Division stoking is a lucrative line of endeavor

Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish explains how grievance theater works:

Grievance theater has been going national. It's no longer just extraordinary cases like Bernie Goetz's Death Wish moment on the number 2 train that briefly catch hold of the national conversation. The obsessive coverage of the so-called Jena 6 case, an incident of so little internal meaning, signaled that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would no longer just be able to drive a local controversy, they now had the freedom to drive national controversies any time they wanted to.

Trayvon Martin was their big moment with grievance theater being used as part of a presidential campaign on a national level.

The fortunes of too many black politicians have been tied to white guilt and black rage. The worst sort of black politician channels black rage to score points with black supporters while playing on the guilt of white voters promising to heal the social conditions that bring out that rage and protect them from its ravages. But never before has that game been played out of the White House.

The current occupant of the White House is a veteran of the corrupt urban political machine where there are only two games in town and when the money runs out, this is the one you play. The money is running out and accordingly we have been treated to an episode of grievance theater, with the man in the White House playing the familiar Sharptonesque role of healer and inciter.

What does it say about America that what was once a form of political theater rising out of the grimy urban blocks of failed cities is now a national art form? A local dysfunction has become a national dysfunction, not because every city has become New York and Chicago, but because the people at the center of power know urban politics, community organizing and racial consciousness theories and little else. Like some Third World communist backwater, we are being governed by men and women with no understanding of anything practical, but a thorough grounding in Marxism-Leninism. 

The overlords and self-appointed cultural arbiters know all about class oppression and gender fluidity and environmental justice, but they have no idea how to actually offer the world something of value and thereby make an honest living.