Shuffling The Deck

It's such fun when the Best-and-Brightest eat their own.

Last year, Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez, a latina born in California of Mexican immigrant parents, was recorded in discussion with three other latinos (Councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, and LA Labor Federation President Ron Herrera), wherein they said some rather racist things.

The recording was leaked only recently, on October 12th, and the furor has (so far) claimed the scalps of two of the four: Martinez and Herrera.

The mainstream press is reporting it as a story about the battle for political power between latinos and blacks, and the identity talliers are lamenting the loss of latino representation on the City Council.

I see an "emperor has no clothes" moment for the identity politics narrative.

Per today's enlightened culture warriors, everything is a struggle between two groups: oppressor and oppressed. Individuals are sorted by their identity marker into one group or the other, individual circumstances be damned. This depersonalization makes it easy for them to declare "all People of Color are oppressed, therefore all People of Color are natural allies."

Since there's power in numbers, the agglomerations ensue, and we now have the catch-all BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) label, which puts Mongols and Maoris, Koreans and Seminoles, Chinese and Japanese, Indians and Pakistanis, Cubans and Dominicans, Inuits and Chileans, Brazilians and Rwandans, Ghanans and American blacks, all in one big salad bowl.

Take note, for a moment, who's not in that salad. Armenians, Iranians, Turks, Iraqis, and other North Africans, Middle Easterners, and others often aren't allowed in the BIPOC club, even though there's plenty of oppression going on (that it's by their governments may be what’s giving the Woke pause - Government is Good, after all).

Hold that thought.

We have been told that the oppressed cannot be racist, because racism requires your identity group having a position of power. Yes, that's the new definition, but it just got gobsmacked by a PoC saying that the child of another PoC "looks like a little monkey."

The arrogance of lumping several billion people who span half the planet into one category is breathtaking. It ignores the very real differences - and conflicts and difficult history - between dozens of cultures . It also ignores the irrefutable realities of tribalism - you cannot simply erase by decree the biological perceptions of "other" that are at the root of racist attitudes and behavior. We, as individuals can and usually do rise above that biology, but that's not the same as wiping it away with a cleverly formed acronym.

There are other cracks in the salad bowl, and they are growing. Whereas latinos and asians are both deemed BIPOC, the latter are increasingly being shunned by the Left, for having the temerity to succeed academically and economically. Watch as BIPOC continues to de-emphasize acts of oppression against asians, and as the Left continues to encourage academic discrimination against their children. Asians are going to be de-BIPOCed at some point.

I expect a similar arc down the road for latinos. Already, there's evidence of greater affinity for the values more typically associated with the Right: entrepreneurship, family, religiosity, and the like, and more and more are voting for Republicans (that the GOP didn’t start embracing latinos decades ago is its own fault). Certainly, the Left will continue to presumptively claim the dozens of ethnicities lumped into the "latino" bucket are "theirs," and those who stray off the plantation will be called bad names, but that sort of shaming doesn't work that well any more.

Martinez et al deserve their falls from grace. If we are to get past racism, racists should get their comeuppance, no matter their skin color or other identity markers. The business of excusing racism based on who commits it has to stop.

The Best-and-Brightest who built the BIPOC house of cards deserve it more, for the paternalistic racism that leads them to treat all those they deem "oppressed" as their personal play things and reclamation projects. That they deride success, and stand in its way, is just as damning and also warrants a reckoning.

The traditional constituencies of the Left and the Right have been shifting these past couple election cycles. Blue Collar America, long considered a core of Democratic votes and values, is increasingly shifting to the GOP (and the GOP is increasingly shifting to America-first populism). Well-to-do white college grads, and the subset that is suburban women, have supplanted those blue collar votes in the Blue column, and are the big drivers of the agenda. The taken-for-granted groups: blacks, latinos, jews, gays and lesbians, are waking up to that for-granted status, and some are peeling away, either by rejecting the new ideology or by actually voting against the party that claims their votes. Many will remain, either due to inertia or deep-rooted tribalism, but it doesn't take a big shift to change the nation's electoral balance.

The Dems are in a bind, given the myriad conflicts between their traditional constituencies and the "woke" agenda the new core demands. Already, they're losing latinos for aforementioned reasons. Blacks are also starting to leave, as more and more realize "their" party has failed them, on education, on family, on religion, and so forth. Naked anti-Israel attitudes are in ascendance, giving much consternation to American jews. The trans-activist efforts to fundamentally recast the concept of gender is turning off gays, lesbians, and feminists.

Are there enough new voters (i.e. young, woke, and naive) to supplant those losses? Can the Dems draw a decent enough hand from the reshuffled deck of constituencies to win majorities? Seems a tall order to me...

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