Paul E. Gottfried

Reading an online response by someone described as “National Review’s chief domestic policy analyst,” with the mellifluous, politically correct name of “Reihan Salam,” addressed to Ron Unz of the American Conservative, I was struck by a stray reference to a group that Salam’s employers have not accorded the right of recognition. Salam observes that Unz, who edits a “paleoconservative” publication, has written a “thought-provoking” article on Hispanic immigration. Unz wishes to discourage further Hispanic immigration because it depresses wages in the U.S., but otherwise this publisher raises no substantive objection to the influx of Third World, uneducated population from south of our border.

Unz begins his brief by arguing that Hispanic crime, including in all probability crimes by illegals, is no higher than it is among the Anglo population. (Unfortunately, Ron's thesis has been debunked, but let's not dwell on that.) Furthermore, the Latino immigrants, according to Unz, are generally hard-working and make reasonable efforts to fit in. Unz states that Republican politicians have overreacted by declaring war on illegals and by engaging in supposedly xenophobic policies and rhetoric against the newcomers. His only objection against continued immigration from Latin America is that it’s depressing the wage structure for those already in the work force. Latino immigration has hurt vulnerable American wage-earners, by providing cheap, expendable labor.

According to Salam, Unz has gone outside the box of what he would expect from the right. He has properly condemned the anti-foreign gestures of the GOP, and he never raises those “cultural issues” that one hears, perhaps with a shudder, from “paleoconservatives.” But who, pray tell, is this last group? Although Salam devotes an entire essay to them, I don’t have a clue as to what he’s talking about. The people alluded to have something to do with how the Right used to be...and they tend to follow “the idiosyncratic political economist Murray Rothbard,” my late friend. Many of them have racial reasons for not wanting to flood the country with Hispanic immigrants, but Unz, to whom one could never ascribe the slightest twinge of racial or cultural Angst, is somehow a paradigmatic paleo. Indeed, engaging in discussion with Unz is the litmus test for whether Salam’s neoconservative camp is open to a “good-faith conversation” with a group on the right with which Salam “doesn’t agree very often.” One might note that if he did, he would in all probability have to apply for food stamps.

Recently I’ve been thinking about someone whose name is attached to an organization I’m currently president of, H.L. Mencken (1880-1956). For years I’ve tried to understand why the Baltimore Sage has been branded, mostly recently in The Weekly Standard (see here and here) and in a voluminous biography by Terry Teachout, as anti-Semitic and anti-Black. The closest I could come to documenting these charges is that Mencken joked in his diary about the bad table manners of an obviously Jewish diner in a club that he frequented. He also said in a moment of levity that “an anti-Semite is someone who dislikes Jews more than is absolutely necessary.” This, as everybody who knew him was aware of, was a quip that Murray Rothbard was fond of repeating.

As for Mencken’s supposed revulsion for Blacks, I can’t find any evidence of it, although he may not have used “African-American,” or whatever is the now fashionable PC term in referring to the minority in question. We know that Mencken criticized segregation in his native city of Baltimore. He also never tired of attacking lower class White Southerners of the kind who wanted to keep Blacks segregated. Indeed if I were going after Mencken for his intolerance, I would have to notice his invectives against Southern Fundamentalists rather than his scattered, insignificant jokes about Jews and Blacks. That said, however, White Southerners don’t count as victims in their own eyes or in anyone else’s. In fact their politicians and journalists seem quite happy to view them as onetime racial victimizers, who were redeemed by civil rights legislation.

In any case, it seems to me that the recent attacks on Mencken have nothing to do with his prejudices. Liberals and neocons hate him for taking stands that don’t have much to do with the accusations made against him. One, Mencken opposed America’s entry into both World Wars, and during the First World War, he was expressly pro-German. (He was after all a German-American.) His predilection for the Central Powers in 1914 elicited a bitter tirade from Fred Siegel in (where else?) The Weekly Standard (January 30, 2006), a screed that charges the “horrid” Mencken with being a lifelong enemy of democracy and decency. Supposedly Mencken’s fondness for Nietzsche (about whom he produced a not very useful or scholarly biography) shows for all to see that he worshipped the “will to power” and saw this incarnated in the Teutonic enemy of Anglo-American democratic civilization. Someone who took such reprehensible positions in foreign affairs, we have to infer from Siegel’s remarks, must also have been against Jews, who represent all that is good and radiant in the West and (lest we forget) Israel.

