Posted by
Chris on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 12:45:11 PM
In "The Incredibles", Mr. Incredible's son, Dash, is frustrated because he isn't allowed to manifest his special super-speed powers. His mother resignedly tells him that everyone's special. "Which is another way of saying that no one is", Dash grumbles in reply.
The same operation is happening to the word "racist". Racism is, of course, a bad thing. It can be so awful in its associations that it used to be that politicians could be cowed by charges of racism whether they were true, not true, or even absurd. But lately, voices on the left have leveled the charge so often, at so many people, for criticizing anything that the left supports- not just people, but policies, ideas, legislative proposals, and so on - that the charge has lost its sting. It has reached the point that anyone who didn't vote for Obama or who dares to peaceably assemble in opposition to the policies of his party is either implicitly or explicitly called a racist.
This actually happened to my wife and me at a dinner party. A friend of ours expressed the opinion that there was no reason to vote against Obama except for racism. Since we couldn't care less what color he was, I was flabbergasted. I don't think the person even realized she had implicitly labelled us as racists. Race had nothing to do with it. But my dinner party experience has been replayed millions of times over lately, both in public and in private. Now, with most people, if polls can be believed, opposing Obama's policies, the opinion makers on the left have taken up the meme that the race card must be played again, and again, and again.
I don't know how much of this decision by the left reflects a disconnection from reality or a cynical calculation that the strategy worked well for them in the past, so it should work this time as well. But when most of the country, for reasons having nothing to do with race, dislikes specific policies and is called racist for daring to say so, it doesn't sit well. And when those people are called racists no matter what they do, it begins not to matter to them. And when they see that most of their fellow citizens are labelled the same way, it matters even less. In other words, when everybody is a racist, nobody is - at least in the sense that the epithet loses its sting and the word loses much of its descriptive power.
The hard left is destroying a useful word. Honest minded people can rejoice that to some extent that they have already freed us from the power of its false application. The danger, of course, is that when a situation really calls for the word, it may have lost its power there as well.