“We’re Better Than That”

     The title phrase has been used, often successfully, to quench a rising wave of opinion that the Right should make use of one of the Left’s weapons. Those weapons include identity politics, pejorative name-calling, double-bind accusations, ridicule, and in general answering the Left’s fire with equal or greater counterfire from the Right. The NeverTrumpRump and “Conservatism, Inc.,” whose members Kurt Schlichter has delightfully christened the “Fredocons,” are especially unfriendly toward the rise of a white identity politics. The notion that white Americans, especially white Christians, should see their race and nationality as a unifying factor, just as do the Negroes, strikes them with a particular horror. “Recognize that which is common to us? Take note of what distinguishes us from those who call us enemies? Forge it into a bond upon which we can rely for mutual support and defense? Unthinkable! We’re better than that.”

     This is a variation on one of the rhetorical gambits I mentioned yesterday. Specifically, it’s the inverse of “It’s the right thing to do.” It attempts to shove the tactic under discussion into an untouchable bin: untouchable because the contents are a priori morally wrong. But are they?

     Clarity is absent from such exchanges. The subject deserves an extended examination.

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     It is emphatically not true that “the ends justify the means.” If the means is morally wrong, it cannot be justified by yoking it to “a good cause.” But a means isn’t morally wrong simply because a gaggle of pundits declare it so. It must violate some aspect of the moral order of the universe.

     The matter of identity politics is hard to see in that light. Consider: the great movement of the post-World War II years to establish the legal equality of the races – keep the modifier legal firmly in mind – was a movement that drew its power from white Americans. There were some Negro voices involved in it, most prominent among them Martin Luther King Jr. However, American Negroes alone could not have mustered the political force required to overcome white opposition if whites generally had been averse to their aspirations. There weren’t enough of them, they didn’t command significant social or economic muscle, and they would have been easy to shut out of the political discourse.

     Start from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which passed handily in both houses of Congress and was signed without resistance by Lyndon Johnson. What happened to disturb the progression from legal racial equality to a consequent harmony of the races?

     The answer, of course, is black identity politics. Racialist “leaders” made the forging of a quarrelsome and demanding black political bloc their modus operandi. They employed threats, bribery, coalition politics, and a number of other methods to imbue American Negroes with the notion that regardless of the CRA, “whitey” would hold them down, relegate them to a peasant class. They spread myths and rumors about CIA drug-running in black neighborhoods and police ever ready to arrest blacks simply for standing on the corner. They demanded ever more handouts, set-asides and preferences in government contracting, and ever greater representation in the bureaucracy. They maneuvered for the formation of solidly black Congressional districts, to guarantee the election of black Representatives…and later on accused whites of defining those districts against the interests of blacks.

     Were those tactics morally wrong? They were certainly ugly, lamentable to witness, but that’s not the same. What’s most important about them was that by creating a black identity movement, which necessitated viewing American whites as enemies, they’ve evoked a white identity movement in reaction, energized to defend American whites from blacks’ predations. The latter could not and would not have emerged without the former!

     White identitarianism is not an aberration but a defensive reaction to a hostile and increasingly militant minority . It will not fade swiftly. The deliberately fomented animosity of American blacks toward whites is too open and too virulent. The resegregation of the races will continue as whites leave heavily “integrated” neighborhoods for all-white enclaves in which they can enjoy a measure of peace and security. While responsible, law-abiding blacks remain immersed in the “whites are the enemy” mindset, defend and support black rabble-rousers, and protect black lawbreakers from justice, there can be no lowering of whites’ guard.

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     The universe has strict, self-enforcing laws. One of those laws is that of equilibrium: No force can remain indefinitely unbalanced. Among men, every movement of any kind will elicit a counter-movement that will halt it or worse.

     The mechanisms delineated above have more bearing on political dynamics than notions of right and wrong. Ought we to be “better than that?” In better times, perhaps. But not when our survival, or the survival of our children, is at stake.