The Crow.

"Make a joyful noise."


Words. For Your Consideration.

"...We are nowhere near the post-racial moment that Barack Obama’s election was supposed to usher in; instead, we seem more obsessed with race than ever, and more attuned to identity politics in all its permutations. But Herman Cain’s candidacy has confirmed what the experience of the Obama era has already suggested: In national politics, race matters, but ideology matters much, much more.
It didn’t used to be this way. Before the 1960s, white racism was one of the great organizing principles of American politics, capable of trumping ideological differences and creating otherwise-inexplicable political alliances. In the New Deal era, for instance, progressive Northern Democrats and conservative Southern Democrats could share the same political party because the Southerners cared more about preserving racial privilege than they did about the cause of limited government: They lived with F.D.R.’s liberalism because he left Jim Crow alone.

Even in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the cause of white supremacy largely finished and overt racism increasingly taboo, it was still possible to pick out a nest of high-profile issues where racial attitudes plausibly shaped ideological positions as much as than the other way around — the tangle of crime/welfare/affirmative action, in which it was sometimes hard to separate the principles involved from the long shadow of Jim Crow.

But now those issues, too, have receded from the national debate. (When was the last time you heard a national Republican politician attack affirmative action, or a national Democrat complain about mass incarceration?) In their place, we have a politics where partisans on both sides strain — and strain, and strain — to put a racial spin on ideological disagreements that have little to do with race, deploying claims of racial animus as bludgeons on issues that are only tangentially connected to America’s history of slavery and segregation.

The election of America’s first black president has raised the temperature around race without fundamentally changing this dynamic. The great debates of the Obama era have largely focused on issues like health care, financial reform, entitlements and deficits, rather than the more racially charged controversies that divided liberals and conservatives a generation ago. Yet they’ve taken place amid a blizzard of racial charges and counter-charges — against Tea Partiers and talk radio, against Planned Parenthood and the N.A.A.C.P., against the president himself. From the rhetoric on both sides, you would think that the Ku Klux Klan, black nationalism and the eugenics movement were all live forces in American politics, instead of fossilized remnants of an era when race was a defining issue rather than a sideshow.
The entire Cain candidacy has been a reductio ad absurdum of this tendency — a case of anti-Obama conservatives reacting to the left’s overheated charges of right-wing racism by rallying around an African-American conservative who delights in playing the race card himself.

In a sense, all of this is understandable. Racism is America’s original sin. The story of race in America has been one of the great dramas of our history. It makes sense that the presidency of Barack Obama has brought these issues rushing back to the surface.
But they’re mostly a distraction..."

THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Herman Cain Scrunity