i do think that the republicans on the judiciary comittee just seem absolutely obsessed with "wise latina" and ricci. ask her about it. but just hammer her over and over with the very same words, hour after hour? you start to realize that they take themselves to be members of an oppressed and endangered minority; their rhetoric has shifted toward what used to be called the "neo-nazi" "movement": they speak for an endangered white race, as though overly aggressive affirmative action programs were extermination camps. this becomes bizarrely disturbing when you hear it in the drawl of the former attorney general of alabama: jeff sessions.i actually thought alabama (where i used to live) had come a long way from bull connor or whatever.

but this really has a different flavor, where we white dudes are losing control of the judiciary etc. i think it has something to do with obama's election, and i think you actually are seeing and will see actual white suprematism in resurgence. but now it comes in response to actually losing (some) control over the power in our society; it has a pathetic edge, like after affirmative action has assisted all these minorities, we'll have to have an affirmative action program for white people.

what they don't see, because they still have these suddenly-anachronistic-sounding racial/gender/sexuality categories in the front of their minds, is that the emerging elites are massively similar to the traditional elites: in the class they now occupy, the manner of their education, where their money is, their spots on the bureaucratic spreadsheet of power, what they wear or eat, where and how they live. the people who wield this kind of power should just naturally club together, and there's no reason that a republican senator and a hispanic judge shouldn't be playing 18 together at congressional this weekend, talking in a friendly way about what their brokers are advising, how their daughters are doing at stanford, wine, and what a wrong sort of person sarah palin is: all they need to do is realize that their interests and identities are in fact aligned.

i'd think that we will also see more minority spokesmen on the right: as they ascend, they will have to divide: they can't all be liberals, any more than they're all republicans because lincoln won the war. and to the extent that republicans speak for various sorts of elite groups, they should see that they can do what they do in cooperation with other such people, no matter their race, gender or sexuality, as the newly-ascending elites would come in part to identify with, you know, country club values. they'll start pushing tax cuts. of course they will: that's the victory of liberalism construed in identity terms, and also its end.

that of course entails the transformation of the right, because it is evidently still dominated by these racial obsessives. but there is no reason, for example, that there can't be libertarian - or for that matter security-state - latinos or gay people etc. this is the way the obama election etc does actually signal a reconfiguration of american politics. only these fossils must be retired.

one realizes only now how very racialized american politics has been, on both sides. there cannot be liberalism or conservatism, left or right, democrat or republican in a post-identity-politics america. so we may be seeing a profound re-articulation of the political spectrum, and the victories of liberalism (such as affirmative action, or identity-politics itself) are the end not only of conservatism, but of liberalism as well.