What's Next

A few days before the election I had lunch with some of my liberal friends. (I do have liberal friends. An English professor without liberal friends probably has no friends at all.) I enjoy their company. They usually inspire me to write, but immediately after the election, for obvious reasons, I felt pretty uninspired.

Then a few days later I heard a conversation on one of the news shows, and another on a political talk show, each recalling something I had heard from my liberal friends, and I began to recognize the fallacy that is going to be the first line of defense for the Obama Administration. As happened so often in the election, each of these conversations, no matter the original topic, came promptly around to the charge of racism. The groundwork has been laid, and from this point on you can be sure that any opposition to President Obama and his policies will, by definition, be racist.

That sounds so stark, and frankly ridiculous, when presented as a conclusion, but the deft academic gymnastics that are employed to establish the charge are worth examination. The argument goes like this: If you object to Obama's long-term relationship with terrorist William Ayers, what you are objecting to in essence is that Barack Obama is not "one of us." The average person of good judgment of course would never consider fraternizing with a person of that character, but President-elect Obama is smart enough and dedicated enough to handle such a relationship without being tainted. He's not like you and me, and if you object to that, it's because you hate and fear anyone that is different from you, someone who is "not one of us." (By the way, don't even raise the question of elitism in this regard. Anyone who considers any member of an oppressed race as elitist is clearly making an insensitive and racist argument. You don't want to go there.)

If you reject him because of his affiliation with a church where race-baiting and hate speech are part of the worship service, it's because you don't understand the Black Christian experience, and what you're really saying is "he's not one of us." If you think his tax policies and spending plan turn too much toward government control and too far from the free market, when you call that socialism you're trying to distance him from the mainstream of white American society and say "he's not one of us."

Now here's the payoff. The rejection of his "otherness" (one of those wonderful, made-up academic terms that supposedly freshens a stale concept by its very childishness) converts all these objections into an objection to his race; thus, rejection of his elitist attitudes, disapproval of his poor judgment in friends, disagreement with his fiscal policies, even concern over his lack of experience are all just code words to hide irrational, evil, racist opposition. (Fallacy Alert: Over-generalizing.) It's a very neatly packed argument, provided you don't look too closely at the label.

Besides being a vast over-generalization--for certainly it is possible to reject unsound, out-dated, Keynesian socialism or other leadership flaws without even knowing the racial heritage of the man--besides being an over-generalization, this argument is a classic red herring, a distraction right down to its spiny, segmented vertebrae (see Fallacies: Red herring).

But it's a red herring on steroids. When liberals deflect any single argument by calling it racism, they turn the discussion away from an argument that is capable of question, difficult to win, and toward an argument they cannot lose. Once the opponent must defend against the charge of racism, the debate is won. Better still, when they can group all objections into just one, and that one is the oppositions' "obvious" racism, then they never have to deal with logic or policy at all. No challenge has to be addressed as a discreet, rational issue. They can all be turned aside in one smooth counter-stroke as racist code words, not only not worthy of an answer, but clearly indicative of a moral failing in the opponent. You have to admire the audacity, to employ one of the President-elect's favorite words. This is a red herring the size of a halibut!

My timing, of course is a bit behind. It would have been useful to have posted this before the election, but have no fear. The charge of racism is not going away for at least the next four years. This particular fallacy worked well for liberals in the recent campaign, and if the Clinton Presidency taught us anything, it's that the campaign for the second term begins with the first inaugural. Don't expect the Obama team to be throwing down their tools anytime soon. If conservatives don't speak out and identify this tactic for the distraction it is, racism will certainly be the defining topic of debate for the entire Obama presidency.