Forbes magazine has now “fact-checked” Dinesh D’Souza’s infamous September 27 cover story, “How Obama Thinks,” and has uncovered one “slight” misrepresentation, it says, of an Obama speech on the BP oil spill. Such a “fact-checking” feint is irrelevant to this travesty of an article; you can’t “fact-check” a fever dream of paranoia and irrationality. Sickeningly, while “How Obama Thinks” is useless as a guide to the Obama presidency, it is all too representative of the hysteria that now runs through a significant portion of the right-wing media establishment. The article is worth analyzing at some length as an example of the lunacy that is poisoning much conservative discourse.
D’Souza argues that Obama’s policies are motivated by a hatred towards American power absorbed from his Kenyan father. He offers exactly zero evidence for his hackneyed psychological theory. But the most laughable weakness in D’Souza’s thesis is the fact that the policies which D’Souza presents as the “dreams of a Luo tribesman” have a decades-long American pedigree and are embraced by wide swathes of the American electorate and political class. If support for progressive taxation, greater government regulation of health care, stimulus spending, and conservation make one the tool of the African anticolonial movement, then Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, John Kenneth Galbraith, FDR, and the Sierra Club are all Third World agents provocateurs.
D’Souza attributes Obama’s tax policies, for example, to his anticolonialism pact with his dead father:
If Obama shares his father’s anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn’t really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just.
Never mind that Washington Democrats and pundits have been calling for the rich to finally pay their “fair share” long before Obama came on the scene. Suddenly, soaking the rich is a black African import—at least when a black president embraces the program.
Obamacare is likewise an outcropping of a filial crusade to vindicate a deceased African progenitor, in D’Souza’s view:
Obama seeks to decolonize [the health sector], and this means bringing [it] under the government’s leash. . . . For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.
(D’Souza tries to make a fine distinction here between “socializing” the health sector, which he says that Obama forswears, and “decolonizing” it. I have no idea what he is talking about.)
Barney Frank and John Conyers regularly railed against the greedy insurance companies during the health care debate. D’Souza would quite possibly see in Conyers’ denunciations another African relic, but what about Barney Frank? A mandate for universal coverage is the necessary flip-side to the ban on excluding pre-existing conditions—a widely embraced goal of conventional health care reform; it has nothing to do with a “decolonizing” mission, whatever that means. Moreover, liberals denounced Obama for his distance from the health care debate, yet somehow the final results are the product of a Kenyan mindset.
D’Souza’s twisted hermeneutics are unending. After the BP oil spill, Obama railed against America’s disproportionate consumption of oil and its “century-long addiction to fossil fuels.” Where have I heard those criticisms before? Just about from every Democratic politician and a large number of Republicans as well. D’Souza finds it part of Obama’s “strange behavior,” however, that he would denounce America’s oil appetite after the oil spill, a gesture that has a patent political, as well as a not implausible substantive, logic.
In fact, there is not a single policy that Obama has pursued since taking office that does not grow out of the American tradition of left-wing liberalism or more immediately out of the Bush Administration, the latter including bailouts of Detroit and Wall Street, drone strikes in Pakistan, continuation of the doomed Freedom Agenda in Afghanistan, and invocations of the state secrets act to protect anti-terror actions from judicial scrutiny.
But D’Souza is determined to present Obama as an alien within the body politic. He opens his article with an anaphoric refrain of strangeness and foreignness:
The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. . . . More strange behavior . . . The oddities go on and on . . . Obama’s foreign policy is no less strange.
The only thing strange here is D’Souza’s interpretation of Obama’s standard-issue liberalism as a scary foreign import.
So what is D’Souza’s evidence for the Africanization of American politics? The best he can come up with are statements in Obama’s autobiography about his effort to emotionally connect with the deceased father he saw only once at age 10, after having been abandoned by the man at age two.
