The post-racialism of Obama is the reverse of Martin Luther King’s invocation of a society that has transcended race. Obama privileges race over character as a means of invoking guilt and group solidarity. He does not care about all Americans in a way that transcends race, nor does he care about one race exclusively. He cares about no one at all. If he appears to have any warm feelings for a particular group, they seem to be limited to the Muslims of his childhood who helped raise him.
There is nothing reassuring or transcendent about Obama’s post-racialism. Like his post-nationalism, it is a symptom of a man who belongs nowhere but who can do his best to pass everywhere by appropriating identities and symbols as if they were currencies to be traded on an international trip. A man such as this is adept at speaking on more than one level, at sending coded messages that say different things to different people in a single word.
To moderate liberals, the selection of Biden sends a message that race has finally been transcended through the hard work of men and women like them. To the left, the message is that the old patriarchy is on the way out and is about to be replaced by a multicultural people’s leadership that knows what a ridiculous joke the old white male power structure is. The left is not at all troubled when Republicans ridicule Biden. They chuckle because Republicans aren’t in on the joke. Biden is meant to be them. They are Biden.
The left harbors its greatest contempt, not for Republicans, but for liberals. “I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy/I hope every colored boy becomes a star/But don’t talk about revolution/That’s going a little bit too far,” Phil Ochs sang mockingly. “Love me, love me, I’m a liberal.” Obama’s people are singing Phil Ochs’ song and displaying the traditional contempt for all the parts of the Democratic Party that aren’t as committed to revolution as they are.
Biden is a joke because the Democratic Party is a joke. He represents what the left sees as the flaws of the Democratic Party and liberalism, the old white males who wanted slow reforms and gradual change instead of abrupt revolution. Obama’s people could have chosen a more credible figure who would have provided useful cover, but instead they couldn’t hold back their contempt.
That arrogance and contempt are the greatest flaws of the men and women looking down at the world from the capital city of the enemy nation that they have finally seized. They could replace Biden, they should replace Biden, but they probably won’t. Their revolutionary ideals are fueled by their egotism. They want to overthrow everything not because they care about everyone, as they claim to, but because they truly don’t care about anyone at all. Not only don’t they care, but they feel nothing but contempt for the people looking up at them, pleading for jobs or tax relief. And it shows.
To the left race is a means to an end, it is not the end. Its collectivism requires enlisting individual groups dissatisfied with the system to help overthrow it in a coalition whose ultimate aims do not serve the needs of any of the individual groups. The racial identity of millions of African-Americans is a tool, like the former Senator from Delaware who somewhere beneath his hairpiece, past nerves deadened by Botox injections, harbors dreams of inheriting the job in 2016.
Biden still does not understand what he is. He is a fellow traveler, a dupe, a scarecrow of the old white male liberal establishment hung up over a cornfield to attract unknowing liberals while serving as a figure of fun to the left. And despite his corruption and arrogance, there is something sad and pathetic in the spectacle of a hollow man with capped teeth set in a grin making a fool of himself for the amusement of the Post-American crowd. A crowd that he thinks are laughing with him, when they are actually laughing at him.