The Sleeper Has Awakened

Martin Luther King Jr. supposedly wanted a color-blind society. In his "I Have A Dream" speech, he said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." And, by the 1980s, it essentially had been realized. Things weren't perfect, but social mores expected everyone (at least whites) to be color-blind, and the law required it. Alas, it was not to last. There were too many on the Left that benefited by minority bloc voting and emphasizing racial tensions and differences, and grievance politics.  And too many on both sides of the political aisle that benefited from open borders and importing cheap labor.

     I watched the first episode of the new television series, Picard, because I'm a long-time Star Trek fan. My secret hope was that the series would introduce a new and different Picard that, like the main character in Breaking Bad, had fallen into the dark side; perhaps a Picard that used his failing winery as a front for smuggling Romulian ale. What viewers were presented with instead was the wet-dream of the retiring boomers in the professional classes: a Picard who was a humanitarian, a scholar, who lived in a chateau in a sunny part of France, who flung open his windows each morning to worship the sun ... and who was waited on and cared for by cheap illegal alien servants. (Of course, he was also an evolutionary dead end with no children or grandchildren. And you could have made a drinking game based on taking a shot each time Picard uttered the phrase "Earl Gray tea").

     Since this was Star Trek, the servants weren't Hondurans but Romulan refugees that fled the destruction of one of their homeworlds due to a nova explosion (although it never explained why they had to resettle on Earth instead of one of the other worlds making up the Romulan Empire). And they are very devoted to Picard because he was one that saved them from the destruction of their homeworld: literally their savior. Good servants (pat, pat on the head).

     But the downside to all this cheap foreign labor, diversity and grievance politics is that eventually the native population begins to wake up to the fact that they have been had--that they had been the marks in a cruel con job. Instead of the peaceful colorblind society portrayed by the various Star Trek series, they have been delivered into a society where "white privilege" has condemned them to be the most hated of persons--a white person. And, just perhaps, the native population begins to think that what's good for the goose is good for gander.

     That is what Progressives fear, and, according to Neal Milner's op-ed, "White Political Identity Is An Emerging And Dangerous Force," it is the end of the world as we know it. He warns that "[w]hite political identity may seem to be in the shadows," but, soon, "it will be at the center because a significant and fast-growing portion of white people now think of their white-people selves as a political group with cohesive interests." He continues:

      According to Ashley Jardina’s recent book “White Identity Politics,” in the last 15 or so years there has been a significant increase in the number of people who strongly identify as white. They view their white group as an oppressed minority.

      Presently 40% of white voters feel this way, with about one-fifth of those feeling especially aggrieved and willing to get politically involved on behalf of white interests.

     At the root, they feel that their way of life is being threatened by cultural diversity, globalization and most of all by immigration. America as they knew it and benefitted [sic] from is disappearing.

Even worse, according to Milner, is that these people don't hate other races--i.e., they are not racist in the traditional sense of the term.

      The basis of white political identity is not the usual suspect — racial resentment. In fact, Jardina shows that it’s common for strong white political identifiers to have views sympathetic toward African Americans.

      What makes this group important, and quite possibly different from its predecessors, is its diversity. White identifiers are an extremely diverse group that cuts across age, gender, income, occupation and even political identification.

     Education level makes no significant difference. Personality traits make only a very small difference.

     So we are not talking about a small, fringe group of white supremacists or KKK sympathizers. Very few white identifiers, even the most ardent ones, take kindly to those groups.

     Not race-baiters, not Klansmen, but instead — and this is what makes them especially significant — people “like us,” your white friends and neighbors.

And his concern--his nightmare--is that "those people" will increasingly vote against Progressive candidates. Which poses a problem for Democrats. Milner notes, for instance, that "[n]o Democratic candidate is going to say, 'What can we do for white people?'" Of course not--the Democrats haven't asked that question since the 1950's. Now it is "what can we do to white people?"

     After watching the new Picard series, I noticed that we also had available reruns of the old Bewitched series. Amazingly, I had never previously seen the first episode. So I did now. It was surprisingly pleasant and entertaining.