The climax of Obama’s narrative, [writes D’Souza], is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave. It is riveting: “When my tears were finally spent,” he writes, “I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America–the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago–all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”
Though conservatives are supposed to believe in family values, even in less-than-ideal circumstances, D’Souza dismisses this moment of imaginative reconciliation as merely the declaration of a political program. Leaving aside for the moment the absence of any factual basis for his theory of paternal political influence, D’Souza’s disparagement of Obama, Sr., after the son’s gesture of forgiveness, comes off as jarring and tasteless:
Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.
Obama’s effort in his autobiography to tie together the disparate elements of his life—to connect his “life in America” with an absent father–is dictated as much by literary convention as by felt experience. It is the sum total, however, of D’Souza’s textual support for his bizarre thesis. Undaunted, D’Souza goes on a rampage of confident mind-reading:
From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America.
One would think that D’Souza could provide some textual support for these claims regarding Obama’s worldview, leaving aside their alleged provenance in mid-century Kenya. He does not. Instead, he has the gall to present the absence of evidence as evidence. D’Souza’s main source for Obama, Sr.’s anticolonial thinking is a 1965 article in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” in which, according to D’Souza, Obama, Sr., called for state ownership of private land. D’Souza presents no evidence that Obama, Jr., even read the article or was influenced by it. For D’Souza, this absence of a mention is a smoking gun:
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father’s history very well, has never mentioned his father’s article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
With such a historical technique, there is nothing that D’Souza can’t prove. Obama, Jr., also has never mentioned the royalist philosopher Joseph de Maistre’s 1798 anti-Protestant essay, “Reflections on Protestantism in its Relation to Sovereignty.” Does that mean that Obama, Jr., seeks to shore up the power of the Catholic Church against the assault of atheistic Protestantism?
D’Souza soon reaches a climax of pop psychoanalyzing:
Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. [Source, please?] Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright.
Besides such unmoored speculations, D’Souza also traffics in claims that are patently contradicted by the facts. His use of 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a plank in his Obama-the-anticolonialist-crusader thesis is particularly confusing. He writes:
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. . . . 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maybe so, but Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan, so how are his policies there anticolonial?
Any pretense of logic regarding 9/11 then breaks down completely:
Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan.
If 9/11 pushed America into a war that Obama is voluntarily prosecuting, how does supporting the Ground Zero mosque relate to that fact? New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg is a far more vocal proponent of the Ground Zero mosque than Obama; does that make him an anticolonialist, too?
Even if it were the case that Obama embraces the standard liberal playbook for reasons of personal history—a position for which D’Souza has provided no evidence—so what? If Obama were not president, millions of people would still support the policies of his presidency under a different Democratic leader, as they have been doing for decades.
Some critics of the idiotic pseudo-theory of language known as deconstruction used a similarly baseless tactic when literary theorist Paul DeMan’s youthful contributions to a collaborationist Belgian journal were discovered. “You see!” the critics brayed. “Deconstruction is part of the Nazi project.” This opportunistic argument overlooked the fact that a range of people whose backgrounds bore no resemblance to DeMan’s, such as Jacques Derrida, had contributed to the development of deconstruction, which could be discredited on its face, without any psychological overlay.
Liberals engage in their own armchair psychologizing, of course. All the more reason for conservatives to forswear the tactic. But D’Souza’s screed is just the latest manifestation of the rebirth of the conservative hysteria that marked the Clinton era. The fact that both Clinton and Obama’s critics became obsessed with the person rather than his policies suggests that those critics have no faith in the public’s ability to grapple with abstract issues, rather than alleged personal failings. The shrillness of the hysteria around the last two Democratic presidents also suggests a conservative sense of entitlement towards holding power.
David Frum has eloquently blasted Newt Gingrich for embracing D’Souza’s “How Obama Thinks,” which Frum calls a “brazen outburst of race-baiting.” Unfortunately, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who have also endorsed D’Souza’s Forbes ravings, have far more influence than Gingrich. When the book on which the Forbes article was based comes out on October 4, we can expect a blitz on the conservative media. Perhaps The Roots of Obama’s Rage will provide the arguments so sorely lacking in D’Souza’s article. If it does not, Regnery Publishing comes out of this episode far more discredited than Forbes. And any talk show host who gives D’Souza a platform will be further poisoning American political discourse. I would also hope that King’s College, a Christian school in New York City, is having buyer’s remorse about making D’Souza its president.
