Sen. Barack Obama has discovered recently that the identity politics he has practiced for many years has a price after all. The good news is that Obama’s embarrassment over Rev. Wright’s hate America diatribe is forcing a reexamination of identity politics. The bad news is that this disease has infected the body politic for so long that a full recovery is problematic.
Identity politics is a fancy, politically correct name for what used to be called group-think: voters need not look at where candidates stand on issues important to the country; they need simply ask which candidate is a member or advocate for my racial, ethnic or gender group. Senator Obama’s long-time mentor and pastor, Rev. Wright, has been revealed as a spokesman for a group most Americans find especially distasteful: the Hate America Lobby.
Sen. Obama is now busy trying to disavow the extremist views of Rev. Wright, but his problem is that Wright was not a lone discordant voice in an otherwise angelic choir. Rev. Wright is typical of the whole choir singing the praises of Blame Whitey politics. Even Obama’s wife is a celebrated soloist in the hate America chorus that echoes Rev. Wright.
When you listen to Michelle Obama’s recent statements about being “proud of my country for the first time in my adult life” because of her husband’s political success, you hear a cheering audience in the background, not groans of disbelief.
When Rev. Wright shouts “Not God Bless America, God Damn America!” you see the same hallelujah chorus in the background, not a picture of parishioners walking out of the sermon in disgust. This message may play well in Southside Chicago, but not in Peoria or Palmdale.
Sen. Obama is trying to say that he valued Rev. Wright for his ministerial teachings, not his political views, but it is impossible to believe this explanation when Rev. Wright’s politics were usually delivered as part of a sermon in church. Obama sat through 20 years of such ugly venom without once raising a public objection or leaving the congregation.
In the Democrat Party competition for the 2008 presidential nomination, both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton were reaping only positive benefits from this style of politics until Rev. Wright’s radical views about the “US of KKKA” were put on display.
Unfortunately, this style of demagogic politics is not unique to Rev. Wright, radical feminists, or the far-left blame-America-for-all-the-world’s-ills crowd.
The demagogic appeal of identity politics has been used for years by the proponents of open borders when they try to mobilize all Hispanic citizens to vote as a bloc for candidates who support unlimited immigration and amnesty for the twenty million or more illegal aliens already in our country.
They love illegal immigration because it tacitly rejects assimilation as the necessary cornerstone of citizenship. To these zealots of multiculturalism, assimilation is a bad thing because it means respecting and admiring America’s traditional institutions and values.
For the most part, voters of Hispanic descent— Republican, Democrat or Independent — care about the same issues other Americans care about. They care about good schools, business taxes, protection of human life, and our national security.
But in the spiel of the identity politics demagogues, Hispanics care only about how many green cards will be issued next year. Regrettably, the opponents of assimilation flying under the flag of multiculturalism have more influence than one pastor in an Afro-centric church in Chicago.
It may turn out that we owe Rev. Wright a debt of thanks. His extremist rants have helped focus public attention on a deeper, more pervasive problem, and the sooner we deal with it, the better. Identity politics has spread its toxins throughout our civic culture for decades. In November of 2008, America may send those pied pipers of anti-Americanism a message they can’t ignore.
Republican Tom Tancredo represents Colorado’s 6th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
