Political Correctness and the Blonde Beast

On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh summarized some of his recent philosophically profound thinking on air:

“We are separating people by class. We are separating people by race… The Obama people are thriving by telling their voters who they ought to hate, who they ought to oppose, who they ought to try to eliminate, wipe out, in a political sense, and it’s all based on race or other forms of ethnicity… We’re in the midst here of designed class and race wars. They’re brewing out there… [Obama] declared war against Republicans and, by extension, anybody who voted for them… There’s a giant deception taking place.”

15 million people listen to Rush Limbaugh every week.  That’s 15 million listeners for a program that is generally ignored by mainstream elites and the mainstream media (although lately less so).  Imagine if a) his views weren’t partially impeded by the cultural dominance of political correctness and b) media and elites outside Fox News felt comfortable giving Rush, and other conservative extremists, a political podium.  Therein lies the importance of political correctness in the US.

People, especially straight white male people, often bitch about the unfairness and restrictiveness of political correctness.  Some point out that everyone is racist – black people make white jokes, whites make black jokes, Latinos make fun of Asians and Asians make fun of Latinos.  Scratch the surface of America, or get together with a mono-gendered or mono-racial group, and racist/sexist speech often comes up in a very un-PC way.  If this is true, why hide it?  Or if everyone does it, why single out whites or males?

The real importance of political correctness, especially in terms of race, is not in promoting individual fairness, paying penance for past injustices, or even serving as a counterweight to structural racism (although these are all important justifications).  No, the true importance of political correctness at this point in American history is to suppress the blonde beast of white racial nationalism.

For hundreds of years, America ran a state-operated system of white terror and oppression, and used a virulent racist ideology to support this effort.  African-Americans were enslaved, tortured, lynched, and murdered by white governmental organizations, police and mobs.  Other people of color suffered incredible injustices and hardships in railroad encampments, immigrant ghettoes, agricultural fields and internment camps.

This deep rooted system of racial oppression and its ideological support formally ended two generations ago.  To expect that virulent a strain of racial ideology to be wiped out in that short a time period is insane.  Every time Rush talks about race war, about people being eliminated, about deceptions, secret plans and the downfall of America, you can hear the rumblings of the blonde beast emerging from the depths of American society.  Political correctness is a weak and sometimes inanely blunt tool to restrain white racial nationalism – but for now, we still need it to keep the beast at bay.