Political hatred and fear should be summoned forth only under the most exigent of circumstances. D’Souza has failed completely to make the case for unleashing his incendiary brand of irrationality.
I wouldn’t dismiss the thought of a 60s anti-neocolonialism influence on Obama, but the lion’s share more likely either came from his loopy mother, who–in his somewhat fictional autobiography–lashes out at her poor second husband when he says Americans are her people, or Reverend Crazypants Wright.
As far as pop himself goes, he turns out to be something of a disappointment to the author, and he’s rarely presented in a positive light.
D’Souza had so thoroughly discredited himself in his earlier apologia for Islamic hatred of the West that I guess he figured he had nothing to lose by going batshit crazy on Obama.
Turns out he was right, and then some. Intellectual negligence and dishonesty is now so rampant on the Right, it is no longer possible to distinguish it from the Left on these grounds (present company excepted, of course). “No enemies to the right” has now been extended to cover almost any form of craziness–the ends justifies the means, apparently.
My disgust with the American right is pretty much boundless at this point. The on-going integration of religion–most often of the most loony variants–with politics is no longer tolerable to me, I’m afraid.
Someone should psychoanalyze D’Souza. He was born in India, after all. It his neo-religious view of evolution.
Note that when I write nonense, I acknowledge that is, in fact, nonsense.
Do realize that D’Souza had the crazy notion that the Christian right should seek alliance with the Muslims in order to help purge Western society of “decadent” influences. I don’t think D’Souza is playing with a full deck.
I don’t think D’Souza understands the extent to which “(Judeo-)Christian” and “Traditional” are the updated code words for “State’s Rights.”
It mostly means “I want the 50s back.”
“…Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, John Kenneth Galbraith, FDR, and the Sierra Club are all Third World agents provocateurs.”
Aha! I knew it!
Obama strikes me as a fairly straightforward Chicago corporatist with, as you say, a liberal left political pedigree.
I have thought D’Souza was off-the-planet ever since he proposed his “Abrahamic alliance”. This is just further evidence.
The American Right’s attempt to turn itself into a mirror-image of the worst aspects of the Left is sad and dangerous.
“My disgust with the American right is pretty much boundless at this point”
“There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it”
Niven’s Law (Larry Niven)
The American right is not immune to Niven’s Law.
As for the integration of religion with politics, when was it ever separate?
I once heard part of D’Souza’s defense of Christianity on either Prager or Hewitt. It was, at the intellectual lynchpin of argument, all rust and no iron. It seems wishing makes things so.
Well, the right is a little off but Obama is no one to talk highly about. People knew him years ago at Occidential College and he is the typical lefty. His father according to Steve Sailer did dislike the States. Anway, Obama’s best teachers are Sal Ailisky and Rev Wright, people that certainly anyone on the right whether secular or not certainly have there flaws. Sal the old style socialist and union organizer. Obama lives in an age where the left can’t nationalized everything but tried to heavy regulate it or redsitrbutive the wealth. Obama is an incomptent bureacratic. Personality, I don’t see why upper-middle class whites are attractive to him just because he acts like a college professor and is half-white. Obama makes Justinian and Phillip the second, also big buercracitcs look comptent. And to Heather who supports doing something on illegal immirgation, Obama is just as bad as Bush on this issue. Obama wants the Brown Cacus support whether it hurts poor blacks in the market place. Obama is a half black verison of Jimmy Carter and LBJ.
If anyone would like to read an intelligent exploration of some of the issues that D’Souza addresses in his book, I strongly recommend Steve Sailer’s AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE.
Steve Sailer is no doubt intelligent. He is also more race-obsessed than Al Sharton and Jesse Jackson combined. I’ll pass.
