Tim Wise and the End of Policy

Tim Wise recently posted a Twitter thread arguing that Democrats can win by turning the 2020 campaign into a moral crusade against racism rather than a policy debate. Many commentators, including celebrities such as Jimmy Kimmel and Alyssa Milano, agreed. In a post at Medium, Mr. Wise suggested Democrats could learn from his efforts in fighting David Duke’s Senate and gubernatorial campaigns. “What ultimately stopped Duke was the crafting of a moral message against hate,” he wrote, “one that could inspire the progressive base (especially people of color), yet also appeal to reasonable conservatives and moderates.” The Washington Post gave Mr. Wise a platform to make the same argument.

The obsession with “racism” has reached a new high when fighting it need be the Democrats’ only policy. But Mr. Wise has put into words what “progressivism” is about: feelings rather than facts, indignation rather than policy, hatred rather than thought. America needs only one goal: the destruction of “racism.”

Tim Wise. (Photo credit: James Coreas, Wikipedia)

Alas, we live in astonishing times in which many people — white and non-white — act just as primitively as Mr. Wise wants them to. But he should consider one little detail: Donald Trump is not David Duke. Donald Trump is president of the United States. Virtually every Republican from President George H.W. Bush on down opposed David Duke, but Republican voters and elected officials overwhelmingly support President Trump. Most conservative institutions that opposed Donald Trump in 2016 support him today. “Never Trump” conservatives such as Erick Erickson and Glenn Beck have switched sides.

Unlike David Duke, President Trump does not criticize Jews. Instead, he attacks progressive Democrats for alleged anti-Semitism. Donald Trump was never in the Ku Klux Klan, nor are there pictures of him in a Nazi uniform. Instead, Donald Trump hobnobs with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. During his 2016 campaign, President Trump never explicitly appealed to white voters nor accused his opponents of being anti-white.

Mr. Wise accuses President Trump of having called “white supremacists” “very fine people.” Conservative media easily and routinely show this is not true. When President Trump was criticized for telling “The Squad” to “go back” to their native countries, Republican support for him rose. A new poll shows his overall approval rating also increased.

Progressives, celebrities, and many journalists accuse the president of “race-baiting” or “dog-whistling” — all subjective charges that mean very little. In fact, data from the Pew Research Center show that most whites have no racial consciousness, unlike majorities of every other race. Whites also think the country pays too much attention to race. Insisting President Trump and his base are “racist” is a rerun of Hillary Clinton’s failed “basket of deplorables” speech.

However, Tim Wise is right that increasing non-white voter turnout could overwhelm Republicans. Even aside from turnout, demographic change will make it harder for Republicans to win in 2020.

Mr. Trump still has a chance. Some suburban voters were repulsed by him in 2018, but it will be harder for Democrats to win over moderates in 2020. Democrats can’t appear moderate when non-white congressmen are clamoring for reparations and calling Democrat elders like Joe Biden “racists.”

Tim Wise says the GOP is a “white identity” party. He thinks President Trump is a “white nationalist” and an “authoritarian.” This is typical lefty foolishness. Polls show record-level voter concern about immigration, but the president has done little to stop it. He hasn’t even criticized racial preferences, and the administration has made no effort to make English the official language.

Objectively, the Trump Administration is to the left of the Clinton Administration on crime and of the Obama Administration on border control. If President Trump is a “white nationalist,” that term, as Orwell observed of “fascism,” is “almost entirely meaningless.” The supposedly “authoritarian” President Trump is one of the weakest presidents since the 1920s, often ignored by his own staff. He tweets rather than uses the powers of his office.

In Mr. Wise’s Medium column, he wrapped himself in the flag.

It is you, Mr. President, you and your cult, who hate this country. The only version of it you love is America, circa 1957. But that America is no longer, and we are better for it.

America is a nation in the process of becoming a pluralistic, multiracial, multicultural democracy. You and your cult hate that America: the only one that actually exists. You despise the very notion of it.

Mr. Wise argues that trying to “flip” or change the minds of Donald Trump’s voters is a “waste of time.” Instead, he calls “Trumpism” the real “threat to America.” What must he think about the 60 million people who voted for Donald Trump?

Mr. Wise has told us. In 2010, after Republican victory in the midterms, he fantasized happily about wanting white voters’ “hearts to stop beating . . . and for some of you real damn soon.” He later deleted his post and claimed he was “misinterpreted.” In 2012, he said “we live in a White Supremacist Apartheid System.” After President Obama’s re-election, he tweeted: “ATTENTION CONSERVATIVE WHITE PEOPLE: Yr nation has left the building . . . please follow it as soon as is practicable for you.” In 2017, when candidate Roy Moore won the Republican nomination, Mr. Wise declared it was time to “destroy white Alabama” if Mr. Moore won. This is, to use a leftist term, “eliminationist” rhetoric.

Mr. Wise seems to agree with Pat Buchanan that, if the Left triumphs, the country “will be so unalterably changed in a few years” that Donald Trump supporters “will never realize political power again, and your America will vanish in a different America.”

We are already on our way to that “different America.” Mr. Wise argues that “we are better” because it is no longer the America of 1957. How are we better?

It was white America that landed on the moon in 1969 while black groups protested. Income inequality was less severe in 1957; wages tracked productivity more closely. What many progressives want is, in effect, the relatively economically egalitarian America of 1957, but with fewer whites. (Coincidentally, a recently published study argues that 1957 was the happiest year of the 20th century, at least for the United Kingdom.)

Today, America’s academic performance is mediocre. Mass immigration means more Democrat votes, but lower wages, less social trust, and more welfare. Once-beautiful cities have human feces in the streets. Suicide rates are rising.

Of course, Mr. Wise’s whole point is that progressives should not focus on policies, but join the moral crusade of opposing a “racist.” Mr. Wise wants an election about “the nation we aspire to be” but would never examine the consequences of white dispossession. It’s questionable whether a majority-minority country with low rates of patriotism, civic participation, and basic respect for public symbols is even a nation. It would be more like a continent-sized shopping mall that needed better security.

Mr. Wise’s project requires willful ignorance, and even if whites did as he tells them, they still be called racist anyway. White Americans must speak the truth about race and its consequences. Most Americans may claim to like “diversity,” but they avoid it in their own lives. When it comes to where they live and where they send their children to school, most whites already agree with us. Even liberals do. It’s just a question of giving our people the moral courage to finally — finally — take our own side.