With media attention fixed on the Republicans’ Donald Trump problem, a more consequential political trend is playing out that will outlast the showman’s political lifespan. Rank-and-file Democrats, coming off of consecutive election victories by the first black president, are sharply divided on race, even though all of their candidates are white.
The Democratic 2016 primary resembles the politics of gentrifying, liberal cities such as Washington, D.C. White gentry progressives have their own set of priorities and their candidate in the 2016 race — a septuagenarian socialist senator from Vermont.
Black Democrats have another set of priorities and another candidate — the wife of a white Southerner once referred to as “the first black president.”
In the latest FOX News poll, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is already losing to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders among white Democrats, 43 percent to 37. That poll was taken before her abysmal press conference this week in which she made an insouciant but feeble joke about wiping her email server clean with a cloth. She maintains an overall 19-point lead thanks to 65 percent support from black voters.
This division, which may well become starker, provides the backdrop as the Black Lives Matter movement tries to draw attention to police brutality against African Americans and systemic racism. As their events are hijacked, each Democratic candidate must weigh the bad optics of cowering, fleeing, or fighting back.
They have gone easy on Clinton, but especially hard on Sanders. As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has pointed out, Black Lives Matter activists feel they can reach more white people with their message if they harass the candidate of white progressive America.
At a Sanders speech that activists managed to terminate in Seattle this month, a mostly white crowd booed their impromptu takeover of the stage. The activists in turn lectured the crowd and berated them for “white supremacist liberalism.”
Most black voters doubtless disapprove of such tactics being turned against Sanders, a civil rights activist for decades. But black voters also care about the serious issues the activists raise.
It is distorting nothing to ponder the possibility that what we’re seeing here is the racial demagoguery of white liberals within the left-wing media backfire on its authors. They spent much of the last decade trying cynically to re-racialize politics in areas where race had, thankfully, become irrelevant. They took special care to frame every disagreement with or criticism of President Obama as an expression of bigotry. (For a time, they even tried to treat the word “Obamacare” as a racial slur.)
The seeds they planted have germinated, spouted and grown strong. Racial paranoia is now in full flower, and bogus conspiracy theories bloom about white America trying to destroy its first black president. And after so much crying of wolf on racism, suddenly the so-called “white supremacist liberals” find themselves decried as wolves. A grassroots social media campaign was orchestrated this month to inform them that they are “not an ally.”
Conservatives don’t have to ask how this injustice feels.