Eliminating race-obsessives from my life is one of my goals. I find myself much happier that way.
Mark,
Since Obama is obsessed with race (cf the full title of his magnum opus, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE), wouldn’t Sailer’s alleged “racial obsession” function as a plus? Ignoring Obama’s feverish concern for his racial identity is a bit like writing a study of T. S. Eliot while ignoring the fact that he was born in America. Some things can’t be ignored.
“Since Obama is obsessed with race…”
He is? I’d say his critics are the obsessives in regards to his race.
I think we need to consider the source. D’Souza is descended from Portuguese immigrants to India, who were never fully accepted in their new homeland. D’Souza’s father responded to the social pressures by becoming an abusive drunk. Dinesh D’Souza has never been able to replace the fatherly love of which he was deprived. Is it any wonder that D’Souza indulges in mad ravings about those whom he sees as interlopers in his new adopted country?
(See? Writing idiotic crap is easy. Where’s my check from Forbes?)
OK, I have just been convinced that I should bookmark this site.
Loved your take down of one of the most thoroughly revolting minds today. But after finally reading D’Souza’s Forbes article, instead of just the reviews of it, I think the joke is probably on us.
I don’t think it’s about Obama at all. It’s about inventing psycho-babble about Obama and his Kenyan father in order to discredit their real target, whcih is what the publishers of Forbes consider to be an anti-business agenda.
Remember, D’Souza is the guy whose twisted but gifted mind could imagine a Grand Alliance between Islamic and Christian Fundamentalists across the globe, and where the war on terror and the culture war were different theaters of the same conflict. My guess is that the editors at Forbes gave D’Souza space on their cover for his weird neo-colonialist assault on Obama because they knew his piece wasn’t about Obama at all, not really, but was a preemptive strike on a liberal economic reform agenda their business readers didn’t want.
“He offers exactly zero evidence for his hackneyed psychological theory.”
He doesn’t need to. He sets forth his hackneyed psychological theory, then he and the people who agree with him say “YOU offer US the evidence that this theory is wrong.”
This evidence, of course, must be strong enough to convince D’Souza, who stands to make a lot of money and get a lot of exposure from this book, that he himself is wrong. Which is to say, the evidence will never be strong enough.
I think D”Souza’s excuse will eventually be that he was writing “metaphorically”, and we’re all taking him too literally. After all, the only other explanation is that he is batshit insane.
In his defense, I would say that he probably sees mainstream Liberal Democrats like Barney Frank as dangerous radicals not far removed from “Anticolonialists” with Kenyan roots.
As a matter of fact, weren’t our Founding Fathers “Anticolonialists” at heart? Jefferson had intimate relations with Sally Hemmings, doesn’t that make him suspect in this mad way of looking at things?
He is?
As the commenter you’re responding to pointed out, the guy centered his whole autobiography on finding himself in explicit racial terms. His breakthrough comes in the middle of one of Wright’s racialist stemwinders. He then spent the next 20 years in that same church and married a woman who started out life with an unreadable essay complaining about black Princeton grads forgetting to act black. She was then given a job disbursing diversity ill-gotten diversity shakedown funds.
Obama’s critics may be race-obsessed, too, but that doesn’t negate his original obsession.
Gold Star for Robot Boy,
Yes, Obama is obsessed with race. If you doubt me, read his memoirs. Try counting the sheer number of times that race comes up. The entire book is about Obama’s single mined focus on his racial identity.
As for Obama’s critics being racially obsessed, bear in mind that many of Obama’s supporters are equally racially obsessed.
I’m sure Obama is responsible for every mess that the republican party has put our country in, from the economy to the most recent BP oil spill debacle. He’s probable responsible for animal litigants entering the fray too: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/2010/09/23/should-animals-be-able-to-sue-bp-or-anyone/ (put the wrong link earlier, sorry).
D’Souza is descended from Portuguese immigrants to India, who were never fully accepted in their new homeland.
