Malcolm’s ghost

Ronald Reagan’s grand coalition – the three-legged stool of social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and national defense hawks – has been shattered by a creeping secularism that carries with it an attitude of enervating moral relativism, the fiscal excesses of “compassionate” conservatism and the continuing cost of overseas adventurism. So many “isms”. Too many.

With the possible exception of a lethargic Fred Thompson, no candidate running for the GOP nomination is acceptable to all three wings of the electorate and the party orthodoxy. Mitt Romney may have come too late to his pro-life and pro-marriage convictions, while southern evangelicals narrow their eyes at his appreciation for Joeseph Smith, Jr.’s doctrinal innovations. Mike Huckabee is an economic populist, which makes him an uncomfortable party candidate, and former Baptist minister, which would make him an uncomfortable nominee. Rudy Giuliani has all those marriages, as well as a regrettable penchant for being photographed in drag at New York parties -those will not travel well. John McCain’s status as a maverick makes him popular in New Hampshire, but anathematizes him to party insiders while his genial stance on amnesty for illegal aliens grates on many. Too many.

It all makes for a fascinating and unpredictable primary struggle and has led to speculation of – quelle horreur! – a brokered convention. It’s early yet of course, and someone may fatally stumble to clear the field but in the interim we political junkies are popping corn and enjoying the drama.

Across the aisle, the Democratic Party has problems of its own. Unlike the more ideologically heterodox conservative candidates, they mostly all believe the same thing, varying in policy degree more often than kind. They do differ however in one significant thing: Each of them passionately believes that the best candidate to lead the country to “change” stares back at them from within the mirror. And what they see in that mirror defines what they see in the world.

For a generation at least, progressives in the Democratic party have been wedded to identity-based politics, the collaboration to power of self-selected and soi-disant victim groups identified by gender, economic stratum, sexual orientation and race, just to name a few. Their internal formations are inherently separatist, perpetuate marginalization in order to raise class consciousness and implicitly reject the idea of an overlying or unifying national identity. They are openly contemptuous of the notion of a common culture.

And now, as David Brooks points out in the NYT, two of their major constituencies stand on the brink of open, identity-based war:

Both Clinton and Obama have eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics. A Clinton victory wouldn’t just be a victory for one woman, it would be a victory for little girls everywhere. An Obama victory would be about completing the dream, keeping the dream alive, and so on.

Fair enough. The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other…

What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities. The Clintons are hitting Obama with everything they’ve got. The Obama subordinates are twisting every critique into a racial outrage in an effort to make all criticism morally off-limits.

It’s hard to look at all of this and not be stirred to contemplations about creative destruction. It’s also hard not to hear the ghost of Malcolm X speaking about chickens coming home to roost.

Interesting times.