A central plank of contemporary leftism is that Americans are irredeemably racist and America an irredeemably racist place. Same as it always was.
For evidence of such views one need look no further than comments from the Democratic presidential contenders, coupled with the assumption that they are at least reasonably representative of the left on such matters.
During their Feb. 7 debate in New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders declared that America was a "racist society from top to bottom." Joe Biden embraced the notion of "systemic racism," which Pete Buttigieg claimed "has penetrated to every level of our system." Not to be outdone, Elizabeth Warren presented the country as so racist as to require "race-conscious laws in education, in employment, in entrepreneurship."
None of this is new, and only acquires additional stridency by virtue of coming primaries wherein the black vote will matter more than in Iowa or New Hampshire.
Still, such claims (and the racial pandering driving them) are curious and intriguing in a number of ways.
First, they amount to a rather tricky electoral stratagem in which the intended recipient group (the black minority) gets the message being sent but the other group (the white majority) either doesn't or gets it and inexplicably fails to be offended by its slanderous content.
When candidates like Sanders and Warren trash America and Americans as racist, what they mean, as a matter of logical inference, is that white America and white Americans are racist. And that black Americans continue to suffer because of such racism in much the same fashion as they did in previous eras, civil rights legislation and other markers of improvement notwithstanding.
Such efforts to pander in favor of one identity politics group at the expense of another is made even trickier when recognizing that, although black voters might make up the most loyal base of the party and a decisive voting bloc in many Democratic primaries, they still constitute a tiny (12 percent or so) portion of the electorate, while white folks comprise more than 70 percent.
The Democratic strategy thus requires that votes be won from blacks by denouncing whites as racist but without losing too many votes of the denounced, either in Democratic primaries or (especially) come November.
At the least, calling people racist while asking for their support constitutes a rather novel approach to winning elections.
That Sanders, Buttigieg and company are about as lily-white as one can get, with not even a glimmer of a beach vacation tan, only makes the spectacle still more bizarre (as if, although whites are overwhelmingly racist, absolution on that score can somehow be obtained by calling other whites racist with sufficient fervor).
Implicit in the Democrats' castigation of America as irredeemably racist is also, along with the pandering aspect and the ahistorical ignorance of evidence of racial improvements, a rather remarkable, and remarkably contemptuous, interpretation of black attitudes and resulting voting behavior.
White liberal Democrats (and white leftists in general) apparently assume that blacks continue to be helpless victims of racism who can be appealed to only on that basis. For leftists, all black people think alike, in the sense of all embracing race as the primary basis of their identity, the determinant of their destiny, and the cause of victim status in a hopelessly racist land.
We therefore arrive at a disturbing incentive structure in which, to achieve electoral success, white Democratic presidential aspirants must be, or at least appear to be, more offended by racism than its victims. In the Democratic worldview, all blacks are victims of racism, even if they might not see themselves that way, and all whites who aren't liberal Democrats are racist, even if they don't feel they are.
Whatever the actual level of residual racism in America, liberal Democratic candidates can turn out the black vote only by depicting the state of race relations in the most negative possible terms, such that anything which heightens racial tension is good news in such precincts.
Although most Americans might believe that racism has declined substantially in recent decades, as attitudes and behavior have become more enlightened, the leftist race narrative is threatened to the core by any such acknowledgement.
Ironically, progress on race relations actually does become harder to achieve when one of the nation's two major political parties both denies that it is possible and has acquired an investment in preventing it.
People with even modestly developed moral sensibilities detest racism. And since Democrats apparently think Americans are racist, we might be forgiven for concluding, based on their own rhetoric, that Democrats detest their fellow Americans.
It would also be difficult to see how they could view a country that is racist "from top to bottom" favorably either. Yet they not only continue to reside in such a racist place but somewhat perversely ask us to allow them to govern it.
The hunch is that Democrats will have to work even harder than usual this election cycle to convince black Americans that racism is keeping them down, that they have no prospects of relief from the racist yoke other than voting for white Democrats.
Otherwise they might notice that historically low black unemployment rate.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 03/02/2020