You sure? I thought DD himself had said that his Hindu ancestors converted to escape the caste system. D’Souza is a fairly darkly-complected Indian, implying his family’s caste had been low. A lot of intelligent, dark Indians are Christians today whose families converted.
If this is true, I can sympathize with his love of Christianity as being at least a big improvement over Hinduism. One of the few good things about religion is that it provides an alternative social structure for people excluded or downtrodden by the mainstream, like the Civil Rights movement being organized largely in black churches, or the election of a Polish Pope providing a focal point to upset European communism.
That should be “single minded,” not “single mined.” Damn typos.
Of course, in Obama’s defense, his racial obsession has been very, very good to him. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to imagine him getting to the presidency without the aid of his ability to exploit his racial background and anxieties to maximum advantage.
RandyB: I have no idea. The point is that anyone can make things up, and we could just as well make them up about D’Souza.
D’Souza is certainly a Portuguese name, though, and many Indian people with that name are descended from Portuguese colonists. Were I Dinesh, that would be all I would need to make up a psychological analysis of the man.
Excellent article- Appreciated. I long for the days when left and right could talk about policy: now it’s just so much hatred.
Hey Polichinello,
I’m sure you know how it’s like to grow up black in America. Or better yet, grow up half-black and half-white when every white person will always refer to you as black. Plus, you’re growing up in a time when less than 10 yrs prior people were being lynched and half-blacks were especially targeted. I know it’s really hard for hard right wingers to put themselves in other peoples shoes.
Maybe you should sit and read Michelle Obama’s with a dictionary next to you. Then maybe you would understand and be able to read it. Leave it to a racist to identify a racist. I love how all of these supposed race blind folks throw out racially tinged comments. Ill-gotten shakedown funds? That’s right, I forgot. No black folks have ever been discriminated against, they’re just lazy.
Trajan, are you aware that Democrats usually garner between 88%-92% of the African American vote? Al Gore won 90% of that voting block, so why do people continue to use this talking point that President Obama’s black supporters support him simply because he is black? I’ve never heard a white man accused of the same for voting for Clinton or Bush.
trajan23 · September 28, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Gold Star for Robot Boy,
Yes, Obama is obsessed with race. If you doubt me, read his memoirs. Try counting the sheer number of times that race comes up. The entire book is about Obama’s single mined focus on his racial identity.
As for Obama’s critics being racially obsessed, bear in mind that many of Obama’s supporters are equally racially obsessed.
So thoroughly clear that the folks posting here who are calling President Obama race-obsessed are woefully uninformed on the challenges of identity formation for biracial people in this country — particularly of President Obama’s age cohort. Interracial relationships were extremely rare for his parents’ generation (only 6% of American married couples TODAY are interracial), and having biracial children was even more so. There is this thing in American history called the one-drop rule that made anyone of any partial African descent automatically considered black. Centuries ago it was encased in certain state’s laws; now it’s more of an informal cultural and societal “rule” that’s been passed down through the generations since those laws were in effect. Considering yourself just plain black, when you are indeed biracial, is probably easier to do when you are raised by the black side of your family. But President Obama was not, never really knew his father or the other Africans in his family, and so therefore his self-identification as black had to be learned. That’s the point of the book. It takes a lot to come around to that point of understanding about oneself when there is so much ambiguity involved and so few other examples to refer to. Perhaps the commentators here have less ambiguous racial identities that they have just taken for granted, because they are considered the norm in our society. Good for you. But you might try stepping outside of your own experience, and considering how you would grapple with growing up one of a very rare group of people within a society so stratified by race at the time, and incidentally looks like it still is in many ways — based on the retarded commentary by the likes of D’Souza and his other “race-obsessed” ilk.
Appreciated. I long for the days when left and right could talk about policy: now it’s just so much hatred.
You mean the days when Buckley and Vidal were calling each other queers and nazis? Yeah, great times.
