Ideological blinders

An intriguing read. From A Tale Of Two Suburbs: White Democrats’ culture clash has been long in the making. by Clare Malone.

From the headline, I thought was to be a statistical explication of what was driving the cultural divisions among white Democratic voters. Things to do with class, culture, education attainment, employment patterns, etc. Clearly there is a divide opening up between urban-center, 1% income, college educated white Democrats and rural and manufacturing sector Democrats. It is a topical issue and intriguing.

But Malone fails to deliver. To call her a Ben Rhodes journalist is close but not quite fair.

She seems mired in critical race theory. The discussion alludes to class differences between whites but keeps coming back to a central discussion of race, with many attendant false assumptions and claims which are difficult to sustain empirically. The Mandarin Class members seem completely blind to how racist they sound when they speak of race and attempt to define people based on their race.

And that was the one interesting take-away in the article.

If Democrats lose these voters in 2020 — both white blue-collar workers and their blue-collar-identifying descendants — it might portend a dramatically different party over the next few decades, or even century. When I went back to Ohio, I gleaned that how white people vote has quite a bit to do with their pasts — the formation of political identity comes from experiences, oftentimes inherited ones.

People are unique based on their unique histories? Do tell. I was given to understand by the best authorities that all you needed to know was their race in order to understand everything about them.

That was a clear glimmer of recognition that critical race theory doesn't actually give you many good practical answers under most circumstances. That you have to see and observe and take people as they are rather than the templates you might wish to force them into.

But it was just a glimmer. Malone returns to her ideological race musings. Like so many postmodernist ideologues, Malone is both mired in past tragedies and also convinced that occurrences from two, four, six generations ago are materially determinative today.

I empathize to a small degree. I share the view that past circumstances can have present influence. There are some circumstances where path dependence is a real phenomenon. But it is all contingent on circumstances. Where we part ways is the belief that past events determine current realities. That is the totalitarian and deterministic mindset which always brings postmodernism down.