When Howard Dean brought Confederate-flag whites into identity politics, he implied one terrible thing: that whites, like other racial identity groups, have the right to pursue power in the name of their race. He inadvertently sanctioned one of history's most destructive formulas: race alone justifying power. And yet, had he reached out to angry black separatists, he would have been hailed as a racial healer. Why the difference? And how does it affect our politics?
The answer goes back to the fundamental conflict between democracy and atavisms--those tribal elements of ourselves that we inherit like a fate from our group and that we share with our grandfather's grandfather. I am a black American, I say, and thus announce my atavistic connection to all others who live as black Americans, to all who ever lived as black Americans. Religion, caste, class, gender and race can all be atavisms, and they are inherently anti-democratic because they exclude all outside the atavism.
Embracing atavistic identities too strongly leads to three great sins: asserting the inherent superiority of one's group over others, excluding others as inferiors, and invoking an enemy to fight in the name of one's superiority. White racism, black separatism, Islamic extremism and Nazism are all atavistic identities gone too far, gone to where one's When Howard Dean brought Confederate-flag whites into identity politics, he implied one terrible thing: that whites, like other racial identity groups, have the right to pursue power in the name of their race. He inadvertently sanctioned one of history's most destructive formulas: race alone justifying power. And yet, had he reached out to angry black separatists, he would have been hailed as a racial healer. Why the difference? And how does it affect our politics?
The answer goes back to the fundamental conflict between democracy and atavisms--those tribal elements of ourselves that we inherit like a fate from our group and that we share with our grandfather's grandfather. I am a black American, I say, and thus announce my atavistic connection to all others who live as black Americans, to all who ever lived as black Americans. Religion, caste, class, gender and race can all be atavisms, and they are inherently anti-democratic because they exclude all outside the atavism.
Embracing atavistic identities too strongly leads to three great sins: asserting the inherent superiority of one's group over others, excluding others as inferiors, and invoking an enemy to fight in the name of one's superiority. White racism, black separatism, Islamic extremism and Nazism are all atavistic identities gone too far, gone to where one's superiority is confirmed only by the denigration and even annihilation of an enemy. Whenever power is pursued in the name of an atavism--my blackness, your whiteness, his Catholicism, her gender--enemies arise and our democracy of individuals is injured. This is true even when oppressed minorities pursue power in the name of their atavism rather than in the name of freedom.
No group in recent history has more aggressively seized power in the name of its racial superiority than Western whites. This race illustrated for all time--through colonialism, slavery, white racism, Nazism--the extraordinary human evil that follows when great power is joined to an atavistic sense of superiority and destiny. This is why today's whites, the world over, cannot openly have a racial identity.
White guilt--the need to win enough moral authority around race to prove that one is not a racist--is the price whites today pay for this history. Political correctness is a language that enables whites to show by wildly exaggerated courtesy that they are not racist; diversity does this for institutions. But white guilt's greatest taboo is the one that Howard Dean violated--assigning whites a racial identity out of which they can pursue power as whites.
Yet Mr. Dean did not cross this taboo as a racist; he crossed it as a hard-core liberal, a supporter of race-based affirmative action, who in the name of racial progress has learned to mentally compartmentalize Americans by atavisms. So used was he to acknowledging the atavistic identity of every minority in the country, it was no doubt a small leap to "include" Confederate-flag whites.
The underlying irony here is that white guilt has given America a liberalism that revives as virtue the precise moral formula at the core of fascism: power justified by race alone. Today a wealthy black will be preferred over the son of a white mailman at all of America's best universities. This of course is illiberalism of the same sort that segregation was.
Classic liberalism (today's conservatism) sees atavistic power as illegitimate because it always steps on individual freedom. The mailman's son is not free if his race is held against him. But the problem with classic liberalism is that there is no room in it for white redemption. American institutions simply want easy ways to show that they are not racist. Their selfishness in this demands the glibness of visible atavisms--black and brown faces more empowered to be present in institutions than other colors. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently called this selfishness "a compelling state interest," which is a rather good characterization of white guilt ...