Excellent critique! I can’t help but wonder though, in all the discussion of D’Souza’s article, how it is no one has defended the concept of “anticolonialism.” If there WAS an anticolonial streak in Obama – well, wouldn’t it reflect well on him? Or do conservative commentators explicitly endorse the idea that rich countries should rule poorer ones?
note to regular readers: this post has gotten some non-trivial link love. so the tone of the discussion will “change”, as these are going to be “drive by” comments from ppl not interested in long term discussion. i will let it go for a bit because of its special nature, but just keep that in mind when you feel you have to respond to every inanity.
Solipsism:
Trajan, are you aware that Democrats usually garner between 88%-92% of the African American vote?: Yes, I am aware of that fact. Everyone is aware of that fact.Blacks vote as a bloc.
Al Gore won 90% of that voting block, so why do people continue to use this talking point that President Obama’s black supporters support him simply because he is black?: I don’t recall singling out Obama’s Black supporters. I was referring to his White liberal supporters.Obama can, in a race against a non-Black opponent, take the Black vote for granted.What separates Obama from, say, Jesse Jackson, is his ability to appeal to the White liberal voter.
I’ve never heard a white man accused of the same for voting for Clinton or Bush.:You haven’t ?Liberal commentators frequently speak of the support that Republicans get from White males as a de facto racial anxiety vote.
Thanks for the heads up, David Hume. I thought that some of the comments were getting a bit heavy on the “I took Race Theory in college” side for a site that calls itself SECULAR RIGHT.
Okay, I’m going to go there: I’m gay and my gaydar goes OFF THE CHARTS when I see D’Souza on any appearance. He is so obviously, to me, just another self-hater closet case who’d rather engage in pop-psychoanalysis of others than take a good look at himself.
D’Souza is a Portugese name, but it doesn’t imply any Potugese ancestry. The Portugese converted their subjects to Catholicism and changed family names. D’Souza, Demillo, and DaSilva, and their variants, are very common names in India. I really don’t get why Obama’s racial obsession or his critics racial obsession matters. He strikes me as an inept politician with liberal leanings. No different than any other Democrat who would have likely won in 2008.
Usually don’t bother to voice my opinion much less respond to someone else’s comment. But this, upthread, was too much: “Obama is a half black verison [sic] of Jimmy Carter and LBJ.” Think of LBJ signing Civil Rights legislation and Medicare. And Jimmy Carter, a strong voice for human rights, warning about dependence on Middle East oil…
“I thought DD himself had said that his Hindu ancestors converted to escape the caste system. D’Souza is a fairly darkly-complected Indian, implying his family’s caste had been low. A lot of intelligent, dark Indians are Christians today whose families converted.”
First of all, there are dark complexioned upper-catse indians. Caste in India has to do with your ancestral occupation more not the color of your skin.
DD has a Portuguese second name, most of the Goanese Christians are products of Portuguese colonization, nothing to do with caste system. Portuguese, unlike the British, were very aggressive ‘converters’.
I think DD was mostly analyzing himself and his ancestry in the article not Obama. He is a classic example of self-hating person. He digs white women hates his people. Not sure what is with some of these Indian-Americans, they all seem to be pretty self-loathing, ( Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, DD) and I thought self-loathing is a liberal desease.
trajan, comments like yours reveal something that has long-troubled me about modern-day conservatism — particularly white conservatism.
“What separates Obama from, say, Jesse Jackson, is his ability to appeal to the White liberal voter.”
With all due respect, trajan, am I genuinely missing something here? Are you seriously suggesting that a political match between Jackson and Obama would result in a tie if the electorate were all-black? Because anybody who seriously believes that has a severely limited insight into Black America.
Not every move “Black America” makes is “racial”. It’s a shame that one would feel compelled to say that to a thoughtful person, but, apparently, it really needs to be said. Far too many white conservatives, in my view, think African-Americans are constantly “thinking racially”. But frankly, that’s just not true.