Today the American media, politicians of all stripes, and public educators will invariably fall into rapturous tones describing the black leader whose birthday is being celebrated, namely, Martin Luther King (1929-1968). King’s birthday is the only national holiday devoted to an individual American whose public observance has been commanded by Congress, and in 1983, this honor was accorded, with more or less bipartisan support. The same tribute is no longer extended to the founder of our country George Washington, or to our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, who is still widely honored for ending black slavery. Washington and Lincoln both now share a generic President’s Day that is wedged in between their two birthdays in February. The gallant Southern leader Robert E. Lee, whose birthday coincides with King’s and who after 1983 was to be co-celebrated in Southern states along with the black civil rights leader, has now fallen upon exceedingly hard times. Lee has become a non-person or even worse, someone identified with Southern slavery, although there is nothing to suggest that this Christian gentleman favored that institution or that he led the Confederate forces in Virginia for any reason other than the one he gave upon turning down an invitation to command the Union army—to protect his ancestral state against invasion.

There is a very clear relation to be drawn between these two recent developments, as my longtime friend Sam Francis delighted in pointing out. The replacement of Lee and Washington, who were related through Washington’s wife Martha, by King as the center of a public cult signaled a true “iconic revolution” in our country. Nor was this revolution in consciousness likely to end with the congressional enshrinement of King or with the public acknowledgement of his birthday. Every January, there takes place an orgy of guilt-tripping and pseudo-Christian penance, one that seems to become shriller and more robotized with the passing of time. There is also in the U.S. a relation between the downplaying of Christmas, which is being reduced here no less than in Britain to a “holiday season,” and King’s birthday in mid-January, which is followed by Black History Month, formerly know as Febuary. What the new liturgical season highlights is King’s martyrdom in 1968, when he was assassinated while leading a garbage employees’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, and the need for national atonement for our country’s long embedded white racism. This penance, which is a post-Christian form of Lent, goes on through Black History Month and is then resumed for another putative victim group during Women’s Month. Although the establishment Right (that is, GOP operatives and neoconservative journalists) and the Left disagree on how this sacral calendar is to be observed, they all see eye-to-eye on its contents.

The dispute here resembles nothing so much as the councils of the early Church that were devoted to clarifying the nature of Christ. Instead of the strife released over whether the concept of homoousia or that of homoiousia properly described the nexus between the first two members of the Trinity, we now have a more timely question: Did Martin Luther King, by his suffering and death, release our country from further atonement for racism or must this atonement become even more frenzied because of how his “unfinished mission for racial justice” ended?

Although the Heritage Foundation proclaimed King to be a “Christian theologian” as well as a “great conservative thinker,” the reality is exactly the opposite: this now beatified figure was a self-proclaimed social radical, who provided the god figure of a post-Christian religion, albeit one that is parasitic on Christian narratives. He is living proof of the continuity between Christian images and a now victorious leftist ideology.

Lest I be accused of being unfair to my subject, let me stress that he was not really responsible for this glorification. As far as I know, King could never have imagined how he would be used after his death, any more than Karl Marx could have imagined that his ideas would be cited to justify Soviet tyranny. He might even have had the decency to blush if he had heard our “conservative” presidential candidate John McCain apologizing last spring in Memphis for having not supported the King public holiday soon enough. McCain characterized this failure as “the single biggest mistake in my political life.”

My young friend Richard Spencer has observed that whenever neocon employees take “conservative” positions on social issues, they find irreproachably leftwing reasons to do so. Thus when they object to abortion, it is because its advocates and practitioners refuse to extend the egalitarian principle far enough—to the unborn. Or when minicons grumble feebly about quotas for Black, Hispanics and women, it is typically because such programs have the putative effect of making their recipients feel “inferior,” because they were given benefits that they might not have earned. Although one could find legion examples of such attempts by “social conservatives” to seem more liberal than Obama, a case that has popped up recently and stands out in my mind is a commentary by Rich Lowry on why “Huck’s censors miss all the points.”

