Barack Obama has a problem, and if it were not for this one problem, he would easily be elected president.  As it is, because of this problem, the impossible John Mc­Cain actually has a chance.  The problem is white people.  Yes, it is true that the majority of Obama supporters are white people, but most of them fall into the category of self-hating whites otherwise known as liberals.  Since a liberal—as I never tire of quoting (from Robert Frost)—is someone who would not take his own side in an argument, liberals and leftists spend their lives betraying every attachment that might command the loyalty of ordinary people.

Rich liberals naturally support high taxes and extravagant government expenditures on the poor, preferably the undeserving poor.  A male liberal—we can hardly call such creatures men—favors women’s rights, heterosexual liberals favor “gay marriage,” liberal parents care more about other people’s children than they do their own, and European-American liberals prefer all cultures to that of Europe.  They are Gilbert’s “idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this and every country but his own.”  And, if these idiots condescend to note their own skin color, they hate it, or at least they think they do.

Mr. Obama may or may not like the white liberals who burn incense to his TV images that fill up the evening-news broadcasts, but he knows he cannot stand the illiberal whites who have not yet learned to hate themselves.  Obama spent two decades attending Trinity United Church of Christ and claimed its pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as his friend and mentor before discovering that Wright was an antiwhite bigot.  Even a politician scheming for power must have occasionally turned his thoughts away from himself and paid attention to the sermons that routinely demonized whites.

Until Wright’s racism became an issue, Obama idolized the man and absorbed his bigotry.  He even borrowed his comically pretentious book title The Audacity of Hope from one of Wright’s sermons.  The Wright story does have its—if you will pardon the expression—lighter side.  It is Obama’s membership in Wright’s “church” that has justified his claim to be a Christian, and his claim to be a Christian is his best evidence that he was never a Muslim.  No one has called him on this, so far as I know, even Christians who are fully aware that the United Church of Christ has about as much to do with to do with the historical Christian Faith as Reform Judaism has with the religion of Moses and Isaiah.

Some Christians have questioned Obama’s credentials as a Christian because of his support for abortion and infanticide, but in the UCC a woman’s right to kill her children is part of the creed, perhaps the only article of faith (apart from support for “gay marriage”) from which no dissent is permitted.  When the UCC says “God is still speaking,” they do not bother to explain why their god has been contradicting himself so much.  I used to think black people had more sense than to put any stock in the great antichurch known as the United Church of Christ, but in joining the middle class, upwardly mobile blacks have apparently become as gullible and shallow as their white counterparts.

If membership in the UCC is the best argument Obama has for refuting the claim that he is a Muslim, he might as well go back to the Indonesian madrassa in which he studied.  Otherwise, he would have to explain how the leader of the Nation of Islam came to speak at his supposedly Christian “church.”  But, I suppose, better Louis Farrakhan than Jeremiah Wright or Rick Warren or Pastor Joel Hunter, the “Christian” “conservative” who claims to be convinced of Obama’s religious sincerity and offered a prayer at the Democratic Party’s Pandemonium in Denver.  No, I do not think Barack Obama worships Allah or any other “god” he cannot see in his own mirror.  In the solipsistic universe he makes up from speech to speech, press conference to press conference, there is no god but Barack and Obama is his prophet.

When Obama and McCain emerged as front runners, I knew that I had forfeited any right I had to talk about politics.  Up to that point I had always regarded myself, on the cynicism scale, as several points beyond H.L. Mencken when he famously observed that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, but to my horror I realized that I had been too naive, too optimistic, too trusting.  Democrats and Republicans were actually going to entrust their country to two of the silliest characters in the U.S. Senate, a body generally distinguished only for knavery, folly, and ignorance.

We have already taken our swings at McCain, but he at least has a distinguished résumé if not a distinguished career.  But Obama?  He was a political unknown in Illinois until the idiot Republicans, in one of their frequent fits of self-destructive frenzy, decided to run Alan Keyes against him.  That is how this Marxist nonentity entered the Senate, where he did nothing for a year or so and then decided that he was that any boy in America who could refuse to grow up, and become president.  And, although he made Hillary Clinton appear to be a conservative or at least a pragmatist, people still voted for him.  Who are they?

