Us Vs. Them

I despise racial politics. I firmly believe in Martin Luther King's dream.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Sadly, that dream is becoming more and more unlikely.

Today the idea of not being judged by the color of one’s skin but being judged by the content of one’s character is as farcical as the idea of unicorns. Judging based on color of skin is exactly the barometer race-mongers and racialists measure with today; content of character be damned.

... Obama would never have been elected if he were white. The color of his skin has been, and continues to be, his trump card that forgives his most egregious acts as an elected official; and the color of his skin certainly forgives his transpicuous shortcomings on a personal level. It is the color of his skin that (in large part) has protected him (thus far) from impeachment. I defy one of the voices who have, with feigned solemnity, uttered Dr. King’s now famous words to argue they would stand passionately silent if Obama were a white president.

Content of character is waived when talking about Trayvon Martin. Content of character is waived when speaking of personal responsibility as it pertains to blacks. Content of character is waived when it comes to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the New Black Panther Party et al.

It is worth noting that the above was penned not by a Grand Dragon of the KKK, or even a Tea Party member. Rather, it was a black commentator who dared to call a spade a spade (okay, that was a bad pun, but with no racial animus intended).

It is also worth noting that there are disturbing facts to back up the common perception that democrats are becoming the party of choice for most people of color, while white voters are turning to the republicans. Policy differences aside, it augers ill to see our two major parties splitting along racial lines.

The Democratic Party is going extinct in places like Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia. It’s vanishing because the working class White Democrat is becoming extinct.

A generation ago, white Democrats outnumbered white Republicans. Today it’s the other way around. Under Obama, barely a quarter of white people still identify as Democrats.

The latest Pew poll shows that 74 percent of Democrats support ObamaCare, but only 29 percent of white respondents do. The Democratic Party is becoming a party without white people. Under Obama, the Democratic disadvantage among white voters doubled without any corresponding gains among minority voters.

Meanwhile Republicans increased their share of white voters. And that’s only telling part of the story.

The nation’s largest party is “none of the above”. Independents began to decisively outnumber both parties under Obama. Hispanic voters are increasingly identifying as independents. So are white men.

And though the independents come from both parties, they increasingly swing Republican in key races.

Tribalism helped Obama win a second term, but it didn’t fix the underlying flaw in the Democratic model. And it actually worsened the situation. The more the Democrats sounded racially divisive notes, the more they alienated white voters, not just by abusing them, but by ignoring their concerns.

Republican congressional candidates won 64 percent of white working class voters. (Democrat Mary) Landrieu won just 18 percent of the white vote (in the 2014 Louisiana senate race); 22 percent among white women and 15 percent among white men. That’s less than the amount taken by a second Republican candidate in the race, Rob Maness.

(Democrat) Mark Pryor won only 31 percent of white voters (in his Arkansas reelection contest). (Democrat Michelle) Nunn won 23 percent of white voters (in the Georgia 2014 senate race). The Dems didn’t do this badly everywhere, but where they lost it was usually because the white vote sharply tilted away from them enough to offset their overwhelming minority percentages.

The Democrats have a white voter problem. The party is betting that it won’t outlast Obama because it confused its own propaganda with reality and decided that white voters hate Obama because he’s black.

It was never Obama’s race that was the problem. It was the Democratic Party’s embrace of leftist radicalism at the national level while waging identity politics wars along the lines of race and gender.

Republicans don’t have a problem with black people. Democrats do have a problem with white people.

The party is now under the sway of an elitist class of white leftists for whom “white people” is an insult, not a group of voters. And by “white people” they mean the sort of voters who conclusively tossed them out in West Virginia, Nevada and Arkansas.

Now the Democrats are hoping that Hillary Clinton can save their party, but first she has to decide who she is. Hillary has tried to play up racial appeals to white voters before overcorrecting and going the other way. At times she sounds like she wants to appeal to working class voters and at other times she returns to her native element pushing the policy toys of the technocracy.

Instead of the Democratic Party’s Great White Hope, Hillary more closely resembles Mary Landrieu veering between accusations of racism and support for the Keystone pipeline. The left’s attacks on Landrieu for supporting the pipeline only highlight the impossible dilemma of any Democrat trying to run to the right of Obama and Nancy Pelosi. They have to either abandon their voters or their party.

The Democratic Party has moved so far to the left that it has alienated all white voters who aren’t on the left and its botched programs like ObamaCare are even beginning to alienate minority voters. Minority support for ObamaCare has hit a new low. Finding white support for ObamaCare requires a microscope.

But the Democratic Party can’t change. It has become dependent on a small donor class of men like Bloomberg, Soros and Steyer whose ad buys and think tanks dictate their agenda. To win, Hillary, Biden and any other candidate must first win over billionaires whose priorities of gun control, no pipeline and lots of big government are exactly the things that have pushed the Democratic Party to the edge.

If Hillary doesn’t win (the 2016 election), one of the big two parties may go extinct. But it won’t be the Republicans.

Let us hope so.