Rich’s column begins by going after the obnoxious censors who have removed all of the 219 uses of the word “nigger” from the new edition of Twain’s classic being put out by NewSouth Books. Along the way, Rich also makes fun of the immoderate PC, which extends even to purging “the use of the word ‘injun’ for good measure.” But he then pushes his commentary away from the obvious reasons for objecting to the censorship, which are not the most fashionable reasons, at least in Rich’s presumed social circles. One, once we start bowdlerizing classics to fit current political hysteria, there is no end to this process. Every time a new obsession comes along or some designated victim group starts griping, we’ll have to rewrite what authors wrote in the past.

Such a course will soon result in the kind of reconstruction of culture that we see previewed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. The Western “heritage” will be refashioned, including the language used in the past, to fit current ideological needs. Even the Communists and Nazis didn’t go quite as far as our present PC gatekeepers. The old totalitarians allowed old classics to be reprinted as they had been rewritten, but then appended their updated introductions.

Two, it is sheer hypocrisy to bowdlerize past authors to fit ADL or NAACP requirements when we produce and distribute movies that should be infinitely more offensive to minorities and most everyone else. Are the bowdlerizers of Twain complaining about Tarantino flicks or “Gansta rap” albums that are packed with “niggas” and “motherfucking” language? Such products of our cultural industry are far more insensitive than any book published in the 19^th century? Why this bizarre double standard? Perhaps it is justified by the fact that filmmakers and producers of blasphemous “art” are part of the “intelligentsia,” along with the totalitarians who are now bowdlerizing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. One should apparently only censor dead White males who will be read by children of the booboisie in state-run institutions.

Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor are both to be commended for setting us straight about the non-relation between Arizona killer Jared Loughner and American Renaissance. Despite a damning report from Homeland Security linking Loughner to this publication, no evidence showing such a connection could be produced. Moreover the description of the AR “organization,” (it is actually a newsletter whose editorial board holds annual conferences) as anti-Semitic was denied almost as soon as the report was issued. Leftist, predominantly Jewish groups such as ADL and the SPLC came to Jared Taylor’s defense against the rumor that he was running a neo-Nazi hate group.

Homeland Security went wrong, when it described Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman whom Loughner shot as “the first Jewish female elected to such a high-position in the US government.” Although the report was correct that the social liberal and pro-immigrationist Giffords held views that were the “opposite” of those of AR, the congresswoman, notes Jared Taylor, has come after multiple Jewish, female predecessors in Congress. These others, not surprisingly, have been even more liberal than Rep. Giffords.

Despite the empty charges brought against AR, a publication to which Loughner did not subscribe, the war against the newsletter continues to be waged, thanks to the neoconservative camp. FOX went into high gear at 8:00 AM Sunday morning, reporting that an extremist organization that hates Jews, Blacks and Israel was somehow involved in Loughner’s crimes. The young woman who made this assertion claims never to have heard of American Renaissance, but assured her listeners that she and her fellow-investigative reporters were doing “research.” From her remarks it seemed that she and FOX were about to reveal something big about a rightwing-extremist “hate group.”

Jim Kalb’s critique of competing views of modernity is rather thorough, and like him, I find much to criticize in what is dissected. Most of the alternatives posed to the present liberal tyranny, Jim points out, are flawed or unworkable. Glorifying the wills of some superior individuals or an ideal community based on biological similarity or working class élan may be to retreat into wishful thinking or else to open the door to alternative forms of tyranny. And the liberal hedonism on which the current democratic managerial order is built enhances control by “social professionals” and “scientific administrators,” as soon as we recognize that hedonistic egalitarianism cannot provide equal gratification for everyone. What this eccentric but now prevalent ideology produces is having “experts” and “human rights” priests decide on whose claims to gratification are to be satisfied. The others will have to go to the back of the line.

Although Jim is accurate in his comments on these late modernist schemes, he is nonetheless short on solutions. It is all good and well to mention the soul and Christian transcendence, but it is hard to see how these ideas could be made to work in the present situation. Are we to command the political class and its allies in the media, the entertainment industry, and public education to change their worldview? And even if they all converted to the religious position Jim advocates, would the people follow?

