Collectivist Toolkit: The Race Card
The preemptive race card is already being tossed out by the Kindergarten Party (HT) at the notion of an Obama loss. An especially pathetic example is this garbage by Jacob Weisberg - the collectivist editor at Slate.com.
This is the second (that I’ve noticed) race-baiting read on Slate in the past few weeks - at least they’re consistent. Weisberg alternates between two distinct tactics - 1) smear McCain based on age and his (alleged) lack of collectivist enlightenment, and 2) smear anyone even glancing at the thought of not pulling the Obama lever as a Klan member.
Both tactics are transparent, illogical and void of intellectual merit - standard leftist prattling. A few quotes…
Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?
Hmmm… perhaps it could be that while McCain is just as bad, he manages to maintain a slightly more resilient cloak over his vision (i.e., his desire to destroy virtually every freedom that led to the greatness of our nation). They both prescribe compulsory compassion and sacrifice as the answer. Both are fully willing, and unfortunately capable, of inflicting massive economic destruction as they trample rights in their quest to reform and pressure (force by gunpoint) their altruist vision on America.
If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.
Or, considering older whites statistically are the most educated and wealthy, maybe A) they see through the bullshit of his entire campaign, or B) they realize that his socialized welfare-state vision cost money, and they’re the ones who’ll be paying for it.
Many have discoursed on what an Obama victory could mean for America. We would finally be able to see our legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism in the rearview mirror. Our kids would grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives. The rest of the world would embrace a less fearful and more open post-post-9/11 America. But does it not follow that an Obama defeat would signify the opposite? If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world’s judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn’t put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.
Sorry Jacob, putting a individual of a particular race into office won’t resolve the philosophical cancer at the root of racism. Buying votes through class-warfare and income redistribution bribery will only breed more non-thinking idiots prone to taking intellectual shortcuts.
Racism is an intellectual shortcut driven by laziness or stupidity. A collectivist takes the quick and easy route in dealing with others by choosing to derive elements of their character by group-based inheritance. Unfortunately, just as inheritance in object-oriented programming, not all attributes are guaranteed to withstand becoming concrete from abstraction. As Ayn Rand wrote:
A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.
Invoking or establishing the awareness to deal with another human as an individual requires one to have the philosophic underpinnings needed to see men as individuals who should be valued according to their minds. Considering the philosophic bankruptcy of our world and the deliberate indoctrination resulting from near universal acceptance of the collectivist mindset, most people stand little chance to hold a fundamental appreciation of individual sovereignty.
Objectivism is the only school of thought that involves such appreciation and applies it consistently.
The only way to eliminate racist ignorance will be for Americans to (re)discover the value of the individual. To celebrate a charming vote-buying champion with the phony symbolism of monumental achievement does nothing more than perpetuate the group-think mentality responsible for the ignorance they wish to defeat.
If we continue on our present path our children will grow up thinking of freedom as a myth. In a nation riddled with government meddling we’ll have equal opportunity for sure - very little of it. Since collectivists deny reason (causality, justice etc.) and derive self-esteem from the sum opinion of others, Jacob’s emphasis on the world’s opinion seems fitting.
As a brief tangent, I find it important to distinguish racism, a broad implementation of collectivism, from stereotyping, a classification or initial conclusion based on social or cultural patterns. If I drive through a rough part of town and see a group of shady characters, I absolutely assume many conclusions based on stereotypes. Extending well beyond race (which the criteria for such conclusions could but doesn’t necessarily include), any attribute that pertains to the setting or an entity within is considered. This is not intellectual laziness. This is thoughtful perception - especially when such stereotypes include a premise of significant profit or loss to the beholder. A individualist-minded observer would realize that any one of those thugs *could* represent the epitome of reasonable ingenuity - despite the odds.
You may or may not agree with Obama’s policy prescriptions, but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change. To the rest of the world, a rejection of the promise he represents wouldn’t just be an odd choice by the United States. It would be taken for what it would be: sign and symptom of a nation’s historical decline.
What Jacob fails to understand (or care about) is that none of those “big issues” are responsibilities of a government within its proper scope. The fact that the US has deluded itself into thinking otherwise is the real symptom of the historical decline he misdiagnosed.
Weisberg and others contend that racism will play a large role in the election. Whether they actually believe that, or conveniently commission its use for the root of a variety of tactics, I don’t know. I’d guess they don’t either, but they have to luxury to play the card from both sides of the deck, so it doesn’t matter. They can use it both to paint non-leftist whites as unenlightened, mouth-breathing, Fascist cavemen (as some voters certainly are), and as a form of denigration, regardless of legitimacy, to guilt others into not being “one of those guys.”
This double edge sword represents a textbook Argument from Intimidation - “only a racist wouldn’t support Obama.”
While any objective individual will attest, especially one living in the south, that caveman racism is certainly still alive any well - I think the fact that Obama is an avowed Socialist scares off many more whites that does his race. As Myrhaf wrote
I firmly believe Obama is the least American, most European presidential candidate ever. This little man has no idea what made America great. His vision of America’s ideals is exactly what is destroying American liberty and individual rights.
Indeed he is absolutely against every ideal that brought about the American splendor. To Obama, accountability is a term only applicable in the pragmatic context of denigrating republicans or big business, justice is only valid in the wretched context of “social justice”, and freedom is a diet-life clobbered by pragmatic, feel-good statism bent on the wholesale violation of individual rights.
Our quality of life is a direct result of individuals who valued personal achievement. Obama publicly promotes witholding personal achievement and its wretched materialist nature, and that self-esteem is merely a derivation of one’s ability to become a spoke in the collective wheel.
Sure, there are idiots who wouldn’t vote for a person of a different race even if he were the perfect embodiment of their political philosophy, but shouldn’t spitting in the face of reason, rights, and freedom cost B.O. a few votes?
