On Wednesday, I wrote a piece for National Review in which I critiqued the newfound victorious tribalism of American politics. Here was my basic case:
Obama, like it or not, leads a coalition of tribes. Trump, like it or not, leads a competing coalition of tribes. The Founders weep in their graves….President Obama’s tribal politics have crippled America. Americans hoped that Obama — after campaigning on the notion that he would provide the capstone to America’s non-tribalism — would heal our wounds and move our country beyond racial politics. He, in his own persona, was to be a racial unifier. He represented the hope that America could reject tribalism in favor of American universalism. Instead, Obama has rejected checks and balances as a matter of principle, and has used tribalism to grow his own power. By cobbling together a coalition of racial and ethnic interest groups, Obama knew he could maximize the power of the government to act on their behalf….Donald Trump is the counter-reaction.
On Thursday, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine argued that I got Obama all wrong. Chait characterized my view of Obama as unfair, and what’s more, emblematic of “the very white racial paranoia that enabled Trump to conquer the Republican Party.”
Obama, Chait seems to argue, isn’t tribal. But he promptly concedes the point: Obama is indeed tribal, but according to Chait, his tribalism is justified. “It is true, of course, that Democrats do appeal to different members of their coalition on the basis of their interests,” writes Chait. “If you believe that racial discrimination against white people is as serious a problem in American life as discrimination against racial minorities, as Republicans overwhelmingly do, then you’re inclined to view any specific appeal to minorities as the odious dangling of special favors.”
But this misses the point. You don’t have to believe that discrimination against whites is as widespread as discrimination against minorities to believe that all discrimination is wrong, and that reactionary tribalism on the basis of race is wrong. Morality doesn’t distinguish between “bad racism” and “good racism.” Racism is bad.
But according to Chait, there is such a distinction. If your group is victimized, then racism is justified. Blacks, to take Chait’s example, are supposedly victimized by stand-your-ground laws (an evidence-free contention, given that most of the situations in which the media cites stand-your-ground are not in fact stand-your-ground cases, and given the fact that invocation of stand-your-ground is up to private parties’ defense, not up to the state). This justifies politicians appealing to blacks as a racial group.
This misses the crucial point: disparate impact does not imply institutional racism. All laws have disparate impact. It is telling that Chait does not bother to cite the most often cited disparate impact racism argument used by President Obama and the left: the criminal justice system. Presumably he doesn’t because he understands that the criminal justice system targets criminals, not innocents on the basis of race. But Obama doesn’t care about such niceties: he routinely equates disparate impact with racism without evidence, forwarding tribalism.
Chait continues by stating that Republicans are more tribal because they’re disproportionately white, as though anti-white tribalism is impossible. Again, this confuses ideology with race – a constant problem for Chait, who seems to think that if you have a black guy and a Latino guy both voting for racial reasons, that’s somehow better than two white people who don’t. The only verifiable indicator of why people vote for a given candidate is their explanation of why they vote for a given candidate – and very few white Americans say they vote for their candidate because he’s white. There are far more minority Americans representing majority white districts than there are white Americans representing majority black districts. Does that mean that the white districts are still more racist, since they’re chock-full of whites?
Finally, Chait objects to my narrative about President Obama’s racial story:
[T]he most bizarre element of Shapiro’s charge is his insistence that Obama “constantly suggests that America has an inborn, unfixable problem with racism.” If Obama truly does this “constantly,” Shapiro would be able to offer up many examples of him doing it, but he offers zero…But it’s a complete fantasy. Obama’s account of racism in the United States is just the opposite.
That’s a supremely shallow gloss. Obama tells a double story, allowing his white liberal allies to thrill to his fairy tale of racial progress but his minority followers to hear the message that America can’t be cured of its racism without big government. Here’s a perfect example, from Obama’s interview with NPR in June:
I always tell young people in particular: ‘Do not say that nothing’s changed when it comes to race in America — unless you’ve lived through being a black man in the 1950s, or ’60s, or ’70s. It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours, and that opportunities have opened up, and that attitudes have changed. That is a fact. What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives — you know, that casts a long shadow. And that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.
Leftists like Chait read the first half of this statement, and think it’s Obama’s main message. Minorities read the second half. And the second half counts. There’s a reason that every major poll shows racial tensions rising dramatically during the Obama administration. Spouting vagaries about the arc of the moral universe fades into the wallpaper when you say that every black man in America has been mistaken for a valet because of American racism.
Yes, America is increasingly tribal. One of the reasons for that is the unwillingness of Chait and Co. to see tribalism on their own side. Tribalism is apparently fine so long as Democrats are the ones exploiting it.