I fully agree with Richard’s assessment of Richard Nixon’s legacy. And as someone who actually knew the former president, my opinion may count for something in this discussion. Despite his uniformly leftist conduct of domestic affairs, Nixon, as Richard notes, showed a refreshing realism in foreign policy. The attacks on him from neoconservative quarters had nothing to do with “conservative” thinking. They were motivated by globalist vapors and by an obsession with getting Russian Jews out of the Soviet Union.

Kissinger’s remark to Nixon, which got the usual suspects going, that the U.S. shouldn’t risk nuclear war with the Soviets even if the Soviet regime were killing Jews, had a less than earth-shaking context. What the two were discussing was the pressure being put on the administration to help Jewish refuseniks leave the Soviet Union. Needless to say, the situation of these would-be emigrants was anything but desperate; and one of the effects of their agitation in the U.S. that I noticed was the mobilization of anti-Soviet protestors who had never given a damn about Soviet atrocities in the past. My Jewish liberal and leftist Christian acquaintances were suddenly up in arms circulating petitions against a government whose evil they had never before condemned. The professional anti-Cold Warriors had become violently anti-Soviet over what seemed to be small beer.  It was enough to turn my stomach.

On the more publicized matter of Nixon’s insensitive comments about ethnic groups, it is all too stupidly opportunistic even to comment on. Was Nixon unusual in noticing that Jews are pushy, that the Irish have a tendency to imbibe too much, that Italians can be intemperate, or that Blacks generally don’t excel at intellectually demanding activities? All of these commonplaces were widely heard until PC replaced long ingrained stereotypes. It would be relevant to observe that Nixon’s implacable journalistic foes, like Daniel Shorr and the Kalb brothers, were disproportionately Jewish. On the other hand, so were Nixon’s advisors, like Murray Chotiner, Herbert Stein, and Henry Kissinger. Even more important, the Israeli government, which didn’t take its lead from CBS or the New York Times, praised Nixon profusely as a friend of the Jewish state. Both David Ben Gurion and Golda Meier were quite eloquent in discussing their warm friendship with the American president.

I recall being told as a young assistant professor that it was no longer acceptable to utter the word “Negro.” The approved term had changed to “black.” One was also not supposed to refer to someone as a “Jew” but with some mush term presumably approved by a combined meeting of the SPLC and the ADL. At the same time, it became de rigueur for feminists to insult men, for Jews to blame Christians for the Holocaust, and for the congressional black caucus to excoriate white devils for collective, inveterate racism. Soon afterwards, Harvard professors began writing tracts on the evil White race and about how it was necessary to destroy this race, or else to recode it through political coercion. How delightful to live in a post-racist, post-sexist, and post-homophobic society, in which we longer repeat the old stereotypes, however true they may have been. We’re too busy learning the imposed PC slanders while encouraging designated minorities to express them.

Keith Preston is correct that one could easily look to monarchists and authoritarian conservatives for critiques of “liberal democracy.” But for better or worse, such critics were not libertarians, and to the extent that Schmitt was unhappy with liberal democracy, it was because this hybrid regime resembled the political worldview of someone like Ludwig von Mises. This source of libertarian inspiration, if Keith recalls, wrote in defense of universal government, at least initially adored the League of Nations, and like Hayek, believed that only democratic governments were morally legitimate. 

What Schmitt found odious about liberal democracy were precisely those features that libertarians now celebrate, to wit, a self-constructing individualism, the concept of universal rights and universal government, and the materialist understanding of human happiness. Although I personally endorsed Ron Paul for president, I would never claim that I was representing Schmitt or Eric Kuehnelt-Leddhin, let alone Joseph de Maistre, when I took this expediential stand. As someone influenced by Schmitt more than Mises or Ron Paul, I find it hard to act out of individualist, libertarian motives or beliefs. Nor do I find anything in Schmitt or European counterrevolutionaries that would ever lead me toward a philosophically based libertarian position.

Now that Keith has explained his position in detail, I find that we do indeed have common ground. I agree with his interpretation of what the Left aims at in the long run, namely global homogenization, the leveling of traditional hierarchy, social planning and at the end of the road, total control over systematically deracinated individuals. But on the way, the left offers even more fun and games, with the unleashing of the Christian heresy of multiculturalism and the flooding of the West with hostile alien populations.

