Democrats' Co-option of Race Hits Snags

The liberal class is all in a tizzy about Virginia Governor and amateur blackface entertainer Ralph Northam and his staunch refusal (as of this writing) to resign. Judging from all the media coverage, the tizzy is not so much about Northam injuring black people because of his racist behavior. It's that the incontrovertible evidence of his racist behavior is coming so close to the next election.

It was bad enough when Northam first admitted that he was either the dude in blackface or the dude in the KKK garb in his medical school yearbook photo, before quickly retracting the confession. But when he appeared on the verge of reprising the Michael Jackson moonwalk dance he performed as an Army medical officer, all bets about his "woke"  post-racial mindset were off. He still doesn't get it.

In this age of politics as spectator sport, politicians are used to manufacturing their own dramatic personal narratives as a way to avoid addressing deep societal problems. The standard excuse they use is that every crisis - like, say, 30 million Americans lacking health insurance in the richest country on earth - is just too close to Election Day for us to insist that our endangered, pragmatic and sensitive Democratic politicians do anything about it beyond mouthing platitudes. No matter that there is more than a year to go before November 2020. It's always a perpetual campaign. Their winning a seat is more important, in the long term, than the long-term survival of their constituents.

It's even worse in Virginia, which will hold its own off-year statehouse elections this coming November. As the HuffPost reports, quoting the usual Democratic operative granted the usual anonymity to speak frankly because of the sensitive self-dealing involved:

Democrats have a good  chance of taking control of both the House of Delegates and the state Senate, where Republicans currently have narrow majorities, in November. Republicans now hold a three-seat majority in the state House and a two-seat advantage in the state Senate. But Northam remaining at the top of the ticket could jeopardize Democrats' shot at unified control of government.
It's an unimaginable scenario going into an election cycle," said an advisor to a Democratic state senator who requested anonymity to speak freely. "This is the closets opportunity Democrats have to take control of the legislature in a generation."

The anonymous operative said the party is terrified that, absent Northam disappearing, Republicans will use the yearbook photo in campaign ads in an effort to depress black turnout. The operative did not comment on what Democrats have to offer the black voters of Virginia, besides cosmetic diversity.

They lose control of the narrative when one of their own party selfishly lets out his true inner reactionary and thereby endangers the careers of his fellow politicians besides, come to think of it, deeply wounding the feelings and perhaps even endangering the very lives of the black and brown people they supposedly care so much about. It becomes especially fraught for corporate Democrats, whose main, and perhaps only, theme and narrative of this perpetual campaign is beating Donald Trump just for the sake of beating Donald Trump.  They'v been working overtime to  flaunt the "diversity" of their own slate of candidates as a virtue-signaling tool to show that they are not racists like Trump and his Republican Party.

As Politico reported in November about the party's planned reliance on race and racial issues to defeat Trump:

The recent, more explicit rhetoric on race among potential 2020 Democratic hopefuls -- who, to varying degrees, have addressed racial issues for years -- is at least partly strategic. Black voters are likely to be decisive in many 2020 primaries, especially in the South.

"It's fairly simple -- s/he who wins the black vote, wins the primary," one advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign said in a text message. It was no accident that Clinton's first major policy speech during her 2016 campaign was about race and the criminal justice system. "It's time to end the era of mass incarceration," she said at Columbia University in April 2015. Clinton frequently discussed implicit racial bias on the campaign trial, and used the term "systemic racism" in her Democratic National Convention speech accepting her nomination, the first major party nominee to do so. But she was an imperfect messenger for those policies, given that her husband signed the 1994 crime bill that contributed to the era she was condemning." 

It also didn't help that in her own first memoir, Clinton fondly reminisced about the prison slave labor she used as Arkansas first lady. Abiding by racist tradition, she wrote, quickly won out over her initial misgivings.

It also doesn't help the corporate party cause when designated presidential favorite Kamala Harris gets caught on video bragging to an audience of rich white donors about prosecuting the poor, mainly black, mothers of truant children and even imitating their dialect while doing so. "If you don't go to school, Kamala gonna put both you and me in jail," she laughingly imagined one distraught mom saying to her child. Since Harris had "a lot of political capital," she was going to spend it by summoning up her bold inner white supremacy-serving angel, much to the chagrin of her own staff. Because if there is one thing that endears neoliberal candidates to their donors, it's their willingness to go against their own base and their own party. It has nothing to do with making their constituents' lives better. In fact, it's the exact opposite. The more that they're willing to punish the poor, the better that the wealthy plutocrats like it.

So with Ralph Northam now entering the fray and making such a complete ass of himself by not employing the standard Clinton-Harris Democratic dog whistle, it makes it all that much harder for Democrats to wield their hollow anti-racist cudgels against Trump and the GOP without looking like complete hypocrites.

The corporate Democratic Party, like any political party, is all about power being an end in itself. It is the exact opposite of what Martin Luther King Jr. had to say about the use of "political capital" and power:

"When I talk about power and the need for power, I'm talking in terms of the need for power to bring about the political and economic change necessary to make the good life a reality. I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end or that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community."


So what is a postmodern hypocritical Democratic operative to do?

Change the subject, of course, and smear a popular progressive with the guilt-by-association racist brush.

David Leonhardt of the New York Times is in a bit of a tizzy because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke by phone over the weekend about forging a trans-Atlantic alliance with British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom the neoliberal class has long smeared as an anti-Semite. Leonhardt says that because the left-wing Corbyn "cozies up" - that is, shares occasional stages with - "known anti-Semites" -  that makes him the same thing as a racist GOP white nationalist. And it makes AOC "problematic," especially in a week when "the whole country is rightly denouncing Ralph Northam's bigotry."

This is a stretch, declaring her guilty by her association with a leftist politician himself declared guilty by associating with alleged bigots. It's kind of a third degree of guilt by association.

This is how slyly they use their racist cudgel, by accusing popular leftists as well as "deplorable" Trump voters of racism. They easily pounded Bernie Sanders with it because of his alleged discomfort with black people, because he's a white guy from a whitey white state. They had a hard time at first with AOC, given her own brown skin and their own shallow reliance on identity politics. Now it looks as though they finally think they've got a plan to bring her down. Guilt by association by association by association. 

The pounding of their anti-racist cudgels rings about as hollow as the rest of their platitudinous neoliberal rhetoric.