Perfectly Clear

Racial, gender, and ethnic diversity matters, of course, but political correctness (PC) tied to bourgeois identity politics can be deadly to Left thinkers and activists and to the causes of peace and social justice. Part of what made the deeply conservative Barack Obama attractive to the U.S. corporate and imperial establishment during the long run up to the 2008 presidential election was the American power elite’s reasonable, born-out expectation that Obama’s skin color and status as a First Black President (FBP) would help make progressives, leftists, and serious liberals reluctant to forthrightly protest his coming service to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, class, empire, and (curiously and stealthily enough) white privilege. Smart power brokers calculated correctly that political correctness around race – and the related fear of being considered racist because one dared to criticize a FBP – would help keep the left in check on Obama’s corporatist, Wall Street-pleasing, and imperial policies.

With Hillary Clinton in the White House (the likely though hardly certain outcome of the coming presidential election), we’ll have some of the same problem around gender. Numerous progressives, liberals, and even leftists will be unduly reluctant to criticize an arch-militarist, super-corporatist Clinton45 White House because of Hillary’s status (should she win) as a First Female President (FFP).--PS

Paul Street homes in on the reality of the power-elite vetting process that gave us Obama and will soon enough, barring an upset, give us Clinton.

This is about as fine of an elucidation of how it works that I've seen recently.

I addressed some of the same points, albeit with lesser clarity, in this April 15 piece at CP.


TS