John O’Sullivan touts Obama as the conservative candidate of national unity

Let us try to understand John O’Sullivan’s recent article on the election. O’Sullivan being one of those writers who never says in 900 words what he can say in 2,500, we will skip past the first two thirds of the article, a disquisition on 19th and early 20th century British politics, and get to his actual subject: which presidential candidate should conservatives support in the USA in 2008? Shockingly, the one-time editor of the flagship magazine of American conservatism recommends that conservatives who care about national identity vote for the leftist Barack Obama, arguing that Obama’s theme of a “post-racial” America is compatible with conservatism:

What does the conservative interest indicate on this occasion? It seems possible and even likely that a victory by Barack Obama would be the climax of this long policy of fully integrating black and minority America into the nation and putting the querulous politics of race behind us. As I have argued elsewhere, the mere fact of a President Obama would strengthen and stabilize America just as a Polish pope undermined Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. [The meaning of pope comparison is obscure.] Black and minority America would be fully integrated into the nation as the British working class was fully integrated into the British political nation by George V. Americans would feel better about themselves and the world would feel very differently about America. The conservative interest, as defined above, would therefore smile upon a vote for Obama.

I don’t need to explain to readers how off-base this is. However, O’Sullivan at least sees the other side of the issue:

Notice that this analysis does not depend upon the actual policies pursued by Obama. It is the fact of an Obama presidency that would be a long step towards national cohesion. That fact is enhanced by Obama’s rhetoric of one nation. But what if Obama’s actual policies weaken this cohesion? Since he seems to favor more or less open immigration, multiculturalism, bilingual education, racial preferences, and other policies that emphasize and reward ethnic division, he might well obstruct and delay the overcoming of race that his presidency symbolizes and contradict the rhetoric of one nation used by Obama to such good effect with voters of all races. Obama’s proposed policies therefore open a line of attack for Republicans to exploit. Unfortunately for the GOP, John McCain takes almost exactly the same position on these “National Question” issues as Obama—without having the Democrat’s symbolic or rhetorical appeal.

If the National Question is to be the main deciding factor, then the conservative [sic] would point to a vote for Obama. Any Republican argument for supporting McCain over Obama has to rest on all the other policies where they differ—taxes, national security, the economy, health, etc. Here, of course, McCain enjoys an overwhelming advantage with potential conservative voters.

The argument is intricate enough to make you pull your hair out. O’Sullivan is saying that while Obama would be symbolically unifying, and thus positive from a conservative point of view, his policies on the National Question would be divisive, and thus bad from a conservative point of view. But, O’Sullivan continues, McCain’s policies on the National Question will also be divisive, without Obama’s unifying thematics. Therefore if national unity is your bag, vote for Obama. But if other issues such as the economy move you, vote for McCain.

It’s simply bizarre. O’Sullivan is urging national-unity conservatives to vote for a candidate whose policies he describes as anti-national unity, because O’Sullivan likes that candidate’s symbolism, even though he admits that the candidate’s policies contradict his symbolism. In short, O’Sullivan is buying into Obama’s feel-good rhetoric, even as he admits that the rhetoric is a lie.

Apart from the obvious and appalling folly of urging conservatives to vote for the leftist Obama under any circumstances (why couldn’t anti-McCain conservatives simply decline to vote for either candidate?), here is the deeper issue that O’Sullivan gets wrong. He says that if Obama enacts open-borders, multicultural, and anti-white, race preference policies, that will undermine Obama’s unifying message. In reality, however, there is no need for Obama to enact such policies, since they are already massively in place. Therefore if Obama does nothing on immigration, multiculturalism, and race preferences, if he leaves them as exactly as they are, America under his presidency will still be a country with deeply institutionalized race-divisive policies of the kind O’Sullivan deplores and sees as the antithesis of conservatism.

Again, O’Sullivan thinks that Obama would be contradicting his national unity theme if he increased multiculturalism, increased illegal immigration, increased race preferences. O’Sullivan doesn’t see that if Obama simply allowed those policies to continue in their present form, his claim to be America’s race-transcending unifier would be exposed as a fraud. As I demonstrated yesterday in my article, “What is post-racial America?”, Obama cannot declare that he will inaugurate a “beyond-race” America, when America has an all-encompassing system of race-conscious preferences for certain races, a system Obama fully supports. By O’Sullivan’s own logic, the only way that Obama could unify the country racially would be if he rejected multiculturalism and terminated race preferences. Since no one, least of all O’Sullivan, expects Obama to do that, O’Sullivan’s support for Obama as the candidate of racial unity is revealed as senseless.

