Tuesday morning, Jeff Goldstein began firing-off a series of twenty-five Tweets that properly belong in a single blog post and are collectively [Ooo, that word] a brilliant dissection of Donald Trump’s using an appeal to Tribalism as attraction for support and the Left’s role in providing an atmosphere where such an appeal is welcome. For whatever reason, Jeff has not published his Tweets at Protein Wisdom. Therefore, I’m publishing them here, with his approval…
Again, while I strongly disagree with the faux-intellectual core of racial identitarianism, the reasons for its revival are often real [eg, Julian Castro’s HUD “mobility” initiative that claims authority to control racial demographics of wealthier neighborhoods thru Sec8].
In 1994 Clinton launched a trial program that in 2011 a HUD study showed didn’t help the relocated poor but instead led to [a] crime increase. Castro’s now nationalizing this program under [a] 1930s law never INTENDED to be used to socially engineer freely chosen settlement patterns. This is anti-Liberty, anti-American. And the inevitable increases in crime and tumult allow Racialist opportunists to rally resentment. Ironically, these same racialists don’t respond by demanding Liberty but instead by seeking their own dictator.
For instance, Trump declaring he’d punish companies for finding more profitable areas from which to operate is much the same impulse. Obama and the left use race and civil rights laws to undermine organic freedom of association. A Kennedy gave them legal cover.
When [Justice Anthony] Kennedy absurdly ruled that racism needn’t be conscious but rather can be judged on disparate income, which government can address he provided legal cover for leftist “mobilization” schemes. In reaction, white nationalists AND other identity political groups exploit the friction created by leftist social engineering schemes to create tribal narratives and protections many find appealing. The government’s overreach in short creates legitimate liberty and property concerns; and we shouldn’t ignore the legitimacy of those concerns. But the answer isn’t racial tribalism and a move to protectionism and civil Balkanization; rather a demand for Liberty and government withdrawal.
In 2007 I wrote that Obama would set race relations back 50 years. And that’s because big government leftists use race as a vehicle to justify redistributionist schemes while using the cover of civil rights law never intended to give them such power.
You can hardly blame people being forcibly told by government that where they live and with whom they settle is not their choice for noticing. But while it’s easy to notice [—] federal government leftist programs seem increasingly aimed at demonizing whites [—] the pushback in [the] form of so-called “racial realism” is just [a] flip-side of the same coin: it’s anti-Liberty, rejects individualism for group identity narratives. Other countries have been coaxed into blaming “racial” scapegoats for inevitable failures of big government leftism/social engineering.
Trump has tapped into a real and deserved angst among many whites. But he’s legitimating their precisely wrong responses to the problems.
The answer is Liberty, less government, more opportunity, a less-aggressive regulatory burden, and an end to racial and ethnic cronyism.
Instead, the left has conned what should be natural conservatives into fighting leftist tribalism with leftist tribalism. Trump stokes that. Trump’s populism is grounded in racial tribalism that is being opportunistically exploited as a corrective to leftist overreach. It isn’t. It’s the left’s version of Helter Skelter. Big govt has become the mainstreamed Manson Family. It divides us, pits us against each other, then sends in strongmen promising hope and change to further constrain our liberties.
Fuck that.
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