In order for society to progress, for the American Idea or, if you prefer, the American Dream, to be preserved or obtained, identity politics must be eliminated
Wouldn’t it be fascinating, actually tremendously heartening, if the man who was supposedly our most divisive politician was the man who ultimately brought our broken country together—former President Donald J. Trump?
America is often, justifiably, criticized for having been built to some degree by slavery. It was not alone in that, and it still exists in some places, but America fought its most painful war to abolish the practice. Years later, it enacted the Civil Rights Act, enshrining equality in our laws. Racism was diminishing.
Yet some people have what I called in one of my books a “nostalgia for racism.” They can’t live without it for reasons that range from comfort with old assumptions to the most cynical personal gain.
Consequently, for as long as I have been alive, which is the entire post-World War II era, it has been assumed that minorities voted Democratic, whether to their advantage or not.
So I was gladdened to see, watching on television, the throng of racially mixed Americans gathered in one of my childhood haunts from Yankee Stadium to the Zoo to Van Cortlandt Park—the borough of The Bronx.
No less than one of the most reactionary forces in our culture—identity politics—was under attack in the massive show of support from that mixed-race crowd given former President Trump at his surprisingly large rally in Crotona Park in the southern part of the borough.
I used the term reactionary above quite deliberately because it was and probably still is the most supreme insult one could give anyone leaning left. It signified they were behind the times, retrograde.
And much of the left has been that since they reversed the color-blind, character-based idealism of Dr. Martin Luther King in favor of the reactionary (that word again) dictums of critical race theory and so-called anti-racism that are themselves racist to the core. The latter two assert the primacy of race over character, something that is senseless to anyone who honestly observes actual human behavior in even slightly moral terms.
