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Black Leftist Calls Obama a “Sociopath”, Blasts Left’s Race Obsession

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On March 9, 2014 @ 1:16 pm In The Point | 21 Comments

Adolph Reed, Jr’s Harper’s Mag essay is sending shock waves through some corners of the left which are reacting by describing him as clueless and out of touch.

They may have a point, but Reed challenges the left’s current fusion with liberalism and its obsession with racial politics. It’s doubtful that Reed is imitating the right so much as coming to the same conclusions thereby independently validating the so-called racist criticisms of Obama.

Reed is so extremely far to the left of Obama that he considers him to be virtually indistinguishable from Republicans, but his insights into Obama as expressed in a Salon interview and the Harper’s essay are familiar ones.

Again and again, perfectly sentient adults cited the clinching arguments made on the candidate’s behalf by their children. We were urged to marvel at and take our cues from the already indulged upper-middle-class Children of the Corn and their faddish, utterly uninformed exuberance…

Obama is the pure product of this hollowed-out politics. He is a triumph of image and identity over content; indeed, he is the triumph of identity as content. Taibbi misreads how race figures into Brand Obama. Obama is not “without” race; he embodies it as an abstraction, a feel-good evocation severed from history and social relations. Race is what Obama projects in place of an ideology…

In fact, Obama was able to win the presidency only because the changes his election supposedly signified had already taken place. His election, after all, did not depend on disqualifying large chunks of the white electorate…

Particularly among those who stress the primary force of racism in American life, Obama’s election called forth in the same breath competing impulses — exultation in the triumphal moment and a caveat that the triumph is not as definitive as it seems. Proponents of an antiracist politics almost ritualistically express anxiety that Obama’s presidency threatens to issue in premature proclamation of the transcendence of racial inequality, injustice, or conflict…

In an interview, Reed goes on to express his familiarity with the Obama type.

Q. Obama’s a highly intelligent man. You’ve met him.

A. Yes.

Q. Maybe he’s a cipher in the sense that he’s a symbol. But he’s not a cipher of a human.

A. I don’t know. Look, I’ve taught a bunch of versions of him.

Q. You mean you’ve had people like him as students?

A. Yeah. So his cohort in the Ivy League. His style. There’s superficial polish or there’s a polish that may go down to the core. I don’t know. A performance of a judicious intellectuality. A capacity to show an ability to understand and empathize with multiple sides of an argument. Obama has described himself in that way himself in one or maybe both of his books and elsewhere. He’s said that he has this knack for encouraging people to see a better world for themselves through him.

Q. Yeah, he’s like a blank slate.

A. Right. Which in a less charitable moment you might say is like a sociopath.

Reed isn’t the first man on the left to say what the right has always been saying about him, but this may be one of the more high profile attacks on Obama that uses the same language as the right.

In both his essay and interview, Reed critiques the left’s obsession with Rainbow Coalition politics.

The left careens from this oppressed group or crisis moment to that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source of political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the Zapatistas; the urban “precariat”; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT “community”; the grassroots, the netroots, and the blogosphere; this season’s worthless Democrat; Occupy; a “Trotskyist” software engineer elected to the Seattle City Council) to another…

Reed’s hard leftist argument is that the left has abandoned the old Labor politics of equality for racial caste politics of representation. It’s hard to deny that this is indeed the case. It’s why the Democrats and their Liberal puppeteers and their leftist puppeteers have lost the white working class.

The Democratic Party doesn’t speak to white voters because it’s adopted the mindset of racial representation.

The movement for racial justice has shifted its focus from inequality to “disparity,” while neatly evading any critique of the structures that produce inequality…

The problem with a notion of equality or social justice that’s rooted in the perspectives of multiculturalism and diversity is that from those perspectives you can have a society that’s perfectly just if less than 1 percent of the population controls 95 percent of the stuff, so long as that one percent is half women and 12 percent black, and 12 percent Latino and whatever the appropriate numbers are gay. Now that’s a problem…

This is a significant critique of the left because it doesn’t really offer equality. Its chatter about income equality is meaningless. It may raise the floor a bit, but it’s really operating on a stratified system of equal representation or dividing up a shrinking piece of the pie.

While we would obviously disagree with Reed’s politics and his proposals, his critique of the consequences of racial representation politics are valid. It means one black man in the White House and millions collecting unemployment.

An equal longer-term danger, however, is the likelihood that we will find ourselves with no critical politics other than a desiccated leftism capable only of counting, parsing, hand-wringing, administering, and making up “Just So” stories about dispossession and exploitation recast in the evocative but politically sterile language of disparity and diversity. This is neoliberalism’s version of a left. Radicalism now means only a very strong commitment to antidiscrimination, a point from which Democratic liberalism has not retreated. Rather, it’s the path Democrats have taken in retreating from a commitment to economic justice.

Of course the left was never committed to economic justice. There’s ample proof of that in the various Socialist republics. It’s committed to a stratified system of inequality, which it is replacing in the United States.

Anti-discrimination and population replacement has become a more convenient means to that end rather than its old focus on dying labor unions.

Like in black politics, for instance, the subtle shift from a notion of equality that’s anchored in the political economy to a notion of equality that tends to a norm of parity has been a really important shift. And when we look around now at academics and others who plead the case for racial justice–Merlin Chowkwanyun and I did an article on this in the 2012 Socialist Register, a challenge to the racial disparity discourse. The language through which briefs for racial justice are crafted at this point are much more likely—I mean, vastly more likely—to point to the problem as a racial disparity instead of inequality. And that might sound…

I don’t get the difference…

I was going to say, it might sound like a pedantic distinction. But the notion of disparity as the metric of racial justice means that blacks should be represented roughly in their percentage of the population in the distribution of goods and bads in the society. So you can have 15 percent unemployment, but if blacks are only 12 percent of the 15 percent that are unemployed basically…

Then it’s OK?

Yeah.

It’s a significant difference to Reed who keeps thinking in terms of total social transformation. And his critique echoes the old Wells vs Lenin argument about the speed of revolution. But the left isn’t really trying to achieve 12 percent black unemployment to 15 percent national unemployment.

It wants disparate impact on blacks because it needs them as a base. The left always ends up destroying the economic prospects of its base. That is its endgame.

So it needs higher black unemployment and it needs to offset it with a caste system of affirmative action that mandates 2 or 3 extra black employees so that it has its racial cake and eats it too.

But Reed is correct in pointing out that the left has retreated from equality and is instead embracing racial quota proportions instead. The left has bet everything it has on minority-majority and has no way out.

The terms “left” and “progressive” — and in practical usage the latter is only a milquetoast version of the former — now signify a cultural sensibility rather than a reasoned critique of the existing social order. Because only the right proceeds from a clear, practical utopian vision, “left” has come to mean little more than “not right.”

Reed is right about the cultural sensibility part. What we call liberalism these days is largely an elitist sensibility composed of Whole Foods, Obama posters and checking your privilege on Twitter.

 


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