Mote and beam

Hmm.

I came across Philip N. Cohen's twitter. Seems interestingly eclectic. As I am scanning down his tweets, I see:

Wouldn't it help if any establishment Republican ever said anything critical about racism in the party when they're not losing? @KayHymowitz

— Philip N. Cohen (@familyunequal) March 6, 2016

From the tenor of his tweets and the nature of his research, Cohen seems solidly of the left. He is responding in this tweet with some criticism directed at Kay Hymowitz who is solidly on the right. I can't quite discern the nature of the back and forth but clearly it is something to do with the election campaign.

None-the-less, it is a quite striking criticism, and I suspect revealing of the differences in weltanschauung between left and right. The left as it exists today in the US and particularly in the academy, media and in the entertainment industry is obsessed with group identities. The right, somewhat ironically given their vilification by the left, is now the torch bearer of MLK's dream of treating people not based on the color of their skin but by the content of their character. It seems almost as if the left's first question is "What color are you?" versus the right's "Who are you, what do you believe?"

This difference in orientation is oddly manifested in the respective candidate fields between the Democrats and Republicans. With their group identity approach, the Democrats ironically muster three white politicians from the northeast, two of them quite elderly. Old white people doesn't quite describe the Democrat field but it is close.

In contrast, the Republicans, with a focus on character and accomplishment rather than race, class, and gender come up with a field of seventeen candidates that is the very model of the diversity which Democrats, in other circumstances, might admire. Men, women, older, younger, establishment, outsiders, candidates with executive experience and executive neophytes, candidates from the North, South, Midwest, and West, black, white, Hispanic and Asian candidates, politicians, attorneys, real estate developers, hi-tech businesswomen, brain surgeons, etc.

That's what makes Cohen's tweet intriguing. Its as if he doesn't see that the Republicans have delivered the very diversity he wants but they have done so without the postmodernist/critical theory worldview to which he, presumably, adheres. Without the ideological adherence, it seems that the desired outcome is invalidated.

Meanwhile, he also seems blind to the fact that the Democrats, while almost obsessively focused on group identity and criticizing racism, have delivered the same old tired homogenous roster of entrenched interests. And, it seems that that is alright so long as they are criticizing that which they are doing.