Hillary, Condi, Pandering and Power; who's REALLY running a plantation?

There is an aticle in The Opinion Journal called:

Hillary's Plantation
Hillary Clinton reveals her fear of Condi Rice.

BY SHELBY STEELE

Here is an excerpt from the article:

...A great achievement of modern liberalism--and a primary reason for its surviving decades past the credibility of its ideas--is that it captured black resentment as an exclusive source of power. It even gave this resentment a Democratic Party affiliation. (Antiwar sentiment is the other great source of liberal power, but it is not the steady provider that black and minority resentment has been.) Republicans have often envied this power, but have never competed well for it because it can be accessed only by pandering to the socialistic longings of minority leaders--vast government spending, social programs, higher taxes and so on. Republicans and conservatives have simply never had an easy or glib mechanism for addressing profound social grievances.

But this Republican "weakness" has now begun to emerge as a great--if still largely potential--Republican advantage. Precisely because Republicans cannot easily pander to black grievance, they have no need to value blacks only for their sense of grievance. Unlike Democrats, they can celebrate what is positive and constructive in minority life without losing power. The dilemma for Democrats, liberals and the civil rights establishment is that they become redundant and lose power the instant blacks move beyond grievance and begin to succeed by dint of their own hard work. So they persecute such blacks, attack their credibility as blacks, just as they pander to blacks who define their political relationship to America through grievance. Republicans are generally freer of the political bigotry by which the left either panders to or persecutes black Americans.

No one on the current political scene better embodies this Republican advantage than the current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. The archetype that Ms. Rice represents is "overcoming" rather than grievance. Despite a childhood in the segregated South that might entitle her to a grievance identity, she has clearly chosen that older black American tradition in which blacks neither deny injustice nor allow themselves to be defined by it. This tradition, as Ralph Ellison once put it, "springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done." And, because Ms. Rice is grounded in this tradition, she is of absolutely no value to modern liberalism or the Democratic Party despite her many talents and achievements. Quite the reverse, she is their worst nightmare. If blacks were to take her example and embrace overcoming rather than grievance, the wound to liberalism would be mortal. It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton's "plantation" pandering in a room full of Condi Rices...

This has been a problem with the liberal/left for a long time. By pandering to groups of people as victims, to gain political power from their greivences, they become stuck in a relationship of needing their constituents to STAY and REMAIN victims, to harness that greivence power. The left has an investment in making sure the problems that make victims of people are never overcome.

Tammy Bruce also talks extensively about this dynamic in her books, and about what she calles the "Misery Merchants" of the left. They have an investment in NOT solving problems. They need to keep the grievences of blacks, gays, feminists and other groups alive and perpetuated, so they can use them for vote stumping and fund raising. But it's an entirely negative dynamic, and does not empower, uplift or help people. It's perpepual victimhood.

You can read the complete article HERE.