Every Revolution Eats Its Young

David Brooks takes a jaundiced look at the competing identity politics being used by the Clinton and Obama campaigns. He sees the race and gender cards being played by the two camps as cynical attempts to see who can be the bigger victim.

But Clinton’s real problem is that she is caught in a trap, which you might call The Identity Trap.

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.

All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity politics are now being exploited by the Clinton and Obama campaigns against each other. They are competing to play the victim. They are both accusing each other of insensitivity. They are both deliberately misinterpreting each other’s comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally retrograde.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

The tap dancing can get pretty absurd:

Even in this moment of stress, Clinton wants to have it both ways. She wants to be emblematic of her gender and liberated from race and gender politics. As she told Tim Russert on Sunday: “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us wants to inject race or gender in this campaign. We’re running as individuals.”

As he puts it, every revolution eventually ends up eating its offspring. Brooks notes that all this victimology is not playing well with the younger voters. He believes this is why a sort of de facto truce is emerging. That started yesterday with Obama trying to tamp the issues down. But one does have to wonder how much damage has already been done.

One other thing that occurs to me: Brooks thinks (correctly) that Hispanic voters are quite important. So how much damage is Clinton doing with that bloc by having her surrogates trying to disenfranchise a lot of them in Nevada? Identity politics. It's a lot like trying to perform Riverdance in a minefield.