"With the feminists, the homosexual groups, the other interest groups, you put it all together with the black interest groups, and it does not look like America," says Richard Viguerie, referring to the Democratic Party. It's an interesting question at this moment in history, the little matter of what America looks like. If one pursues Mr. Viguerie's point to its logical end, "real" Americans must be male and straight and white and not especially interested in any "other" group (except, presumably, Mr. Viguerie's own ConservativeHQ). This division between supposedly authentic Americans and those "others" is, according to a report in the New York Times, the new but ever-so-old line henceforth to be "pounded" into the media by certain Republican strategists, of whom Viguerie is a prime player. The Democratic Party is to be figured as a ghetto of women, wusses and macaca-lovers. Republicans are straight arrows whose manly brows glisten with the pale dew of impartiality.

At the same time, Viguerie insists that this is not about race or gender. He's just against "special interests." If you are so crass as to think it's about prejudice, well, that's just because you're one of those annoying people who see isms under every rock. This rhetorical spinmanship is ubiquitous right now. Everywhere, there are protestations of high-mindedness while embracing the de facto resegregation of this entire nation. It can be seen in the endlessly reductive discussions about the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, an anti-affirmative action measure voters endorsed in the last election. Like the one passed in California some years ago, it eliminates not just affirmative action but all mention of race in most every publicly funded arena, for any purpose including remediation (except law enforcement--got to leave that window for police profiling). It even bars collection of demographic data involving housing, health and schools. Talk about killing the messenger. Ward Connerly, lead architect of the initiative, is a black man himself, and so, the argument goes, how on earth could the initiative be bad for black people? Don't you like black men? And what an exceptional black man he is! When the Ku Klux Klan formally endorsed the initiative, Connerly returned the embrace: "If the Ku Klux Klan thinks that equality is right, God bless them. Thank them for finally reaching the point where logic and reason are being applied, instead of hate."

What a bridge-builder, that Connerly.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.