I understand why blacks vote for a black candidate, though by the same token Germans should revere the memory of Adolf Hitler and Georgians would have a statue of Stalin in his hometown.  (Oops.)  I can also understand why public-school teachers, social workers, and other welfare dependents vote for a politician who will certainly increase their income and power.  But setting aside race loyalty, greed, and the libido dominandi, how could anyone hold his nose long enough to vote for somebody who talks in that smarmy adenoidal voice?  When Obama gets on his pulpit, it sounds almost like he is swallowing his words in a sea of high-toned phlegm.  He does not so much speak as (to quote what Alexander Wolcott once said of a theater audience) strum his catarrh.  His self-righteous public persona should grate on the sensibilities of normal people.  Worse than nails on a chalkboard, the Obama public voice is as disturbing as the voice of Mariah Carey played on the headphones of the person you are condemned to sit next to on the flight from Chicago to Paris.  And yet, some otherwise normal people voted for him in the primaries and will vote for him again in the general election.  Why—or, rather, how?

During the primary season I found myself in San Antonio.  The driver my friend arranged for me was the chatty type who thinks his life history is bound to interest his passengers.  He was, in fact, amusing, and he had knocked around enough to have seen a few things.  He was white, although on the bohemian side, a fairly normal guy, and he was enthusiastic about Obama to the point of being inspired.  Assuming the Freudian blank screen that is increasingly necessary, I asked him why.  Well, he explained, anyone would be better than Bush.

That is not an easy argument to refute—except in the case of Obama and McCain.  The one great comfort of this campaign is that we know the outcome: Whoever wins will turn out to be the worst president in American history.  What I wanted to ask the driver, though, was how a working-class white guy could vote for a man who so obviously hates him and his people.  He was, admittedly, not one of those gun-toting religious bigots Obama is so afraid of, but an Obama administration, backed by a Democratic Congress, will certainly do everything possible to enhance the opportunities of everyone who is not white while forcing white taxpayers—and, let us be honest, we do pay most of the taxes because we have most of the money—to fund Operation White Out.

Here is an allegedly true story “Overheard in New York City”:

Thug #1: Yo, I can’t wait for Obama to win the election, yo!  He gonna make white people illegal!

 

Thug #2 (stopping dead in his tracks): You one ignorant muthaf–ka, ain’t you?

The first thug, though perhaps a dreamer, does at least reflect something of the hopes that are entertained in the event of an Obama victory.

The racial logic of the Obama campaign is far from new; it is as old as affirmative-action programs that ask white parents to take privileges away from their own children to give special assistance to the children of strangers, so long as the strangers belong to a different race.  It is one thing to argue that we should practice charity toward the poor or even that we should be selectively more charitable, for one reason or another, to this or that group of poor people, but quite another to ask me to put the needs of my own children—along with those of my nieces and nephews, grandchildren and cousins, neighbors and friends—behind the needs of other people.  However you describe affirmative action and minority set-asides, they represent a deliberate and systematic policy of discrimination against people like me in favor of people not like me simply because they are not like me.  Such disgusting and immoral policies are worse than any form of racism I have encountered because they teach us to hate precisely those whom we are most supposed to love.

An electorate that accepted the affirmative-action policies imposed on it by the political class had already made a suicide pact.  American whites simply cannot wait to be marginalized, and in the media the pundits are already reserving places in the internment camps—not just for you and me but also for themselves.  One of the big news stories this summer was the revised date by which whites will be a minority in the United States.  News readers and columnists could barely contain their glee and actually took some time off from extolling Obama to celebrate the end of their civilization.  On ABC News Charlie Gibson and the gang were like small children at a birthday party, unable to decide which to eat first—the cake or the ice cream.  “Oh boy,” you could hear their minds turning over, “first we elect Obama, and then we’re going to be aliens in our own country.”

Yes, I know.  Only a bigot would describe the Obama campaign as an expression of antiwhite racism.  Somebody, call the Southern Poverty Law Center so they can advance me in their rankings.  Bigotry these days has nothing to do with the way you treat people or even with what you actually say.  Bigotry is what they say you are thinking when they play your speech backward at half speed.  As I have said long ago and many times, we have only two choices in America: The first is a society that is legally color-blind—that is, a political and judicial system that does not discriminate on the basis of race though it cannot, on the other hand, prevent people from following their personal whims in private life.  This is what I have always advocated, and it may be one of many impossible dreams arising from the classical-liberal fantasy that must be dear to the hearts of Americans.  The other choice is a society that discriminates on the basis of race, which leaves any sane person no choice but to support the race of his children.

