A flabbergasting asseveration by Lawrence Auster

About Obama’s election victory, Auster wrote:

“Yes he got a pass on various issues because of his race. But that is not the key thing. He won the nomination and won the presidency because HE WON VOTES. He wasn’t even played up that much before Iowa. Hillary was overwhelmingly the favorite, and Obama was considered to have little or no chance. He became the favorite as a result of his big upset victory in the Iowa caucuses, not because some bureaucratic entity gave him higher grades because he’s black. To apply an AA [Affirmative Action] analysis to a popularly elected politician is just mistaken.”

From one of the most energetic and astute analysts of the problem of the race issue, this asseveration flabbergasts in its naively simple-minded summation.

Auster simplistically rejects the proposition that Obama won “because of his race” by contrasting it with the stupefyingly circular assertion that he won “because he won votes” (and adds extra weight to this blunt circularity by putting its punchline in all caps). In fact, Obama won those votes because of reverse racism, plain and simple. The vast majority of whites who voted for Obama—and had they not done so he would not have won—were doing so because they were righting the wrong of which they have been ashamed for decades: the wrong, of course, of “racist” America, which must be purged not only of its shameful legacy in the past, but of the eternally perduring crypto-racism that continues to undermine any progress America might superficially show into the ongoing present. The election of Obama was one major way for all these millions of whites to assuage their eternal shame and guilt—albeit, being eternal, even having championed the first black American President will not actually absolve them of their inner torment. For, after all, it is of the evil nature of whites to be essentially, ontologically racist. One would have thought Auster would know this. In fact, one knows that Auster knows this—and thus his asseveration flabbergasts. Auster knows that nothing will serve to cure this eternal shame and guilt in the minds of these millions of white Americans deformed by PC MC (what Auster with less precision terms “liberalism”), short of the soteriological self-sacrifice of self-extinction. And yet, somehow Auster can’t connect two logically proximate dots to see that along the road to that salvation, these millions of whites will do their utmost to right the wrong of their white culture and their white nature: And helping Obama win was one crucial and happy day in that never-ending eschatological project of cultural self-extinction.

Obama’s charisma and perceived political talents were just icing-on-the-cake justifications for that main irrational rationale—rather slender straws desperately grasped at, in fact, as to many analysts, those justifications were rather decidedly precarious, given the thin ground of his political experience and substance, not to mention his dangerously radical Leftist associations and expressions over the years. Indeed, the darker, uglier side of radical Leftism in Obama’s personal, social and political past and present should have been massively contra-indicative for a nomination, not to mention an election victory. The very fact that this darker, uglier side was ignored by those millions of white Americans reveals that the factors of Obama’s charisma and political talent were obviously not primary in motivating them in their irrational fervor and support for him.

But in his ass-backward asseveration, Auster turns this assessment—which flows logically from everything else Auster has written on the problem of race—on its head.

For more on this, see my previous essay, Why Obama won: nine reasons, where I argue that, among the many factors involved, the number one reason why he won the election was white guilt over racism.