Having looked at the “essential reading matter” for the (real) American Right posted on this website (here, here, and here), it seems to me that all the lists have at least some value. The recommenders are to be praised for recognizing the utter irrelevance of what the neoconservative-controlled press raises to canonical status, in accordance with its changing policy demands and cults of personality. Clearly, Jonah Goldberg’s yapping with a Democratic speechwriter, whom he turns into a Republican one, would not qualify as anything more than punctuated noise, although Human Events describes this work and even sillier twaddle as “conservative classics.” Although marginalized by the authorized conservative movement, our side should try to restore some seriousness to what is left of an identifiable Right. And offering suggestions on appropriate reading seems a useful step in this direction.

On the basis of what I’ve seen of the available lists, it would seem that Richard’s bibliography may work best. It needs trimming and strains to be all-inclusive, but it is shaped by obvious rightwing principles and perceptions. Allow me to elaborate, from my political-philosophical perspective. The Right by its nature is anti-egalitarian and favors hierarchy over the idea (or chimera) of universal individual equality. It is also committed to preserving organic institutions in which families and communities can survive. It is profoundly skeptical of any scheme that seeks to advance some notion of human perfection, and especially in the modern world, the Right should be fighting doggedly against social engineering and leveling.

It also entertains a tragic view of the human condition and understands that friend/enemy distinctions are natural to how people live. The way out of this situation, even when it becomes heated, should not be through international administrative regulation of individual human lives for the sake of perpetual peace and brother- or sisterhood. Such utopian efforts can only lead to tyranny and the utter destruction of traditional ways of life. The best we can do in dealing with conflict is to control and channel violence through timely diplomacy and only if absolutely necessary, military interventions. The Right also values free markets—but not more than social cohesion. When these forces collide, those who are concerned with communal interests and standards of decency have every right to opt against pure unfettered capitalism. Needless to say, trading free markets for modern socialism or for welfare state democracy in its present degenerate form is not an acceptable option.

While the Right is not obliged to support biblical literalism, it must be respectful of the Western religious tradition and affirm its irreplaceable value as a moral and spiritual reference point. This respect of course does not exclude the possibility of learning from brilliant religious skeptics like Hume, Nietzsche and Machiavelli, who held pessimistic or profoundly realistic views about the limits of human nature. Nor does this sympathy for the once established religious traditions of the West preclude the possibility of learning about political life from thinkers identified with the Left. Here Richard picked useful examples when he mentioned Lenin and Gramsci.

Although the other lists include worthwhile reading matter, I’m not sure they are particularly well suited to our needs. Jim’s list looks like Mortimer Adler’s Synopticon, a collection of books that Adler and others in his program at the University of Chicago thought were indispensable for an undergraduate education. Most of Jim’s or Adler’s classical works and some of the others mentioned would also make it on to my list of works that came to define the Western heritage. But Jim’s Synopticon-like list looks very academic and from the early modern period onward, heavily favors the English tradition over continental European thought. How, for example, is Locke a more relevant thinker for a contemporary person of the Right than such figures as Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Sorel, Maistre, Donoso-Cortes, or Pareto? Such Britons as Hobbes, Burke, and Hume may be timelier, at least from our critical perspective, since each in his own way argues against the autonomous individual and in favor of authority. But is it necessary to give us so many Brits and so many figures of the Enlightenment, in order to educate people for the Right?

Keith’s list is even more problematic. It has no unifying principle, save for Keith’s predilection for X or Y. This principle of choice may make sense to Keith but certainly not to me. It is all good and well to enjoy the prose of Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Donoso-Cortes, Maistre, Carl Schmitt, and lots of other people. But I’m not sure I see much linkage between the radical individualist Rothbard and, on the other hand, selected Catholic counterrevolutionaries of the early 19th century. It is also not clear what exactly is the philosophical or cosmological connection between the anarcho-capitalist Hoppe and the leading German authoritarian legal thinker of the 1920s.

Although there may indeed be common denominators, Keith does not provide them. He might have approached his work differently, for example, by offering individual works by thinkers who differed philosophically but said equally revealing things. There is no reason that one couldn’t benefit from Schmitt’s understanding of the state but also value Rothbard’s work on the Great Depression. I mention this combination because it pertains to my own work and to what I have taken from two different authors. But simply throwing people together with radically opposed views of government as integral to a “conservative” reading list does not prove one’s case. This is different from citing texts, which may be useful for a common task but which do not all come from identifiably rightwing thinkers.

