- Obama techie says 'Life of Julia' a campaign highlight
- Commenter #5 Jonathan Cohen on VDH's Too Few Oppressors, Too Many Victims:
It is sad that so much of what Hanson is describing in this article is coming to pass. While Obama exploited the tribalism to get elected and re-elected, he is not the cause of such divisive politics. One only has to work in a university environment to see where such a racial spoils system is fully entrenched and how counter-productive it can be.
There is no longer a left or liberalism in America. There is only a politics of victimhood that looks on all allocation of employment, college admissions, rewards of any kind as a spoils system to be divided based on formulas that favor formerly underrepresented groups. Visit any website offering jobs of any kind at a university and it will advertise that they are favoring women and minorities.
This is not unfamiliar to anyone who was part of the new left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The people who had worked so hard to end segregation, create vast new opportunities for women and had pushed for a more human rights oriented foreign policy allowed their movement to be taken over by those who sought to use their cause to fuel their own personal ambitions. That is how a movement with humane ideals could degenerate so quickly into a collection of interest groups promoting their own aggrandizement at the expense of the common good.
“Causes begin as movement, develop into businesses and end up as rackets.” This quote or some similar wording is attributed to Eric Hoffer and I believe that it represents what we are seeing transforming America. The Democratic Party did not create this mess but it has cynically exploited it to gain the presidency where it rewards its supporters by filling the federal bureaucracy and judiciary with advocates for the racial, gender and ethnic spoils system.
Within days of the election we have seen Democratic Party appointed judges vote to void the Michigan law, Proposal 2, by which Michigan voters reaffirmed the racial neutrality of the fourteenth amendment. And we have seen the EPA refuse to allow Iowa farmers to use their corn as food and feed grain because environmental extremists demand that it be turned into ethanol. While clearly, this policy is supported by those with an economic interest in it, it could never be allowed without the support of a “sustainability” movement that is incapable of considering the overall economic consequences of its environmental extremism.
The future is not promising. Title IX extremists will now use it to attack American science, attempting to create gender equality of numbers in engineering and physics the way it creates equal numbers of athletes receiving athletic scholarships. In the process it will create an entire new bureaucracy of regulators and compliance officers who will be paid to ensure that college admissions, scholarships and assistantships, post-docs, conferences, speakers at national meetings and the like are assigned to assure that the number of females is greater than or equal to the number of males receiving such rewards. And when people try to resist it, the armies of regulators and compliance officers will respond by declaring that such resistance is a war on women and is evidence that the problem is that we don’t have enough regulators and compliance officers.
I am a generally optimistic person but it is hard for me to see how this is going to end in anything but disaster.
