VDARE.com: 05/02/10 – Arizona, Britain, And Harvard Law All Show Elite Contempt For Ordinary People
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May 02, 2010
By Steve Sailer
Freud noted that human beings like to
“project”
their own undesirable feelings onto others. The wisdom of
that observation became clearer than ever last week as a
mounting hysteria infected the elites of the
English-speaking world, from Arizona to Britain to Harvard.
The rage
of the privileged classes was on full display as they
projected onto citizens their own vices: ignorance,
resentment, and irrational anger.
- The
signing of the Arizona immigration law, followed by
the slow realization from opinion polls that
it was broadly popular, elicited paroxysms of hatred
for the American people from the Establishment.
For example, veteran
New York Times columnist
Frank Rich’s May 1
op-ed included a full helping of the standard media code
words used to denote that voters aren’t appropriately
obeying their rightful masters:
“angry,” “virus,”
“hysteria,”
“vicious,”
“bigoted,”
“apoplexy,”
“slimed,”
“snarling,”
“notorious,”
“incendiary,”
“rage” and so
forth and so on.
-
Meanwhile, in Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown
called a cheeky voter
“bigoted”
after she dared question his immigration policy.
- And
in Massachusetts, , the dean of the Harvard Law School,
Martha Minow, one of President Obama’s oldest
confidantes,
denounced one of her own students for writing an
email expressing open-mindedness on the forbidden topic
of race and IQ.
Bizarre
as it may seem, the potential Supreme Court nominee publicly
condemned a private message to a few acquaintances written
six months ago—even though it had only been dug up and
leaked to the Black Law Students Association by a romantic
rival in a petty catfight!
In other
words, citizens are winning the debates, so elites would
rather demonize than discuss.
Yet, as
comical as the last week has been, the power of elites to
shut down freedom of speech, to ostracize, to impose dumb
dogmas as loyalty tests, must never be underestimated.
Arizona’s SB1070 and
immigration:
by the end of a tumultuous week, Democratic Party leaders
were in disarray as their efforts to turn the illegal
immigration controversy into a racial struggle between
Hispanics and whites had badly backfired.
The Democrats have long tried to goad
Latino voters into viewing enforcement of the laws as a
racial insult. But there has never been overwhelming
evidence that the average Hispanic-American citizen really
shares the
Latino Democratic elites’ obsession with opening the
border.
For example, in 2006 Arizona voters
passed—over the usual bipartisan opposition of the states’
elites—Proposition
200, which required individuals to furnish proof of
citizenship when applying for benefits or to vote.
Latinos gave it 47 percent support. That’s far more than
you would expect from elite assumptions that Hispanic
voters’ race makes them mindlessly biased in favor of
illegal immigration.
Back in the spring of 2006, pundits
predicted that after the
massive marches by illegal aliens that Hispanics would
rush to the ballot box in November. Yet, according to the
Census Bureau survey, the Hispanic share of the vote
fell—from 6.0
percent in 2004 to
5.9 percent in 2006.
The
simple reality, of course, is that illegal aliens aren’t
supposed to vote, while Hispanic-American citizens have
sensibly ambivalent views about their impact on America.
More importantly, egging on a Hispanic v.
white racial struggle is a losing proposition for the
Democrats at the ballot box in 2010 because
there are still more
white voters.
The plan
is to change all that. But it can’t happen fast.
But these obvious truths were lost on the
Democrats because they have inflicted, as they say, “epistemic
closure” upon themselves by denouncing all opponents of
illegal immigration as evil racists. Hence they have shot
themselves in the foot in 2010.
Last
Thursday, President Barack Obama and Senate majority leader
Harry Reid announced contradictory plans for immigration
legislation. According to an AP article on
late Thursday evening,
“Obama Takes Immigration Reform Off Agenda:”
“With that move, the
president calculated that an immigration bill would not
prove as costly to his party two years from now, when he
seeks re-election, than it would today …”
Of
course, when the unemployment rate in California is 12.5
percent, amnesty’s not looking so hot right now. But the
long term political trend is against amnesty too. So Obama
is probably blowing smoke when he claims that he’ll get
around to it when he’s running for re-election.
In
contrast to Obama, earlier that day Reid had outlined the
Senate Democrats’ proposed comprehensive immigration reform.
This bill is still a scam, but the winds
are blowing in the right direction. The
Washington Post
headlined Spencer S. Hsu’s article on Sunday, May 2:
Senate Democrats’ plan highlights nation’s shift to the
right on immigration.
