The DNC Illustrated Devastating Identity Politics – Consequences to America Be Damned

Martin Luther King Jr. said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

If the 2016 Democratic National Convention (DNC) was any indication, the party of Robert Byrd and Woodrow Wilson has little desire to turn King’s vision into reality.

To look over the guest list and listen to the proclamations of the DNC’s various speakers is to see a clinic in identity politics geared explicitly away from focusing on content of character and towards the physical attributes with which one is born and over which one has no control.

Each and every speaker from a paraplegic Hispanic female to the parents of various black males shot by cops was hand-selected as a political prop to perpetuate a narrative geared towards specific constituencies and an overall theme. The same could be said of the way each and every substantive soundbite was tailored.

The Democrats reverse-engineered their convention in such a way that their speakers would activate every last constituency necessary to win in November.

At some level one has to admire them for having a goal and developing strategies and tactics to achieve it, in spite of a woeful lying criminal of a presidential candidate, the manipulation of sympathetic individuals and the Democrats’ gratuitous pandering. This is politics, and the people seem to not only abide it, but revel in it.

And what the Democrats’ shameless efforts indicate is that winning is paramount, and not so for Republicans except when it concerns our own primaries, and perhaps the race Donald Trump is running.

The core of the Democrats’ message is that Republicans are evil and Democrats are good. Republicans hate and Democrats love. Republicans divide and Democrats unite.

In practice however, Democrats seek to evoke emotional and tribal sentiments completely antithetical to this message. Dividing Americans by race, class, gender and “identity” is the implicit aim of who Democrats highlight and what they say.

The Democrats’ entire campaign, starting with the “I’m with her” slogan is intended to make their constituents focus on voting with their groups against evil Republican oppressors. Democrats seek to signal to voters that everyone who looks like them votes a certain way. Peer pressure to go along with a message relentlessly pushed in the media and academia is a strong force. When many Democrats are wholly unaware that there is another perspective, voting the same way for life is a near certainty.

Regrettably, the individual, the most precious minority of all, is an afterthought versus the aggrieved group, and the collective.

Democrats have to play up race, class, gender and “identity” because the results of their policies in every place where Democrats predominate are so abysmal. I defy any Democrat to name a failing urban area run by Tea Partiers for the last 40 years. When you can’t win on reason, win on emotion.

There certainly are voters who are in the Democrats’ pocket and for which no matter how devastating the effects of their policies – be it in broken homes, failing schools or rampant crime – nothing will ever cause a change of heart because they fundamentally believe the Democrats’ agenda is in their self-interest.

But for others, appeals to empathy, guilt and envy triumph in spite of the apparent and overwhelming evidence of Democratic depredation.

This is a profoundly sad commentary in light of what Martin Luther King Jr. was advocating. Content of character over color of skin means judging people individually, not in terms of a group or a collective. Content of character over color of skin means judging people on their merits, not their genes. Content of character over color of skin means focusing on substance and fact over style and narrative.

Identity politics may enable Democrats and politicians of all stripes to win elections. Appealing to the worse angels of our nature appears to resonate most in our declining culture. But the damage done to the fabric of the country will last for lifetimes, and ultimately tear it apart absent a profound change in American society. (For more from the author of “The DNC Illustrated Devastating Identity Politics – Consequences to America Be Damned” please click HERE)

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