Former President Barack Obama was on to something last week when he warned of a “circular firing squad” within the Democratic Party. But, like most people, he doesn’t really understand what’s going on, or his own role in creating it.
The defining characteristic of the modern Democratic Party is its fealty not to any specific progressive policy, but to the social justice movement and its demand that privilege kneel before the altar of grievance. That is the feature that will undo the party’s national appeal, and it’s why two of the Democrats’ leading 2020 candidates felt it was necessary to apologize for being white.
Social justice ideology goes back decades, but its rot only really began to seep out of academia during the Obama years. The president himself encouraged it by feeding the identity politics that make up much of the movement.
Recall that Obama in December 2014 hosted a rare press conference and made a point to call only on women reporters. The media, a chief enabler of the social justice mob, cheered the decision. Then-Washington Post reporter Nia-Malika Henderson said the conference was “totally awesome.”
“Love this newser,” tweeted Seung Min Kim, now a CNN analyst and Post reporter.
Jim Acosta also tweeted that he was “happy to see it,” and so were others who didn’t want to hear a question from Acosta.
A Vanity Fair headline lauded the press conference as a “glancing blow to patriarchy.”
After the shooting death of black teen Trayvon Martin in 2012, Obama said it “could have been me,” before also stating that he had experienced being followed in department stores by workers suspicious he might steal and hearing car doors lock when he passed by. Mind you, Obama spent his early adult years in Chicago, during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, when there were consistently 400 to 600 homicides per year.
This sort of rhetoric just nurses the culture of grievance-mongering and oppression-profiteering that is now consuming the Democratic Party.
The day after he announced his 2020 presidential campaign, Beto O’Rourke said in a podcast interview that he would be “more thoughtful” about “the way in which I acknowledged the truth of the criticism that I have enjoyed white privilege.” It’s unclear what “criticism” he was referring to, but I assume it had something to do with his appropriation of a Spanish nickname, despite his being whiter than David Duke’s cleanest sheets hung out in a snowstorm.
At a public event in January, former Vice President Joe Biden, who is also expected to run for the Democratic nomination, said, “The bottom line is we have a lot to root out, but most of all the systematic racism that most of us whites don’t like to acknowledge even exists.” On top of that, Biden is now defending himself from accusations that he was too familiar with the way he touched women in public, a natural evolution of the “believe all women for no other reason than that they’re women” doctrine.
You might think that South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg would be safe, checking at least one oppression box for being gay. But no, even he has to be run through the social justice strainer to expose his privileged pulp. Christina Cauterucci at the liberal Slate wrote in late March that the early momentum behind Buttigieg’s campaign meant that “the well-qualified female and black candidates in the race are getting shoved aside for another white guy.”
Obama doesn’t know it, but this is the party he helped create.