And witness the irony: Many white conservatives take MAJOR offense when someone accuses THEM, with little or no proof, of being racially motivated. But they’ll almost reflexively engage in the EXACT same behavior and not even see the hypocrisy. It’s quite bizarre.
For the record, I don’t blame any innocent person of any hue for taking offense at the charge of racism. I happen to be a black man who gets extremely irritated when someone suggests that my vote for Obama was racially motivated (even though it was NOT — PERIOD). But unfortunately, in the minds of too many white conservatives (I’ll submit Dr. Schlesinger as one prominent example) it’s a self-evident truth that a black vote for Obama is/was racially motivated.
Again, the irony: When we observe, say, a Pat Buchanan (someone I generally admire) or a Steven Sailor (someone I find relatively interesting), and many of their supporters, we will inevitably discover a disturbing number of real, verifiable white racialists and racialist sympathizers. This is a fact that NOBODY can dispute! But if I dare point this out to a group of white conservatives, they’ll focus more on MY presumed racial motivations and totally ignore their dubious ties.
Bottom line, conservatives MUST stop glossing over their own racial issues if they care the integrity of their movement. I say that as someone who used to proudly carry the label “conservative”. I applaud Ms. MacDonald, David Frum and others, for showing some guts. More, please.
Not sure what is with some of these Indian-Americans, they all seem to be pretty self-loathing, ( Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, DD) and I thought self-loathing is a liberal desease.
have you ever heard of two wrongs don’t make a right?
“The shrillness of the hysteria around the last two Democratic presidents also suggests a conservative sense of entitlement towards holding power” I believe you are correct in this statement.
net observer:
“With all due respect, trajan, am I genuinely missing something here? Are you seriously suggesting that a political match between Jackson and Obama would result in a tie if the electorate were all-black? Because anybody who seriously believes that has a severely limited insight into Black America.”: Actually, no. In a Black majority electorate, Jackson would probably beat Obama quite easily. After all, Bobby Rush trounced Obama.
As for Black voters not voting as a bloc for Black candidates when they are running against White opponents, I suggest that you study the Democratic presidential primaries for 2008.Do you think that Black Democratic primary voters decided to cast their votes for Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton because of the issues?
D’Souza is a tool if there ever was one on the Right.
It is pretty obvious that there’s a solid core of post-colonialism in Obama’s thinking. It just has relatively little to do with his dad compared to the fact that he is a university-educated left-wing American. I bet a large number of his aides and political appointees share such sentiments.
There is a major difference between that kind of post-colonialism and simply being against the idea of colonies. You can practically sum up the former with Susan Sontag’s famous quote of the white race being the cancer of human history. Ms. Sontag was pretty damn white so it’s obviously not an idea uniquely circulating around kids of African fathers. It’s rather a staple of white guilt leftism.
Obama is dangerous but not because he’s half-Kenyan, he’s dangerous because he’s a liberal academic with all the biases, prejudices, likes and dislikes that come with that.
Thanks for this piece.
Sharp, as always 🙂
Actually, I think the 2008 Democratic primaries support my position more than yours, trajan.
I distinctly remember how long it took for Obama to catch on with Black Democrats. Like how Travis Smiley’s yearly “State of Black America” conference was rife with skeptical panelists. I also recall the SC Dem primary when Obama received 78% of the black vote, and I remember thinking, “Who are the 22% voting for Clinton?” After all, if blacks were, as you’re suggesting, voting based on race, why weren’t those numbers closer to 100%?
And it goes without saying that virtually any Black GOP-er would be hard-pressed to get the lion’s share of the black vote, even if his Democratic opponent were the “whitest” of white.
So rajan, thanks for confirming several of my points in one fell swoop.
