It is one of the political Left’s great internal paradoxes that it so noxiously issues preening paeans to the collective while it also labors so diligently to divvy up the body politic along class, race, ethnic, and gender lines.
On the one hand, we see leftist darlings like Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) launch campaigns for the highest office in the land with Orwellian, quasi-demagogic invocations of “collective purpose.” Consider also this memorable line from an otherwise-largely unmemorable 1915 U.S. Supreme Court case on the issue of then-nascent zoning ordinances:
“…there must be progress, and if in its march private interests are in the way, they must yield to the good of the community.” Hadacheck v. Sebastian, 239 U.S. 394, 410 (1915)
On the other hand, it is the same Left, whose modern political coalition consists of a rather unusual hybrid of urban/suburban elites and a veritable hodgepodge of purportedly aggrieved affinity groups, that so often engages in old-school “divide and conquer” political pandering so as to maximize its vote count. Veteran observers of the 2012 presidential elections will recall the incumbent’s infamous “you didn’t build that” imbroglio — and the concomitant vitiation of entrepreneurial initiative and goading of class warfare sentiment that such rhetoric represented. More modern observers will note the righteous comeuppance that the institutionally and inherently anti-Semitic Women’s March has finally received. Whether it is Marxist-influenced proletariat bravado or the intersectional coalition’s ostracization of unwanted ethnic “others,” then, it is clear that the same Left that speaks so passionately about the “collective” also obsessively demonizes those that it deems politically unpalatable.
This paradoxical fetishization of both the economically collective and the demographically divisive is the complete antithesis of America’s Founding purpose. The Founding generation cherished not inane demographic divisiveness but deliberative assimilationism: Consider how the great Theodore Sedgwick, at the time a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts, said during the House debate over the Naturalization Act of 1790 that America only sought “reputable and worthy characters” who were “fit for the society into which they were blended.” Likewise, far from being economic collectivists, the Founders understood that the free enterprise system secured by the Constitution’s carefully delimited governmental structure is inherently moral insofar as it directly spawns from our God-given natural rights to liberty and property.
Alas, the Left does not care for such historical or philosophical niceties. Does the “deplorables” slur still ring a bell? Indeed, it is the traditionalist white male that is the preeminent object of the Left’s intensive scorn. We know that large swaths of the Left look upon Trump and his base with dripping disdain. We know that large swaths of the Left abhor the ostensible evil of “toxic masculinity.” And we know that sizable pockets of the Left earnestly believe in the need for much-maligned “white guilt” to have a profound reckoning.
Which brings us to the Covington Catholic High School saga.
The post-March for Life drama surrounding Nick Sandmann and his Covington Catholic classmates would have been merely sad had it not also been so painfully predictable. It would have been merely disturbing had it not also been so unfortunately indicative of ubiquitous cultural phenomena.
Whether it was then-D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh thundering to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Democrats that they were seeking “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” or high school junior Sandmann having the temerity (oh my!) to say, “I can’t say that I’m sorry for listening to [Nathan Phillips] and standing there,” we as a society have repeatedly found ourselves in a deeply discomfiting position: Forcing designated white conservative men to atone, under the bright lights of the national spotlight, for all the purported sins of their kind.
What we watched happen to then-Judge Kavanaugh and what we watched happen to the Covington Catholic high schoolers was, in many respects, shockingly similar: White men affiliated in some capacity (be it via formal Art. III judicial nomination or via informal red MAGA hats) with President Trump were systemically assaulted by the Left and their sycophantic media abettors — with calumnious and personally ruinous slanders thrown about with reckless abandon. In each instance, millennia-old civilizational norms of “innocent until proven guilty” and abiding by the facts gave way to the need for a countervailing media-approved “narrative” to take root.
It is truly impossible to envision an equivalent media firestorm transpiring, had the group of high school students not been overwhelmingly white and MAGA hat-clad. Ramesh Ponnuru incisively observed at Bloomberg that Sandmann’s MAGA hat made him, in the eyes of many, a “conscious agent of white supremacy”:
Sandmann had a MAGA hat, which helps explain some of the continuing vitriol directed at him. It’s more defensible to criticize him for his choice of headgear than for having a particular facial expression while white.
But the assumption of much of that criticism, sometimes explicitly defended, is that anyone who wears that hat (even a minor!) is a conscious agent of white supremacy. It’s an invalid inference based on membership in a large group that is more heterogeneous than the critics allow.
The Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, writing at the Claremont Institute’s new American Mind website, pulled even fewer punches:
The kid in question, however, was part of the accursed white race that has wrought unspeakable evils onto humanity. He was a male and thus complicit in the patriarchal structures of oppression that subjugate women. He was the embodiment of power and privilege.
Worst of all, he wore a MAGA cap. Therein lies his crime. The inherited diseases of whiteness and masculinity, though incurable, can at least be mitigated and contained if the patient is willing to demonstrate good will by embracing leftist views and perpetually flagellating himself publicly for the sins of his race and his sex…
Standing in silence with a smile before a person of color — or presumably, a member of any other aggrieved, oppressed identity grou— is now a crime for deplorable white males of all ages.
We might surmise that there are thus two necessary preconditions for the treatment Sandmann and Covington received from our most supercilious clerisy. The first is an obsessive identity politics-centric mentality that materializes in a crass “divide and conquer” political strategy for vote accumulation. And the second is a unique, deep-rooted contempt for conservative white men.
It is unclear who will be next — who, following Kavanaugh and Sandmann, will become the new conservative white male avatar called upon to defend the collective sins of all conservative white men in the court of public opinion. What is clear, however, is that the Left will continue in its pernicious dividing and conquering by abiding the Hadacheck Court’s warning: “…there must be progress, and if in its march private interests are in the way, they must yield to the good of the community.” It just so happens that pursuing “the good of the community” always seems to amount, in classic zero-sum fashion, to the demonization of the “deplorables.”