White Male Victimization Makes Sense If You Think White Men Are Superior

Jonathan Chait has a nice little post slashing to tiny little bits the assertion by one Joseph Epstein that Barack Obama and, if she is elected, Hillary Clinton would be "affirmative-action Presidents." He notes that Epstein educes precisely zero evidence that Obama or Clinton are unqualified on the merits to be President, or especially that they are uniquely so in American history. Moreover, he notes that the period when Epstein thinks Presidents were chosen purely on the basis of merit just happened to produce 43 white men in a row, the last of whom was the son of a different President. Epstein's argument that these 43 men were elected because of their "intrinsic qualities" rather than on the basis of "accidents of [their] birth" is flatly absurd. Chait goes on to note that the general thrust of the piece, viz. that white men have become a "subaltern class," is hard to square with the fact that today's elite is still overwhelmingly comprised of white men. All of this is true.

Unless, of course, you believe that white men are categorically superior to people who aren't white men. Which, y'know, used to be a pretty mainstream position. "White supremacy" is not just the belief that white people ought to subjugate non-white people; it's the belief that white people are better than non-white people. Now, this belief is what we might, if we were being polite, call "demonstrably false," and if we were not being polite we might call "crazy." But that doesn't mean plenty of people don't still believe it. And if you have this belief, and the analogous, equally crazy belief vis-a-vis women (and mind you, the belief in its truest form isn't just that most white men are superior on the merits to most non-whites or non-men, it's that there's a categorical distinction between white men and others in terms of merit*), then the fact that any of the social elite aren't white men is evidence of a great big problem. Specifically it means that they must have attained their position through "social justice" and "victimization" politics, not through merit, because it is impossible that they have merit. If you believe in white supremacy as an axiomatic principle of reality, then Barack Obama is not, cannot be a counterexample that disproves white supremacy. He is still an inferior black person, and therefore something must be wrong with any system that allows him to be President. And when that system elected 43 white guys in a row beforehand, that was it functioning well, and on the basis of merit, since all the merit resides with the white guys.

So any time someone talks about how Obama or Clinton don't really deserve to be President, and are just "affirmative action" candidates, they're tipping you off to the fact that they are a good old-fashioned, totally unreconstructed bigot who really, truly believes that white men are superior to everyone else. Nice of them to let us know, really.



*Specifically the kind of merit that's required for things like holding public office or otherwise wielding power in society. Women are perfectly meritorious, for some things; those things just aren't being President, or anything remotely resembling being President. (...is what the crazy bigots, think, of course.)