The better angels of our nature trump the tribal "us vs them"

"Sister Sarah R Brother Barack," we captioned this image in our blogpost "Barack Obama is Sister Sharon Falconer" last year: "Screenshot above of Jean Simmons as Sarah Falconer saving a soul in 'Elmer Gantry,' the timeless 1960 film, in Wikipedia's take 'about a con man and a female evangelist selling religion to small town America.' But isn't that exactly what Barack Obama & Company have been up to these last two years?"

"We're all sinners, the preacher tells us. We get what that means, don't we? Why then don't we understand the idea that we're all racists?" asks Ann Althouse provocatively for the defense. How to account for the offense taken by limited-government, free-market tea-party types like ourselves to the current fashion among polemicists on the left side of the aisle of branding us racists? Bombastic race-baiters like the reverends Jackson, Sharpton and Wright may have been thrown under the bus, but a more nuanced narrative was set in motion by the man who would be POTUS at least as far back as December of 2006, when candidate Obama in effect called us a racist for disagreeing with his statist politics. First a few words from the professor, and then our own decipherings. Here's Althouse:

Why does that bother people so? I've been listening to Critical Race Theory for the last 25 years, so saying that everyone is afflicted by racism seems more tedious and trite to me than truly offensive. Is it useful — is it helpful — to approach problems this way, that's what I would ask. But I've been living in a hothouse — among the lawprofs. Out there in the larger social and political world, people feel quite offended and genuinely threatened at the suggestion that their ideas and beliefs have any relationship to racism.

Offended, yes. Threatened? Puleeze, as Althouse in fact acknowledges:

It is possible to think of racism as a much more pervasive phenomenon that we should all contemplate in an honest and self-critical way.

But using the term to assault your political opponents is different. You're not being self-critical. You're still saying there's something terrible about those other people. There could be a serious and valuable inquiry into widespread and largely unconscious racism in American society, but the cheap use of the term "racist" for political gain pushes that inquiry out of reach.

Thank you, Prof. Althouse. The primal tribal imperative of "us vs them" — key to promulgation of the genes of those whose offspring would survive the great winnowing process of evolution — is as old as nature and its offshoot, human nature. Transcending that impulse to find our common humanity is the work of Lincoln's "better angels of our nature," best exemplified in the metaphor of the Shining City Upon a Hill.

Crossposted at Liberty Pundits and Riehl World View.

Comments

[goomp]

White, Black, Western, or Eastern if you believe that Socialism makes a better society than Free Enterprise I think you are a nut cake and I am against you. It has zero to do with race.

[Gayle Miller]

I am so sick and tired of the endless prattling about racism in this nation. It's an obfuscation of monumental proportions designed to distract our attention from the socialist nonsense being foisted upon the American body politic. Don't buy the snake oil kids! Wherever socialism has been attempted, it has failed.

I work hard, I commute 51 miles each way to do it. If someone else can live as comfortably as I do as a result of doing less or nothing at all - whyinhell should I bother? I mean, really, I'm not entirely dumb! Or even a little!