David Brooks: "Every revolution devours its offspring"

The revolution of identity politics is now feasting on Obama and Hillary.

All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity politics are now being exploited by the Clinton and Obama campaigns against each other. They are competing to play the victim. They are both accusing each other of insensitivity. They are both deliberately misinterpreting each other’s comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally retrograde.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

[snip]

What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities. The Clintons are hitting Obama with everything they’ve got. The Obama subordinates are twisting every critique into a racial outrage in an effort to make all criticism morally off-limits. Obama’s campaign drew up a memo delineating all of the Clintons’ supposed racial outrages. Bill Clinton is frantically touring black radio stations to repair any wounds.

It would be funny, in a sort of just-deserts way, except that 30 years of identity politics have been disastrous for this country. That turns the Obama/Hillary spectacle into nothing more than bitter irony.

[Update: Oh lordy, I spelled "just desserts" incorrectly. It's now corrected; the term is, of course, "just deserts". It wasn't until I looked at the post after publishing that I realized I had chocolate on the brain instead of justice.]

[Second Update: Welcome, everyone coming here from Real Clear Politics via Buzztracker! I'm honored to be listed right alongside Instapundit, Althouse, and The Anchoress, even if it is only because I linked to the same article they did....]



(h/t Althouse)