When Obama invited Black Lives Matter founders to the White House in February, he praised them by asserting that they were \u201cmuch better organizers\u201d than he had been at a comparable age, adding that he was \u201cconfident that they are going to take America to new heights.\u201d Prior Black Lives Matter marching death chants to police should have been known to Obama at the time.<\/p>\n

Every problem has a resolution \u2014 but often not a good one. In the case of widely publicized shootings of black suspects by police, regardless of the landscapes involved, police already have proven less likely to respond promptly to inner-city calls for help, rightly or wrongly convinced that they either will be shot at by assassins, or will be forced to use force to protect themselves in a manner that will end their careers, or will hesitate and pay a lethal price for losing deterrence. They likewise assume that their politically appointed high-profile superiors will not support them under media and political pressures, and that society at large has no stomach for a candid conversation \u2014 ranging from history to culture to public policy to economics \u2014 about the dilemma of young black males, who constitute about 3 to 4 percent of the general population, and are responsible for between 25 and 50 percent of some categories of violent crime.<\/p>\n

This spring Obama invited a series of rappers and activists to the White House, whose careers and rhetoric were often violent and divisive. Rapper Rick Ross \u2014 on bail pending trial on kidnapping and assault charges \u2014 had his ankle bracelet go off at a White House ceremony. Black Lives Matter and Ferguson activist Charles Wade abruptly declined his White House invitation, apparently because he had been recently arrested for pimping and human trafficking. Marquee rapper Kendrick Lamar\u2019s Pimp a Butterfly<\/em> album cover portrayed black men hoisting champagne bottles and displaying hundred-dollar bills on the White House lawn, in merriment over the corpse of a white judge with his eyes X\u2019d out. Reality mimicked art when Lamar (whose video sets include singing from a vandalized police car) was invited to the White House \u2014 or perhaps when five fatally shot policemen on the ground in Dallas superseded Lamar\u2019s image of a prone and eyeless dead judge. Obama, remember, has cited the police-hating Lamar (e.g., \u201cAnd we hate Popo, wanna kill us dead in the street for sure, nigga\u201d) as his favorite rapper and\u00a0the dead-judge album \u201cas best album of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the president has reminded us, words matter. So far in 2016 the shootings of police are up 44 percent over 2015. If celebrating the image of a murdered judge is no impediment to an Oval Office visit and\u00a0a presidential endorsement, why would the more reckless activists see any real social odium in escalating the hatred? What does one have to do to be disqualified from a White House visit or earn the president\u2019s disapproval? Be under indictment for a felony? Commercialize a picture of a judge\u2019s corpse? That more police may have been targeted in Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri following the Dallas carnage was the logical result of more than a year of contextualizing Black Lives Matter rhetoric and expressing pseudo-hip adulation of purveyors of anti-police and anti-judicial venom \u2014 but always from a safe distance. What does a Secret Service agent think when Lamar, who became a multimillionaire from lyrics like \u201cWe hate Popo,\u201d comes to visit the Oval Office?<\/p>\n

Obama predicates such no-consequences racial trafficking on four astute assumptions: First, he believes that promoting racial identity, and the more raw the better, is good politics \u2014 that it will solidify his new Democratic coalition, energizing grievances to ensure record turnout and bloc voting.<\/p>\n

Second, he assumes that most of America is still locked into an anachronistic 1960s dialectic of a white\/black binary in the context of continuing bitterness over the racism of Jim Crow \u2014 rather than the complex reality of a 21st-century society of multiple races and ethnicities, well into our sixth decade of affirmative action and racial compensation.<\/p>\n

Third, Obama assumes that his Ivy League metrosexual and teleprompted image, in wink-and-nod fashion, reassures white liberals that while he flirts with and manipulates the uncouth rhetoric and imagery that the cruder rappers or Rev. Wright routinely peddle, he could not possibly buy into their full progam.<\/p>\n

Fourth, Obama assumes that his own racial heritage exempts his sloppy rhetoric and actions from the sort of accountability that would doom a non-minority politician who had compiled a similar oeuvre of tolerating racial incendiarism.<\/p>\n

Yet when a society reaches a point at which the remedy \u2014 honest dialogue and debate \u2014 is considered worse than the disease \u2014 racial animosity \u2014 then chaos and disintegration are the prognoses.<\/p>\n

Up to now, the war zones in Chicago and Philadelphia and other inner cities that routinely experience abject killing each week have been largely ignored by progressives, given the nature of black-on-black violence in cities with strict gun-control laws, liberal governments, and ample social-welfare programs. Yet it may be that these recent shootings in Dallas and various other cities, rather than signaling a new dialogue, mark a strategy of exporting gun violence to purported white purveyors of racism. If that happens, then we are back to the 1960s \u2014 but worse. Read the online racist comments posted on any major news agency\u2019s accounts of a crime involving race to sense the polarization that has intensified since 2008.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, abroad, the world looks not just at the tearing apart of American society under Obama, but at that society\u2019s collective inability to even discuss the catalysts for either Islamic terrorism of the Orlando and San Bernardino sort, or the recent racial violence. When this is collated with seven years of failed reset with Russia, the Iranian deal, the rise of ISIS, the implosion of the Middle East, and the new belligerency in China and North Korea, we may be facing a final six months of a lame-duck presidency the likes of which have never been seen in modern political history.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Obama has been prescient after all about American sins and the need for apologizing, contextualization, and reset. A 21st-century society that celebrates separatism and violence and that pardons the venom of Black Lives Matter and its more extreme manifestations, or that exempts Hillary Clinton from all legal accountability, may simply not be able to exercise a position of world moral authority after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have we reached a point of no return? By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Multicultural societies \u2014 from 19th-century Austria\u2013Hungary to contemporary Iraq, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda \u2014 have a poor record of keeping the peace between competing tribes. They usually end up mired in nihilistic and endemic violence. The only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[225,59,92,383,46],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2rl","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9339,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/america-historys-exception\/","url_meta":{"origin":9383,"position":0},"title":"America: History\u2019s Exception","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 13, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"We should seek to preserve the ideals that made America successful. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online The history of nations is mostly characterized by ethnic and racial uniformity, not diversity. Most national boundaries reflected linguistic, religious, and ethnic homogeneity. Until the late 20th century, diversity was considered\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Europe"","block_context":{"text":"Europe","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10594,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/diversity-can-spell-trouble\/","url_meta":{"origin":9383,"position":1},"title":"Diversity Can Spell Trouble","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas America is experiencing a diversity and inclusion conundrum\u2014which, in historical terms, has not necessarily been a good thing. 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