In regard to the justification for including Hobbes on such a list, I would only cite the Latin verse in which he characterized his translation of Thucydides’ Histories as a defense of traditional authority against “democratic demagogues” and “unruly popular assemblies”:

Sed mihi prae Thucydides placuit,

 Is Democratia ostendit mihi quam sit inepta

Is Democratiam docuit me quam sit inepta,

Et quantum coetu plus sapit unus homo.

Hunc ego scriptorem verti, qui diceret Anglis,

Consultaturi rhetoras ut fugerent.

Although Keith and Jim may not like the passage “et quantum coetu plus sapit unus homo,” especially when applied to a leftist presidency, note that Hobbes (in his Latin autobiography produced in verse) is upholding traditional monarchical authority. The fact that he devises a relatively modern political science to achieve his purpose, testifies to his pertinence for contemporary radical traditionalists.

The responses on this website to my remarks from last month’s Mencken Club meeting impel me to offer this clarification. For those respondents who criticize me for not addressing biodiversity, I should point out the obvious. Unlike a scholar like Henry Harpending, who was one of our speakers, I am not a biologist. It would therefore be presumptuous of me to pontificate about an area of learning in which I am simply not trained. Moreover, I was not delivering a speech at the meeting on the neglect of sociobiology, however interesting a subject that may be. I was asked to speak on the multicultural Left and on how the leftist mindset came to influence the “conservative movement.” Whether or not the authorized conservative movement should discuss genetics or whether or not biodiversity is essential to the recreation of an American Right was not my subject on October 22.

Although it is possible to find isolated passages in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind that sound anti-leftist, such statements are usually throwaways meant to appeal to naïve cultural conservatives. The things that stick out in my mind about Bloom’s book are his defenses of American liberal democracy, as practiced in the modern United States, his support of past crusades for democratic, egalitarian “education” carried on through war, and a call for cleansing our society of the “German connection.” The rest of the work seemed to me the kind of boiler plate one runs into in conservative Catholic and Evangelical diatribes against the Zeitgeist.

Moreover, one doesn’t need to consult Bloom in order to come up with a “conservative” critique of psychedelic drugs and punk rock. In fact there is no more “conservative” reason for citing Bloom as a moral authority on morals and the arts than for bringing up Herbert Marcuse on the one-dimensionality of capitalist society. One could easily find people on the real Right, e.g., James Kalb or Robert Nisbet, who arrived at similar critical conclusions.  Unfortunately for their pocketbooks, none of these authors produced a “conservative classic” that would be celebrated in National Review. This of course speaks volumes for what now passes for a movement conservative authority. But perhaps I’m carping too much. Since National Review, the New York Post, and other neoconservative outlets accept gay everything these days while beating up on Muslims for being insensitive to the “West,” as the citadel of alternative lifestyles, perhaps Bloom in view of his widely remarked on lifestyle may have been perfectly in step with the march of “conservative family values.”

On another, only slightly related matter, Richard may be on to something when he suggests that former president Bush is exhibiting the “despair” of the guilt-ridden white Republican when he goes on and on about how the black rapper Kanye West accused him of “not caring about black people” during and after the Katrina flood. The former president seems to have been shaken-up to a degree that would have been inconceivable for a Jewish liberal if confronted by the same attack. It is easy to think of how Eliot Spitzer or Charles Schumer would have reacted to a comparable insult, namely, by shrugging it off and/or by calling the offending vocalist a horrible anti-Semite. A similar reaction might have been forthcoming if the target had been Bill Clinton, although Clinton would not be able to reach for the Anti-Semite-branding iron in counterattacking.

Bush seems tormented in a way that characterizes those driven by social and racial guilt. It’s as if his moral center had been challenged because blacks not only failed to appreciate his anti-racist goodness but because a culturally enriching black accused him of not being the antiracist Bush strives to be. In any case his reaction to this incident, as explained in his interview with Mat Lauer, was not simply outrage or contempt. It involved a dark night of the soul, as if Bush were afraid of what politically incorrect feelings lurked inside of him. This anguished experience, if Richard is correct about Bush, does not increase my respect for him. It increases my annoyance with those who make a fetish of antiracism -- or their own antiracial sensitivity.