For a long time, I've been bothered by a teaching that my children's high school teachers and then college professors have been hawking.
You can see this theory in Eric Foner's revisionist history of America and various other modern revisionist history books.
And that theory is this: that if only you had blacks, women, and LGBT present at the drafting of the Constitution, or even earlier in the Constituent Assembly, it would be a different constitution. It would be better, more fair, more inclusive. And therefore -- pushes this reasoning -- we need a new Constitution and a new Constituent Assembly to be better and more fair.
I've always marveled at the bald, naked Marxist identity politics involved in that premise. Leave aside the ahistorical nature of this thinking -- often in peddling this theory the teacher will make the point that just like software, the Constitution should be "updated" -- why, we don't still go around on horses, now we have jet planes. Why not completely different laws? This technocommunist thinking of course leaves out that the "software" has been updating itself with the Supreme Court all this time.
But what I always ask is this: What inherent property in these demographic blocs of blacks, women, or gays would you think would be sufficiently different to actually change the Constitution?
You know, that thing with the separation of powers and checks and balances.
What *different* thing would these homogenous and perhaps even hegemonic groups change?
I rejected it as identity politics clap-trap -- because they never admit what it is they think would be different about the liberal American system if it had been more fair and inclusive, i.e. not fair and inclusive because it's the right thing to include everybody, but fair and inclusive AND therefore getting an ideological package that goes with these demographic markets that will be different than the system we already have.
I suspect what they mean to say is that if they could get all these identities together in the Constituent Assembly, they'd have a better chance at installing socialism. That really is where most of these revisionists are going -- and you get it from the entire tenor of their books, how they portray historical events, the animosity and venom they have to the rich and the over-celebration of the poor -- again, as a monolith (see Foner).
I always point out in trying to debate this topic that it really is ultimately racist and sexist and bigoted -- and adhering to an entire corporativist fascist-like ideology (or communistic class ideology) -- to assume that entire races or groups in society like LGBT all have one point of view and will inject some certain monolithic perspective into the Constitutional text.
I challenge them to come up with what they mean. Especially because using this system created by the founders, with its separation of powers and checks and balances, eventually rights for blacks, women and even LGBT have been added. Not sufficiently. More has to be done. But the system itself with the power to litigate and legislation has been the path to equality. Not injection of blocs.
I would have thought this revisionist perspective is actually a minority in academic thinking -- just part of that bubble that the left lives in within universities, and that people don't really believe in these monoliths and they are capable, Sesame Street style, of seeing people as unique individuals with their own ideas who may be capable of different thinking.
Of course, my faith in that notion of pluralism and a kind of colour-blindness to demographic imperatives -- where we pretend, as on Sesame Street, that everybody is really equal and diverse but part of the same civic project -- has been shaken by the elections. 96% of blacks voted for Obama, and we know all the other demographics you can find on Google -- more single women, more Hispanics, and so on. What does that mean for the 4% of blacks who didn't vote for Obama? And there are some, I see them on Twitter and Youtube. How will they add to their numbers if we are all supposed to be in these rigid demographic blocks? For all its talk about "no red states or blue states but United States," the Obama ideologues haven't really explained how they are going to get out of this identity trap.
Yesterday in the New York Times, Thomas Edsahl mused whether Rush Limbaugh's country was gone, now that Pew's demographic drilling on the issue of socialism and capitalism has found more and more people embrace socialism.
So I'm going to ask again what kind of politics we have, and what kind of country we have, if demographics become a marker for thought, and if people are judged not by "the content of their character" but by their beliefs that adhere to their demographics. And yes, this is in a world where there is no more Sesame Street, no more pretending everyone is agnostic and nobody knows.
All the people who angrily denounced me and posted hate messages and deluged my blog with hate-hits didn't like that I reported on this new demographic/political views marker and drew conclusions from it. They continue to live in a world where they can pretend to be above distinctions and utterly unaware of bloc voting.
They substitute contrived and fake blindness bolstered by group-think and rabid peer pressure for authentic tolerance and the guarantee of pluralism and equality for all.
What's fascinating to me with that chart is that despite all the hoopla the White House has put out about supporting the middle class, the middle class -- the people who have $75,000 or above or even much less, $30,000-74,999 have sky-rocketed in their negativity to socialism.
Maybe that's because they're the ones being forcibly redistributed, and they have no cushion for it the way the much wealthier do? Maybe they feel they will be unfairly taxed more?
The huge jump in black appreciation for socialism and white negativity for socialism, creating a marker for controversial political views bound to race -- are sure to go on being felt in areas not just seen in the recent elections.
In any event, having seen so many socialisms fail in my lifetime, and even the British Labour Party fail ultimately to get re-elected because they ran things so poorly, I guess I take a longer view on this, and figure in 4 or 8 or 12 more years, these demographics rooting for socialism are going to have more of a reality check. They will change. The sharpness of that "Marxist contradiction" may have to occur first, but ultimately people will understand that socialism isn't working for their aspirations.
We can also see from the comrades' secret plans for Occupy Wall Street that they succeeded perfectly in their Leninist mission to sharpen those contradictions that Marx always wrote about and set the seeds for class warfare: of those 36% of people who oppose Occupy Wall Street -- a shocking minority) -- a whopping jump occurs in the number opposing socialism -- to 76%. So OWS -- far from attracting or representing "the 99%" -- split people further. That was deliberate.
And those who agree with the Tea Party -- a smaller minority -- made an even bigger jump to hate socialism.
What is to be done? I tend to think the answer is to wait until nature takes its course, but I do think that just as the Democrats in the wilderness for several terms, and leftists in the wilderness since forever, decided to go into education and get to the next generation, so the Republicans have to attend to the same thing.
Hispanics are split nearly in half as to whether they are negative or positive on socialism; 30 somethings; while opposition to (and I bet, even understanding of) socialism has dropped in the 18-20s cohort, the 30-somethings still have a healthy negativity to socialism of 58%. So that's the demographic that has to be reached and probably Rubio is good for that.

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