Post-Race(/ism)-ism

NWRepublican has long been a consistent, theoretically agile voice of the Northwestern libertarian blogo-tendency, and blogger ZEO12 inaugurates a new era of white, male hero narrative in his recent post about the end of 'racism' discourse as a rhetorical weapon of the Left. ZEO12 provides a great deal of food for thought, discussing how conservatives like Joe Wilson represent a transcendence of PC-inspired white guilt, and a new, redemptive willingness on the part of patriots to endure inconvenient, once-paralyzing charges of 'racism' from what he (and Pat Moynihan) call the "liberal left."

[T]oday a curious thing is happening. The charge of “racism” appears to be losing its power to intimidate. In the past, a charge of racism, no matter how baseless, made opponents give up a fight and shrink back into a corner. However, today average Americans who have lived through the decades of racial ultra-sensitivity, are finally waking up to the fact that no matter what they do, no matter how hard they try to prove that they are not racist, it will never be enough to stop the liberal left from using the charge of “racism” against them. So, they are giving up trying. They are becoming unconcerned if they are called "racist." Since they know the charge will be thrown at them no matter what they do, it doesn’t matter any more. And with that, the charge of “racism” has lost its power to intimidate.

I congratulate ZEO12, and like-minded readers, on this new-found confidence and sense of direction, for it restores my confidence that Obama's (more "multicultural") neoliberalism will remain hegemonic until conservatives abandon these market-friendly Rand-spasms, throwback-y white-identity-politics, and gun-related theatrics, in order to hatch a worldview that endeavors to resemble the world of USA, 2009. There can be no better evidence that the Tea Party movement, however spectacular and provocative, is in some ways a non-economic, pyrrhic cultural campaign to restore a definitively-vanquished (WASP-y) America, than this class of assertion. It is an assertion, not-so-coincidentally, built upon this genre of flag-covered-clothing-wearing, "greatest country in the goddamn world"-intoning, self-congratulation:

And, the truth of the matter is that America today is, by any objective measure, the most racially tolerant and diverse culture on the planet today and undoubtedly in history. Americans, far, far more than any other people, nation, or culture, have gone to great lengths to demonstrate that they are not racist and that their nation is no longer racist.

Despite theoretically dwelling in the same region of the same country on the same planet, the assertions above speak to an equally "objectively measurable" fact: ZEO12 and I live on entirely different rocks. This allows me to enjoy his writing, admire his satirical wiles, and wish him good luck on his home planet: that, after all, is what agreeing to disagree should be all about.