Democratic Playbook's Only Page: Division

The Democratic Party has long been deeply invested in identity politics. When it wins elections, its victorious coalition is a Frankenstein monster of disparate groups, often with clearly conflicting interests, stitched together with a single emotional thread: a shared sense of victimization at the hands of those that the party’s messaging manages to vilify. 

During the Obama administration, the arena of division was race. This was presaged by candidate Obama’s insistence that he could no more disown the radical, fire-breathing Jeremiah Wright than he could his own white grandmother – to whom he elsewhere referred as a “typical white person.” That prestidigitation was so successful that it resulted – in combination with the Republicans’ inexplicable refusal to engage its absurdity – in the election of a president whose acknowledged “spiritual adviser” was infamous for screaming, “God damn America!” 

Following that epic mistake, the nation endured a steady diet of racial division promulgated by the president and his acolytes. The Cambridge, Mass., police acted stupidly, and his imaginary son resembled Trayvon Martin. America was a “nation of cowards” regarding racial matters, according to his self-proclaimed “wingman” and attorney general. None of this should have surprised anyone who had read “Dreams From My Father,” a book through which race-based resentment thrums like a beating heart. 

As others have noted, the politics of race during Obama’s tenure did not proceed as many might have expected. Part of the reason that November 2008 was magical, in some ways even for his committed political opponents, was that it held promise for real healing of race-related wounds. Like other moments of progress in this area, it seemed a fulfillment of previously empty promises. Our first founding document’s “All men are created equal” became easier to credit when the 13th Amendment to our second founding document abolished the idea that some could own others. Similarly, the promise of a society based on merit, and not identity – in which we are judged by the content of character, and not the color of skin – seemed bolstered by the elevation of a black man to the presidency. 

Alas, if Obama himself ever took that to be the case, he did not indicate it outwardly. The tens of millions of white people who voted for him apparently were not evidence of real progress; and the tens of millions who voted against him were routinely assumed to have done so because of his skin color, as all defenses against attacks by those who opposed his agenda eventually got around to asserting.