“People of color and the poor.” “Stop the Steal!” What do these really mean?
Is There a Link Between Them?
How many times per day in America do we hear this or that “disproportionately affects people of color and the poor”? Air and water pollution, Covid-19, manmade global warming all disproportionately affect people of color and the poor. How can a worldwide calamity that’s wrecking planetwide ecosystems affect this demographic more than others? Obviously, some “people of color and the poor” are disproportionately affected by any calamity. But if this phrase is condensed into what it really means, this has been the case since the beginning of time, which is not to discount its importance. So, what’s it really mean? And is there a connection between “people of color and the poor” and “Stop the Steal!”? Implications of the former seem minor compared to those of the latter, but maybe not.
Does pollution or Covid or global warming affect Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan or the Obamas disproportionately? These people of color are doing well. Could that be because they’re rich? Aren’t rich people of color less affected by disaster than poor people of color? Maybe “people of color” really means “poor people of color.”
What about “the poor”? If “people of color” really means “poor people of color,” does “the poor” mean “poor people not of color”? More directly, “poor white people”? Surely poor white people are harmed by calamity more than rich white people.
It looks like “people of color and the poor” really means “poor people of color and poor white people.” So, why do we never hear this?
Perhaps there are a number of reasons. Why enunciate “poor white people” as victims when political correctness prefers the emphasis of “people of color”? After all, much of the victimization of people of color comes from white people, so to include white people as victims dilutes the norms of political correctness. Who wants to share sympathy with perpetrators? As mathematician Bertrand Russel noted of “the superior virtue of the oppressed,” there are special considerations that come with being a victim, real or imagined. Real victims get the attention they deserve, so correctives can be implemented. For imaginary victims, there’s a gravy train to run.
Or maybe it’s just a little clumsy to say those extra words — three of them — in a sound-bite society that cannot tolerate being forced to process extra syllables.
Then why not truncate “people of color and the poor” to what it really means: “poor people.”
From six words to two. Why don’t PBS, NPR, MSNBC, and liberals everywhere say this? Could the reason be more nefarious? Could it be that liberals are as racist as conservatives but in reverse?
Broad-brush questions like this beg for broad-brush answers that don’t apply to every member of either tribe, but they apply to some. Compare the attitudes of two groups that couldn’t appear more different: white supremacists and university administrators. In California, Proposition 209 banned race quotas in 1996, yet California university admissions continue to violate the law despite repeated proof that admittance of underqualified students makes those students less likely to succeed, failing board certifications, failing the bar, unqualified for their careers once administrators satisfied their self-serving bigotry to appear inclusive. A solution Allan Bloom termed in his Closing of the American Mind, “the corner that white impresarios painted themselves into.” Within their respective tribes, are white supremacists and university administrators of admission racist? In spades. Bigots? For sure.
But the Left engages in a softer form of racism and bigotry than what we see on the New Right — for now, and this is substantiated by the Department of Justice. It’s been a while since the leftist Symbionese Liberation Army murdered civilians and police in 1970s America. Although student assaults against professors are rising, as exemplified by Middlebury College students who provided one a concussion for allowing a conservative speaker on college grounds in 2017. Meanwhile, on the New Right, we watched hundreds of white boys march with torches shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” We saw white men chase down a black man to shoot him with a shotgun for jogging. We witnessed the casual suffocation of a black man using no more than the very blasé placement of a white man’s knee. Liberal bigotry isn’t so lethal. It, too, is systemic, but it’s institutionalized in the open. As with quotas like university admissions and Affirmative Action that seek correctives after real racism has already done its work, say, at inner-city schools. Instead of fixing inner-city schools — a massive undertaking — Affirmative Action seeks to make corrections after the damage is done. As the law says, to “remedy the results of prior discrimination.” Racism on the Left is more like racism as racism’s cure.
These blatant self-contradictions force societies to live a lie. I witnessed this confluence at a “Diversity Training” session in the corporation I worked for. The diversity instructor projected two documents on the wall, Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employment (EOE). The correctness of each was lauded. Then I said the unsayable. “On one side, you show EOE, stating that in the workplace, no one can be discriminated against for any reason whatsoever. Not race, gender, sexuality, religion, national origin — nothing. On the other side, you show Affirmative Action, which in practice favors three races over all others: Black, Hispanic, and that portion of my heritage, Native American. How are we to square this contradictory practice?” I’d just put the trainer in that corner Bloom noted. All fifty heads turned, laser-focused on the instructor: black, white, Hispanic, East Asian, Indian, and a Pakistani; all engineers, scientists, mathematicians — people not to be bullshitted. The verbal acrobatics to follow fascinated the audience. We all knew what we were supposed to say.
