Americans increasingly live in communities with people they “agree with,” laments Clinton

A further signal (as though any were needed) that Obawan’s election will not mean the deliverance of America from white racism:

PHILADELPHIA (AP)—Former President Bill Clinton warned Saturday that the country is becoming increasingly polarized despite the historic nature of the Democratic primary.

Speaking at the National Governors Association’s semiannual meeting, Clinton noted that on the one hand, following the early stages of the Democratic primary, “the surviving candidates were an African-American man and a woman.”

Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, battled for the Democratic nomination into June with fellow Democrat Barack Obama, son of a white mother and black father.

But this achievement was overshadowed by a growing distance between Americans, said Clinton.

“Underneath this apparent accommodation to our diversity, we are in fact hunkering down in communities of like-mindedness, and it affects our ability to manage difference,” Clinton said.

Clinton developed his 44-minute speech from themes he said he drew from a new book, “The Big Sort,” by Bill Bishop.

He cited statistics compiled by Bishop that found that in the 1976 presidential election, only 20 percent of the nation’s counties voted for Jimmy Carter or President Ford by more than a 20 percent margin.

By contrast, 48 percent of the nation’s counties in 2004 voted for John Kerry or President Bush by more than 20 points, Clinton said.

“We were sorting ourselves out by choosing to live with people that we agree with,” Clinton said.

Clinton, of course, doesn’t consider that people may have very good reasons for desiring to separate themselves into like-minded communities. Indeed, since the very mission of modern liberalism is to destroy the belief in any commonly accepted moral truth or cultural allegiance and thus divide society into mutually incompatible belief systems and mutually incompatible groups,—homosexual liberationists and the “transgendered community” versus “straights,” unassimilable aliens versus natives, parents who let their children run wild in public versus people who expect decent behavior from their neighbors and desire peace and quiet—why should the self-segregation that Clinton regrets be any surprise?

Clinton himself gave people a very good reason to avoid people like Clinton when he came to New York City during the 1993 mayoral election campaign and said (as reported in the New York Times) that the only reason people could have not to vote for Mayor David Dinkins was that they didn’t feel comfortable with people who looked different from themselves. “I’m not saying this is overt racism,” he said, meaning that it was covert racism.

Now, given that liberals think that conservatives are racists, why would conservatives want to live around liberals?

By the way, a similar attitude situation was a major reason for the South’s secession from the Union. The Southerners were under the unceasing moral condemnation of the North because of slavery, and, very understandably, they didn’t like it. This feeling reached a climax when many Northern newspapers justified or condoned John Brown’s raid on the arsenal in Harper’s Ferry in 1859 in his attempt to start a slave rebellion. If the South had said to the North, “Look, you don’t like us, we don’t get along, our social systems are mutually incompatible, your newspapers even support an attempt to give our slaves guns with which to murder us, so wouldn’t it be better for us to go our separate ways?”—if they had sought in a respectful, mutually consensual manner to secede from the Union, the Southern cause would have stood on far more reasonable grounds than it actually did. Instead, by treating the United States of America as an at-will contract, no more perdurable than a day laborer’s job, by contemptuously dissolving the Union, and then by launching a military attack against the United States, and also by absurdly claiming that the South had equally valid grounds for breaking from the Union that the Colonies had had for breaking from Great Britain in 1776 (reality check: when the Colonies declared independence, Great Britain had been at war with them for a year; when the South declared independence, all that had happened was the lawful election of a U.S. president), the South delegitimized the secessionist cause.

But this doesn’t mean that secessionism as such is always wrong.

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By the way, George W. Bush and his allies have been far worse than Clinton in condemning as racists all people who disagree with them, as I showed in the blog entry, Noonan on the parting of the ways, posted during the battle over the 2007 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

I suppose it never occurs to Bill Clinton that certain ways of living, certain environments and certain ways or organizing social life, actually produce certain ways of thinking, so that when people live in the same kind of place they will come to think similarly. Or perhaps he realizes this fact, and hates it, wishing to abolish all ways of life not conducive to liberal indifferentism. That’s probably more like it.

Rick Darby writes:

How come I can’t find a community of like-minded people to live in?

LA replies:

LOL (sadly).

Because your likeminded community isn’t big enough among 300 million Americans (or should I say, among 300 million people living in the United States.).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 15, 2008 01:51 PM | Send