It only makes sense if what O’Sullivan means by “fully integrating black and minority America into the nation and putting the querulous politics of race behind us” is that white conservatives accept mass illegal immigration, accept multicultural education, accept race preference policies, and stop complaining about any of these things—which, by the way, is exactly what I said yesterday is the real meaning of Obama’s “post-racial” America. Absent further clarification from O’Sullivan, he appears to have signed on to a leftist vision of “national unity” which in reality consists of the white American majority surrendering to the anti-white, anti-American system of multiculturalism and race preferences.

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Tim W. writes:

O’Sullivan’s argument is bizarre. I’ve argued that Obama’s election might have a positive side-effect, namely that PC brainwashed whites could wake up to the reality that multiculturalism and diversity are destroying us. As long as the presidents throwing open our borders and imposing race preferences on us remain lily white, and even Republican in many cases, whites just sit back and take it and think things aren’t all that bad.

But O’Sullivan seems to be saying that Obama could truly unify us in some 1960s communal sense. That under his leadership, we could all come together as Americans and drop all these divisive concerns about race and ethnicity. As if blacks would say, “Wow! A black man has won the highest office in the land! I guess America isn’t racist after all and we in the black community should all stop complaining!” There’s not a chance in the world of that happening.

LA replies:

I’ve told before of how O’Sullivan in the 1990s gave a talk at the Philadelphia Society in which he said that if America became all-black, it would change nothing, because blacks are as American as whites.

When we consider the profound anti-Americanism and anti-white resentment in much of black America, not to mention the racial differences in intellectual abilities and self-control, the idea of an all-black America happily carrying on American civilization is laughable.

What can one say? O’Sullivan in the 1990s had enough insight to publish serious articles criticizing immigration from the point of view that it threatens American culture; he even published a big symposium on The Bell Curve. Yet despite that, he lives in some liberal fantasy in which blacks are just like whites and the two races under Barack Obama sing Kumbaya, even while blacks continue to receive the vast network of race-baced benefits that has turned people like Michelle Obama into self-important America haters.

James P. writes:

O’Sullivan further explained his article at the Corner. I found his conclusion rather ludicrous:

I think Obama’s rhetoric of American unity is probably a better guide to his potential presidency than his liberal voting record.

What does this mean? One cannot divorce the rhetoric from the agenda. O’Sullivan is a complete moron if he thinks Obama will be all anodyne rhetoric and no action. Calls for “unity” have no meaning at all unless one intends to unify the country in order to do something. And gee, what should we think a guy with a liberal voting record most likely intends to do? Manifestly, the “rhetoric of American unity” will be the vehicle for implementing Obama’s liberal agenda, and when a charismatic, popular liberal President calls for “unity”, this means “shut up and accept my liberal political program”. Republicans are going to pay a heavy price, but nevertheless it is their right and duty to reject calls for unity, bipartisanship, and togetherness that are really calls for them to surrender.

LA replies:

I just tried reading that overlong Corner entry. The man is incapable of expressing himself cogently. The only sentence I can make sense of is the one you quote.

Kevin S. writes:

The man is clearly possessed of a liberal thought process and end vision: simply wishing hard enough that something were so can make it so, no matter how impossible it actually is. We are NOT all the same and we are NOT all equal in various fields of endeavor. No amount of propaganda, wishful thinking, policy, or quotas can ever change that. Wholesale genetic manipulation on a science fiction level we only dream of is perhaps the only possibility at some far future date since racial genetics accounts for the overwhelming majority of those differences. Hating that fact does not alter it.

Paul Gottfried writes:

Although I could see a radical right reason to support Obama against the bogus conservative (neocon) McCain, the justification offered by O’Sullivan sounds idiotic. But as I point out in my recent monograph on the American Right, appeasing blacks and ‘getting the race issue behind us” by electing blacks to high office has been a National Review theme for about thirty years. It was Buckley who originally made the silly argument that is now coming from O’Sullivan.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 26, 2008 10:16 AM | Send