Likewise, to say “the poor” instead of “people of color and the poor” would damage the sanctity of our new segregation, once reviled, now embraced. The American melting pot is dead. Identity politics is the rule under multiculturalism’s guise of respecting heritage, so long as that heritage is not that of the majority. Under minority preference, majorities are oppressive.
What about “Stop the Steal!” — a claim made by Republicans who gained seats in the House. Do the authoritarian anti-Constitutionalists of the New Right really believe that the 2020 election in which Biden defeated Trump by 7-million votes was stolen by Venezuela, China, Democrats, liberals, or space aliens gun-slinging QAnon’s “Jewish laser” in the sky? Is there really that much abject stupidity in these unUnited States?
Well…
Apparently so.
Deniers of the election, manmade global warming, and the Covid vaccine are winning Republican primaries across our fruity plains. Mark Finchem won Arizona’s Republican Secretary of State primary by claiming the Devil stole the 2020 election from Trump. Venezuela, China, Democrats, liberals, and space aliens can breathe a sigh of relief to hear they’re off the hook. Many of Trump’s January 6 jihadists — with reinforcement from FOX — still claim it was Antifa who tried to stop the vote for Biden that day — the man Antifa supported.
Hmm…
But aside from the gullible, what about those other tens of millions of New Right conservatives? Do they believe this stuff? After 63 court rulings against and 0 for Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell (sued billions for their lies), including two 9 to 0 rulings against Trump by his Supreme Court; after Dominion and Smartmatic voting systems showed their paper ballot copies of each vote cast matched exactly the software count; after the Cyber Ninjas (yes, Cyber Ninjas — at least our nutters have a sense of humor) bumbled their way through an Arizona recount only to find Biden won by 360 more votes than the original tally; after the January 6 Committee showed Trump and his “Team Clown” conspired to overthrow the Constitution they all so love, and still tens of millions of Republicans believe the election was stolen?
Surely…
OK, hopefully, there aren’t that many dolts on the planet. So why keep repeating this election fraud line? What does “Stop the Steal!” really mean? First, it’s not that Republicans believe it — as the media repeats — it’s that they say it. Salted with adolescent defiance, it means, “This is our tribal identifier. This is how we talk. Say this; you’re in the club. We belong. Belonging equals meaning. Fuck everybody else. They’re Libs. We’re Cons.”
Not a great sound-bite, but the New Right has become remarkably verbose.
Aside from tribal I.D., “Stop the Steal!” provides practical utility. Trump taught the once-Christian Right just how easy lying really is. If you lie and stick to it, never admit truth, break every social norm, every moral ethic, not only does God not strike you down, but you can take massive advantage of those who adhere to truth, social norms, and moral ethics. And as we saw here in Seven Truths Trump Taught the World, the Collapse of American Christianity, and the Collapse of Christianity Worldwide, political power is much more important than Christ. Hiding behind lies like “Stop the Steal!” the New Right changed voting laws across the U.S. and attempts to install cranks like Mark Finchem as Secretary of State to “Take back America!” by pseudo-legal means as though they were patriots, not traitors to the Founders they pretend to admire.
Like the Left that can’t say “the poor,” the Right can’t say the election was fair; Trump lost. What links “people of color and the poor” on the Left to “Stop the Steal!” on the Right is also what motivates both. To strike these formulaic poses are part of church doctrine, not only as unifier of the tribe but “in your face” to the other. A provocation and a litmus test that True Believers dare not challenge lest they be labeled members of the other cult.
But tests and provocations aren’t always obvious. Given all the talk of diversity and inclusivity among our liberal faithful, mantras about people of color drip with exclusion of whites, just as Affirmative Action and university admissions do. And for all their ignorance, Trump’s party of largely white real victims of social “scientists” called economists — who embraced China’s export of unemployment to America — can see this much. Trumpers can practice liberal inclusivity as well as any campus snowflake. Better: they have guns. And they’re not so smart they won’t use them, while the rest have learned the firepower of lies, long after the Left taught them how. Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Rudy Giuliani’s “truth isn’t true” are restatements of the Left’s postmodern relativism first infecting our universities in the 1960s. As Kurt Anderson clarifies in his Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, social radicalism on the Left stimulated political radicalism on the Right.
References:
Paragraph 9: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon and Schuster, 1987, pg. 95.
