Emergency, White Supremacy, and Identity Poltics, Oh My!

Here's My Guy Kevin Williamson railing against the eternal emergency.

Rule One: In the present emergency we need "certain illiberal and anti-democratic measures are necessary" to save us. Rule Two: There is always an emergency.

Then there's Jeff Goldstein inveighing against all identity politics. After all, he argues, "white supremacy" is an inevitable consequence of identity politics.

[I]n a cultural and political climate that rewards and empowers identity groups while it brackets individualism as some deplorable and dangerous social ill, those most marginalized by the prevailing norm would seek to gain power and “legitimacy” within that very system.

And this rather charming notion from Evan Sayet, comedian.

“One reason conservatives are so happy and [l]efists are so miserable is that capitalists need friends,” wrote Evan Sayet. “They need business partners and investors, trading partners and customers so satisfied they come back again and again. 

“The socialist needs enemies,” Sayet went on. “There must be people who hate him and oppress him. If he’s not hated and oppressed then socialism doesn’t exist. 

“If he [the socialist] can’t find any such hatred, he’s forced to make it up[."]

All of which is merely illustration of my maxims:

The only warrant for government action is existential peril.

Therefore the world must be coming to an end unless we act now.

And the perennial:

Politics is division. 

You want to create a political movement? You want to win an election? Then you must unite your followers around you into a political army. And the way to do that is to unite them against an enemy.

Not to forget Hegel and the Freud movement. Not to mention Newton. Action and Reaction are equal and opposite. The thing is equal to its opposite. We project our own faults on our enemies.

So all politicians need an emergency in order to get anything done. Otherwise life is just looking for friends and customers and business partners.

So, the identity politics politician needs white supremacy as an enemy to unite the Coalition of the Fringes. Otherwise the various entities of the coalition will start fighting each other.

Oh, lefties, and by the way. If you chaps demonize whites as the root of all evil, and start kicking them off social media and firing them from their jobs, then you are going to provoke them into forming a racial movement based on whiteness. Because some guy is going to come along and play your lefty game with what you lefties might call "the white community" if whites were part of your movement. Which is, as the comedian just pointed out, that "[t]here must be people who hate [you] and oppress [you]."

The whole basis of humans as social animals is that we band together for protection. And the impulse to band together is the feeling that there is a dangerous something out there. It might be a lion, a tiger or a bear, oh my. Or it might be the malevolent tribe next door. Or it might be the whole white race, organized into a secret conspiracy of white supremacy. Or, it might be the blacks, the browns, the yellows, the females, the educated, the LGBTs organized as a political coalition to name and shame whites as "white supremacists."

But the basic problem of every aspiring leader is that if there is no emergency, no enemy, no existential peril then there is no need for political power.

And what does the leader do then poor thing?