Sorry Trajan23 you once again miss the mark. Obama lost to Bobby Rush because he was a newcomer to the Chicago political scene and thus was beaten by the incumbent. No surprise there. Now he is the most popular person on the planet and would easily beat Jesse Jackson in a hypothetical matchup. It is quote interesting that you are telling a Black man about his own community as if you are an expert. Your last post defintely disqualifies you as such. On the same vein, how many Black people do you think have voted for white candidates? How many candidates of color have white conservatives voted for? I’m betting the majority of Black people in one election vote for more white candidates than the average white conservative voter in their entire lifetime. 90% of white voters in Alamaba and Mississippi voted for McCain. Surprise? Not really.
net observer:
“I distinctly remember how long it took for Obama to catch on with Black Democrats. Like how Travis Smiley’s yearly “State of Black America” conference was rife with skeptical panelists.”:The Black Democratic establishment was skeptical that Obama would be able to get enough White votes to win the Party’s nomination, let alone the presidency.At the time, many of them thought that he would be another Jesse Jackson, polling well only in heavily Black districts.
“I also recall the SC Dem primary when Obama received 78% of the black vote, and I remember thinking, “Who are the 22% voting for Clinton?””:I thought that your point was that blacks do not vote as a racial bloc for Black candidates?Considering your argument, why were you surprised that Clinton got only 22% of the Black vote? As a side point, the sources that I have consulted give Clinton 19% of the Black vote, not 22%.
“After all, if blacks were, as you’re suggesting, voting based on race, why weren’t those numbers closer to 100%?”: Because one can never expect 100% of any population to do anything. Furthermore, the fact that Hillary Clinton could only get 19% of the Black vote in South Carolina illustrates my point. Running against a Black candidate, Hillary Clinton, the wife of a man who was called “America’s first Black president,”overwhelmingly lost the Black vote.
“And it goes without saying that virtually any Black GOP-er would be hard-pressed to get the lion’s share of the black vote, even if his Democratic opponent were the “whitest” of white.”: Black Republicans are viewed with tremendous suspicion and disdain by their fellow Blacks.For example,I recall hearing many of my Black classmates at Berkeley sneering at Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell as sellouts. Saying that Blacks would not vote for someone whom they see as a racial traitor does not exactly support your arguments.
Why is anti-colonialism a bad thing? Weren’t the founding fathers anti-colonialists?
PilotX:
“Obama lost to Bobby Rush because he was a newcomer to the Chicago political scene and thus was beaten by the incumbent. No surprise there.” Actually, Obama’s perceived lack of racial authenticity was a key theme in Rush’s campaign.As David Remnick notes:”Rush did not hesitate to mock Obama as inauthentic—and, by inference, insufficiently black. “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” Rush told the Chicago Reader during the campaign. “Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it.” State Senator Donne Trotter, who was also vying for Rush’s seat, told the same reporter that “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community. You have only to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It’s these individuals in Hyde Park, who don’t always have the best interest of the community in mind.” Rush’s tactics were brutal, and they were effective: Obama lost the primary by thirty points.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all#ixzz10tUx02HE
“Now he is the most popular person on the planet and would easily beat Jesse Jackson in a hypothetical matchup.”I see that your hypothetical begins with Obama already in the White House.
“It is quote interesting that you are telling a Black man about his own community as if you are an expert. Your last post defintely disqualifies you as such.” Really?
“On the same vein, how many Black people do you think have voted for white candidates?” And how is this germane to what I said?
“How many candidates of color have white conservatives voted for?” As the majority of “candidates of color” are liberal Democrats, very few.
“I’m betting the majority of Black people in one election vote for more white candidates than the average white conservative voter in their entire lifetime.” Since Blacks are usually forced to choose between a White Democrat and a White Republican, you are doubtless correct.Still not sure how this is pertinent, however.
“90% of white voters in Alamaba [sic] and Mississippi voted for McCain. Surprise? Not really.”I agree, not surprising. Again, still not sure how this is pertinent. However, since you seem to want to play around with racial statistics: Obama carried 43% of the White vote, to McCain’s 55%. For the black vote, the figures was 96% for Obama. As a mental experiment, which figure more closely resembles racial bloc voting?
Sorry, that should read “the figure was,” not “the figures was.” Damn typos.