A complete and unsparing explanation of why identify politics is so dangerous

This is your must-read for today.

John C. Goodman, writing at Townhall, starts his column by laying out the dire numbers. At least post-Americans do see just how brittle their society is:

Here is something almost all Americans agree on: we’re divided.

Nine out of 10 Americans say political divisions in our country are a serious problem, according to a recent poll. Six in 10 say it’s a very serious problem.

He goes on to discuss how Paul Krugman's latest New York Times "column" is  a textbook study in how hate has replaced reason in the pronouncements of so many pundits. I'll leave that for you to read, because you should read Goodman's piece in its entirety.

A bit further down, he cites and fleshes out the three tenets on which modern-day identity politics rests: a racist view of rights and responsibilities, the implicit promise of retribution, and original sin:

A racist view of rights and responsibilities. Here’s the core idea: Your rights, your entitlements, your claims against others – indeed, your very value as a human being – depend on your skin color, your gender, your sexual preferences, your DNA, etc. Those characteristics determine your tribe. And tribes are not equal.

When Hillary Clinton and other Democrats address their national party conventions, there is the inevitable and obligatory listing of all the groups they are going to bat for: blacks, Hispanics, women, LGBTs, etc. The implicit promise: Democrats are going to do things for you that they are not going to do for others. In fact, whatever they do for you will likely be at the expense of others.

The implicit promise of retribution. The message of identity politics is the message of aggrievement. Either explicitly or implicitly, Democratic politicians are saying to their constituents: you have been treated unfairly; you haven’t gotten your share of society’s rewards; and in every case it’s someone else’s fault. If you are black, your oppressors are white. If you are female, your oppressors are male. If you are gay, your oppressors are straight. 

Most Democrats don’t use the term “white privilege tax.” But more than a few secretly believe we ought to have some version of that. And even if they don’t say it overtly, they imply that so-called “marginalized groups” are entitled to something everyone who isn’t marginalized is not entitled to. 

Original sin. Identity politics is almost always connected to the view that guilt for historical bad acts passes down through the genes. Also, it’s not individual genes. It’s the collective genes of your group that taint you.

Let’s say a member of group A sinned against a member of Group B years ago. Then, a modern descendant of an A is said to have a claim against a modern descendant of a B, even if there is no reason to believe that either ancestor was a party to any bad act. 

Here's how that has played out in Democrat campaign tactics over the last few decades:

·When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, the NAACP produced TV ads falsely claiming that as governor Bush sought to protect three white racists who brutally murdered a black man by chaining and dragging him behind a pickup truck.

·It was Barack Obama himself (right on the eve of an election) who brought national attention to the claim that a black youth named Trayvon Martinwas the victim of a senseless white-on-black murder, when in fact, the shooter was a Hispanic with black ancestry, who was later found to be acting in self-defense.  

·Long after the claim was completely debunked, Democratic politicians continued to claim that a black delinquent named Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, after he raised his arms and yelled, “Hands up. Don’t shoot.”

·At the Democratic Party convention in 2016, Hillary Clinton had the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown sitting on the stage in front of a national TV audience with other supposed victims of white racism, knowing full well the entire pretense was a lie. 

Now, the Very Stable Genius is a lot of things, many of them quite objectionable, but anybody who isn't ate up with identity politics can see that he's not a racist. So where does that charge come from?

These charges come from super-sensitive liberals who are so consumed with identity thinking that they stand ready to convert the most innocuous comment into a tribal insult. Criticize the taking of a knee at a football game and you are anti-black. Oppose the caravan and you are anti-Hispanic. Criticize George Soros and you are anti-Jew. We’re not talking about reality here. We’re talking about a psychological disorder that seems pervasive on the left.

Now, fully digest Goodman's conclusion:

Threat to democracy. There was a time when the liberal democrats endorsed traditional civil rights – believing that everyone should be equal before the law. Those days are gone. There was a day when our universities were dedicated to the unencumbered search for truth, wholeheartedly defending the right of people to express views with which they disagreed. Those days are also gone.
Here’s why this is dangerous. One step away from the belief that you have no right to express your ideas is the belief that you have no right to vote. One step away from the idea that you have no right to express your ideas in the polling booth is the belief that the people you vote for have no right to govern.

When lawfully elected governments are deposed in other countries it is almost always in the context of a claim that elected officials had no legitimate right to be elected in the first place. 

It has not been over the top for LITD to characterize post-American leftists as goose-stepping jackboots. They really do intend to silence those who cherish freedom, common sense, basic human dignity, Western civilization and God.

Technical note: Sorry for the formatting weirdness. This happens with copying and pasting stuff from Townhall. If I can find out how to work around it, I'll clean this up visually.