Could Someone Explain to Me How Ross Douthat Could Count as “Right of Center,” Much Less “Conservative”?

Posted by Nicholas Stix

Blah, blah, blah. He’s saying that the Republicans are as bad as the Democrats, which is pure, unadulterated horse hockey. Or else, he’s saying nothing. The man talks as if he has a mouth full of marbles.

Memo to Douthat: Being boring and equivocating are not the same as being wise and scholarly.

This sense of white grievance can be noxious, divisive, and deeply problematic for Republican politicians trying to broaden their party’s appeal. It can help harden divisions and increase tensions between otherwise like-minded Americans.

He sounds like one of those Democratic campaign consultants (including Hispanic consultants in Republican drag) who get trotted out by the leftwing MSM every four years to dispense advice to the GOP on how it can remain competitive. The advice always entails turning the truth upside down, so the GOP can continue to alienate its base, while making zero inroads among blacks, or Hispanics.

A “sense of white grievance can be” a gold mine for Republican politicians trying to win elections. Not only is it rational, it’s anchored in reality.

As Steve Sailer has argued for about 11 years, in what we at VDARE call the Sailer Strategy, the GOP can continue winning elections for a generation to come, if it engages in inreach, and shuns outreach. However, continuing its strategy of outreach—i.e., pandering to blacks and Hispanics who hate it, while screwing over its white base—will continue to alienate its white base, and ensure that 2004 remains the last national election the party ever wins.

In 2004, John McCain engaged in outreach. He showed contempt for the Republican base, which returned the favor by refusing to vote for him.

(Steve might put less value on “sense of white grievance,” but not too much. After all, while opposition to affirmative action and non-white immigration can be argued in racially neutral terms, those practices are first and foremost tactics in a generations-long race war, and are best depicted and fought as such.)

There is a technical term for “Republican politicians trying to broaden their party’s appeal”: “Losers.”

In seeking to broaden its party, the GOP has for years been committing a slow-motion suicide to rival that of Montgomery Clift.

Officially, the New York Times has two conservative columnists—Douthat and David Brooks. In reality, it has no one even right of center. It has two mushmouths in conservative drag.

Actually, Brooks started referring to himself as a “moderate” in the fall of 2008, about the time he stabbed career backstabber John McCain in the back.

Meanwhile, Douthat acts below as if “Obama” weren’t such a bad guy, after all, in mocking the notion that “Obama is actually some kind of post-colonial score-settler,” in taking a cheap shot at Dinesh D’Souza. (Not that there’s anything wrong with taking cheap shots at Dinesh D’Souza!)

This lack of conservatives is no accident. New York Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger is a communist who uses tools like Brooks and Douthat, in order to push public opinion ever further to the left.

* * *

The Democrats’

Identity Politics

Problem

By Ross Douthat
September 4, 2012, 2:15 p.m.
New York Times
50 Comments

On the eve of the Democratic convention here in Charlotte, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein calls on the party to move away from identity politics:

The Democrats have a serious problem. It is a problem that stems from the party’s greatest strength: its long-term support for inclusion and equal rights for all, its support of racial integration and equal rights for women and homosexuals and its humane stand on immigration reform. Those heroic positions … caused an understandable, if misguided, overreaction within the party–a drift toward identity politics, toward special pleading. Inclusion became exclusive. The Democratic National Committee officially recognizes 14 caucuses or “communities,” most having to do with race, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity.

Many of these groups had a purpose in the beginning … But if I’m a plain old white insurance salesman, I look at the Democratic Party and say, What’s in it for me? These feelings are clearly intensifying in this presidential campaign. They are bound to increase, perhaps dangerously, as the white electoral majority (currently about 70%) diminishes over time. If the Democratic Party truly wants to be a party of inclusion, it must reach out to those who are currently excluded from its identity politics. It needs to disband its caucuses. It needs to say, We are proud of our racial and ethnic backgrounds, our different religions, our lifestyle differences. But the things that unite us are more important than the things that divide us. We have only one caucus–the American caucus.

This is an admirably honest take on a reality that often gets lost in the media hunt for Republican “dog whistles” on race, and the endless columns prophesying the G.O.P.’s extinction if it doesn’t find a way to diversify its ranks. Claims of Republican race-baiting have a way of descending into self-parody (especially at this point in the campaign season), but there is obviously a thread of what I’ve previously described as white identity politics woven into contemporary conservatism — not a politics of white supremacy or traditional racial animus, but a politics of racial/ethnic/native-born grievance, which regards contemporary liberalism as fundamentally hostile to the interests of middle class and working class whites. (David Frum’s attempt to channel the mood of G.O.P. convention delegates captures what I’m talking about pretty well.)This sense of white grievance can be noxious, divisive, and deeply problematic for Republican politicians trying to broaden their party’s appeal. It can help harden divisions and increase tensions between otherwise like-minded Americans. But it isn’t likely to diminish so long as the Democratic Party continues to be a vessel for the much more explicit identity politics that Klein’s column deplores, and to support policies that often resemble a kind of racial/ethnic spoils system for non-whites: Permanent racial preferences in education and government, a “disparate impact” regime that can blur into a de facto quota system, immigration gambits that don’t even pretend to be anything other than plays for the Hispanic vote, and so on.

This kind of ethnic/racial patronage is hardly a new thing in our politics, and it doesn’t make today’s liberals the “real” racists, or prove that President Obama is actually some kind of post-colonial score-settler, as the Michael Moores of right-wing identity politics are wont to claim. But it does means that when it comes to exploiting America’s ethnic divisions to mobilize key constituencies, today’s Democratic Party sins as much as it is sinned against. And it means that the Democrats’ struggle to reach Klein’s “plain old white insurance salesman” and the Republicans’ struggle to reach Hispanics and African-Americans are in some sense mirror images of one another. They’re both a consequence of party leaders taking the path of least resistance on racially-charged issues, and they’re both reminders of the hard truth that the more racially diverse America of the future could easily become, and remain, a more polarized society as well.