Christians, Catholics especially, will inevitably insist that such discrimination is contrary to the Faith.  They are badly mistaken.  The fact is that in a flawed world, we must defend ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and our fellow citizens from those who would prey upon them, whether the enemies are domestic criminals or foreign invaders.  When distinctions, no matter how arbitrarily arrived at, are made, we have a duty to make sure that they are not used to cut against the interests of “our” people as opposed to “their” people.  In the color-blind world of liberal theory, there would be no special programs privileging people of one color over another, and people like Jeremiah Wright and Al Sharpton would not be given a public forum.  But when a movement has been created to marginalize and extinguish the group you happen to belong to, you are justified in protecting your own interests and in refusing to sign on to a suicide pact.

The universalism invoked so often by the Catholic left is a product of the anti-Christian Enlightenment that borrows Christian phrases and puts them to decidedly non-Christian uses.  A good example is the pseudo-Catholic support for the welfare state, which invokes the Christian language of charity as a justification for imposing Marxist policies that destroy true charity.  The choice that we face today is not between sentimental universalism—whether in its anti-Christian Marxist or pseudo-Christian form—and racialism, but between the historic Christian view, demanding justice and charity to strangers but also requiring us to fulfill our particular duties to family, friends, and fellow citizens, and two ideologies created in the Enlightenment, universalism and racial nationalism.  One does not have to be a Marxist to practice charity—quite the contrary—and one does not have to be an anti-Christian bigot to protect one’s children.

A friend of mine, whom I know as well as I know myself, recently had an experience that is a portent of things to come.  He lives in what used to be a nice, quiet neighborhood.  When a black pastor moved in across the street, my friend and his wife brought over a plate of cookies, but the new neighbors turned out to be fond of loud parties that often started late in the evening and went on until two or three in the morning.  The entire neighborhood was increasingly upset.  One single woman who called the police was accosted by the pastor, who threatened her if she ever complained again.  She did not.

One night this summer my friend was one of many people who did call the police.  They took their sweet time in arriving and then, since the neighbors (who apparently listen to a police scanner) quietened down a bit for the cops’ benefit, left without taking action.  The party immediately went back into high gear.  My friend then made the mistake of going into the yard, where one of his sons was politely requesting partygoers not to block the driveway and warning them that if they parked too close to the intersection, their cars might get hit.  On an apparently pre-arranged signal delivered by cell phone, the preacher—a large man in his 40’s—and perhaps five young men came charging across the street, screaming obscenities, insults, and threats.  The preacher led the gang, saying ridiculous things about my friend’s long-dead mother, trying to provoke him—rather an old and feeble scholar—into swinging, which would then justify the beating they were threatening.  Failing in their initial objective, the youths attacked his son and two young men who were with him.  When the police finally responded to the 911 call, the two black officers in charge decided to arrest my friend’s son, because in fighting off the attack, he hit one of them with a small glass, which he had been holding in his hand.  As they put him in the squad car, the crowd across the street broke out in a spontaneous chant, “Obama!  Obama!”

No arrest was made because, as my friend pointed out to the police, the first punch was thrown on his property by one of the black youths who was positively identified.  “Charge both or charge none,” he told them.  The police left, and once again the party roared back to life until at 2 a.m. they returned, forced people to leave, and issued a citation.  The next day the preacher tried to stir up more trouble by telling the police that my friend and his son had scattered watermelon rinds and chicken bones in his yard—obviously a racial provocation.  Unfortunately, the police also noted that there were rinds and bones in my friend’s yard, the obvious detritus of the preacher’s own party.  They shook their heads.  My friend is a conservative who was so disgusted with McCain that he was tempted to vote for Barack Obama.  I think he knows better now.

The Obamanation we are facing is a racist nation that will leave few honorable options for members of the coming American minority.  They can, of course, emigrate, an option that gets more attractive every day.  If they stay, they will have to resist the temptation to turn liberal and become signatories to the suicide pact.  If they refuse to sell out, all too many will lose their souls in a poisonous racial hatred that may drag them down as low as Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.  In resisting the campaign to “make white people illegal,” as every sensible person of any color should, decent Americans should not make the mistake of blaming black people for the suicide we continue to inflict on ourselves.  We white males are the problem, not blacks, women, homosexuals, or Mexicans.  We—at least the liberal part of “we”—turned away from our religion and our civilization; we made war on property and marriage; we rejected Haydn and Sophocles in favor of John Cage and Kate Chopin.  We have emasculated ourselves, pithed our brains, destroyed our vision and hearing, and now all that is left is to vote for a candidate whose rhetoric at least is telling us to fling our worthless carcasses off the cliff.  It is almost enough to make an otherwise sane American vote for John McCain.