O'Donnell's Identity Politics Playbook

When Christine O'Donnell rails against "elites" she isn't targeting any policy differences, but rather mimicking the empty identity politics of the left.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-npEhuweIyA

I found watching a YouTube video of Christine O’Donnell at a recent town hall particularly painful. Not only for the fact that she could never seem to master that verb and subject agreement thingy but mostly for the message that she so excruciatingly tried to communicate.

What chiefly struck me was her phrase that we need people who will be “advocates for the constitution, advocates for the United States.” It’s rather telling that in defending conservative principles she was using the language that the left often uses to express support for special interest groups.  O’Donnell belongs to a growing part of the conservative movement that is unconsciously adopting the left’s identity politics.

In the old days when conservatives fought against what they called elitism they meant the tendency of modern liberalism to dictate the minutiae of daily life. Exceptional minds of the right, from Hayek and Friedman to Charles Murray, developed a serious political literature expatiating on the inability of big government to solve many if not most societal problems.

For the new idiotic right it appears that policy differences are merely the excuse for something that goes a lot deeper. The new war on elitism is not so much about policy but about identity. The elitism they oppose is not a set of policy proposals; the new elitism has a face and often a name. A relatively old Club for Growth political commercial was pointing to the latte drinking, Volvo driving and New York Times reading constituency of Howard Dean. You see, it’s not the policy anymore – it’s the people. The real America versus the coastal elites and their groupies as  Sarah Palin would most likely term it.

The new idiotic right has managed to insert resentment and envy into the conservative movement; A kind of class warfare without the ransom note. We need average people in Congress says Christine O’Donnell. Do we? Who of us would consider Washington or any of the founding fathers average? Who of us would even consider present day political figures like Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie average?

I want my government limited but in no way would I like its managers to be average at all.

Viewing again that O’Donnell video one thing comes to mind, something that Noel Coward said: Never mind, dear, we're all made the same, though some more than others.