Hsu pointed out:
“The
Democrats’ shift underscores how, in the struggle between
enforcement advocates and legalization backers, the former
seem to be gaining, experts said.”
The bill
actually contains a few good ideas that could be salvaged in
a 2011 enforcement-only bill.
For example, Reid concedes that we finally must
upgrade the
Social Security card, which is
pathetically
easy to counterfeit. For
decades, that cheap, flimsy piece of paper has served as
tangible evidence to illegal aliens that the powers that be
want them to forge
it to get
American jobs.
So: what are the top Democrats up to?
I don’t know.
Do they?
The
Democrats’ botched tactics stems from their not actually
having thought much about immigration, other than to
congratulate themselves for being ever so
much more sophisticated and tolerant than the American
public—those hate-filled racists.
Democrats’ certainly don’t know much about illegal aliens.
And they don’t want to learn.
To top
off the week, on Saturday, May 1, 2010, the vast mobs of
illegal aliens whom the press was counting on to turn out
for angry May Day rallies to
intimidate voters … mostly didn’t show up. The
Los Angeles Times
wrote:
LAPD estimate crowd at immigrant
rights rally is about half of what was expected [Updated]
“Police had anticipated a larger crowd
because of the controversy surrounding the recent passage of
a tough immigration law in Arizona that
allows
police to check the legal status of people they believe
are in the state illegally.”
About
50,000 apparently were there. That’s a big number, but it’s
only roughly one-tenth as many illegals as marched in LA as
in 2006.
What
happened?
Who
knows? Democratic elites sure don’t. The Hispanics spokesmen
who are constantly being interviewed in the English-language
press as the self-proclaimed leaders of illegal aliens
really aren’t. They are just claiming to lead the vast
numbers of illegals in order to get themselves cushy jobs
advising clueless Anglo elites.
Who are
the illegals’ real leaders?
To the extent that anybody organizes them,
it appears to be primarily Spanish-language radio
disk jockeys. Funny DJs got them to turn out in 2006.
Apparently, it didn’t happen in 2010.
Needless to say, having vast throngs of
foreigners march through our cities waving Mexican flags on
May Day, the day when the
Soviet Politburo used to review a
parade
of nuclear missiles aimed at America was never exactly a
political masterstroke. Those marches helped kill the
Bush-Kennedy-McCain amnesties of 2007 and 2008.
Britain, Brown and
“Bigotry”:
the Labour Prime Minister was
outraged that a mere voter had asked him about the
unspeakable:
his immigration policy. As Chancellor of the Exchequer,
Brown was the second-most powerful member of the Labour
cabinet that
secretly boosted immigration to Britain
a
decade ago in order to elect a new people. Former
Downing Street speechwriter Andrew Neather admitted in 2009:
“Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political
purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the
Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.
I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear
sense that the policy was intended—even if this wasn’t its
main purpose—to
rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their
arguments out of date.”[Labour
let in migrants 'to engineer multicultural UK',
Daily Mail, October 24,
2009]
In public, though, Labour elites were
reticent about what they were planning in order to keep
their “core working class vote” from finding out about it.
Elites
like it best when nobody gets to vote, when nobody thinks
for themselves.
Massachusetts,
Minow, And Malice:
Thus, the strange tale out of Cambridge,
Massachusetts. According to numerous rumors, a young woman
at Harvard Law School (who, curiously, is remaining
nameless) got into a catfight over some guy with another
young lady law student, Stephanie Grace. So Ms. Nameless dug
up out of her email archives a six-month-old private email
from her rival, Grace, discussing the race and IQ
controversy with an above-average level of
sophistication and
open-mindedness. The jealous girl then leaked the
Grace’s
email to the
Black Law Students Association, who forwarded it
nationally to set off the usual
Two
Minutes Hate.
A huge number of bystanders on the
Internet immediately started auditioning for the
Junior Varsity Thought Police, putting the boot in on
the suspicion that Grace might be a
Double-Plus Ungood
Crimethinker!
Clearly,
in a world increasingly run on text communications that are
permanently archived, old-fashioned values like privacy and
intellectual honesty are in mortal danger. In the old days,
when people tended to have conversations rather than
exchange messages that are automatically stored, this absurd
panic over some completely obscure person’s doubts about the
conventional wisdom would never have gotten off the ground.
We are
headed for a stultified world of ideological conformism.
Most egregiously, the Dean of Harvard Law,
Martha Minow, [Email
her] then put her nose in to denounce—the
victim. She wrote:
“I am writing this
morning to address an email message in which one of our
students suggested that black people are genetically
inferior to white people.”
The Dean of Harvard Law ought to be able to read English,
but she flagrantly mischaracterized her own student’s
private email,
which in fact ended:
“I am merely not 100%
convinced that this is the case.
Please don’t pull a Larry
Summers on me.”
Minow burbled on:
“This sad and
unfortunate incident prompts both reflection and reassertion
of important community principles and ideals. We seek to
encourage freedom of expression, but freedom of speech
should be accompanied by responsibility. This is a community
dedicated to intellectual pursuit and social justice. …
As news of the email emerged yesterday, I met with leaders
of our Black Law
Students Association [Email
them]to discuss
how to address the hurt that this has brought to this
community. … The particular comment in question
unfortunately resonates with old and hurtful misconceptions.
As an educational institution, we are especially dedicated
to exposing to the light of inquiry false views about
individuals or groups. “
So much for Harvard’s motto:
Veritas.
As a commenter on the
Volokh Conspiracy blog who aptly calls himself
“Cynical”
explained:
“The real threat is to not just to the ‘social justice’
worldview, but to the entire affirmative-action, diversity
and racial reparations industry. If individuals are judged
for their deeds and abilities instead of their skin color,
Griggs goes away along with the jobs of a great many
compliance officers. Worse, the rampant credentialism which
has fed the expansion of colleges and universities as
substitutes for pre-employment aptitude tests would fall
by the wayside, and that whole racket would start to
collapse as well. You can see how true color-blindness
threatens to
break the rice bowls of many influential people, and
they’ll do almost anything to prevent it.”
Martha Minow is on
Obama’s short list for a Supreme Court nomination. She
has been Obama’s friend since the 1980s. In David Remnick’s
hagiography The Bridge: The
Life and Rise of Barack Obama, the Chicago political
consultant Don Rose describes on p. 225 her crucial role in
the launch of Obama’s political career:
“First, [Obama] comes to Chicago with a reference from
Newton Minow’s daughter, Martha. Then Newt introduces
him to a circle of high-class liberal lawyers. … There are
also liberal, elite funders and agency heads:
Bettylu Saltzman was also part of the Minow grouping and
she has lots of friends.”
For the sake of amusement, here are the
titles of some books
Dean Minow has
authored or edited:
Just Schools:
Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference;
Breaking the Cycles
of Hatred: Memory, Law and Repair; Engaging Cultural Differences:
The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies;
Not Only for Myself:
Identity, Politics and Law,
and
Making All the
Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law.
Jim Kalb writes:
“I knew the Dean
slightly when she was in law school and she struck me as a
very nice and very well-brought-up young lady. I think a lot
of her response in this case was shock and incomprehension
that someone would say something that’s obviously not what
one says or even admits thinking. She brings a woman’s touch
to the position she holds.”
Indeed, in all the parsing of the victim’s
email to show she had it coming to her for violating
reigning norms, there’s a distinct whiff of Junior High
School. It’s reminiscent of how the
In
Clique of popular girls dissects the clothes of a
newcomer to decide whether they’ll admit her to the club or
destroy her with gossip.
Somebody should ask the
President’s press secretary what Obama thinks of his old
pal’s attempt to silence dissent by misstating the content
of a private email that only became public due to petty
vengeance in order ruin the career of one of her students.
After all, the President is much closer to
the Dean of his old law school than he was to
Professor
Henry Louis Gates. And we all remember
how much fun that turned out to be.
Let’s be frank about what this ridiculous Harvard Law
School brouhaha is all about. It’s about whether you have
internalized the elite class dogmas sufficiently to be
allowed into the elite. The more unbelievable the dogma, the
better it serves for demonstrating your class loyalty. The
more you rat out others for heresy, the more you prove your
fealty.
What can be done about the self-serving stupidity of our
elites?
There will always be elites, and any movement that
doesn’t have any is doomed. So we have to do something about
the ones we are stuck with now.
The Sailer Solution:
Scoff at them.
Make fun of them.
Point out their moral and intellectual failings at every
opportunity.
That way, when a Martha Minow declaims,
Americans will roll their eyes and fail to stifle their
giggles.
[Steve Sailer (email
him) is
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book,
AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S
"STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is
available
here.]