Leftists Should Stop Whining About 'Their' Minorities

["Sanjai Kukreti" <skukreti@home.com>]

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I think the Indian Left could take a lesson from this



TIME

Yes, Minorities Can Be Conservatives


Change is good, says TIME essayist Lance Morrow, and liberals should
stop
whining about 'their' minorities taking up with the opposition
BY LANCE MORROW

TANNEN MAURY/AFP
Bush's security adviser Condoleezza Rice and general counsel Alberto R.
Gonzales


Change is good. Change is necessary. Let us, as Bill Clinton said long
ago,
make change our friend.

In any case, when change comes, it's a little silly to greet it with
indignant disbelief. The poor New York Times hears the axes at work in
the
cherry orchard of the vanished Clinton '90s. It beholds the new Bush
team
and begins to keen, sounding as mournful as Ashley Wilkes standing
stiffly
in the ruins of the old way of life. Oh, sure - three blacks, five
women,
several Hispanics, an Arab-American, an Asian-American Democrat, and so
on.
Diversity, if you will. But it's sneaky diversity! Peek under that
apparent
ethnic variety, and what you see are pod people, aliens disguised in the

colors of Benetton! Conservatives!

They were expecting, perhaps, Earth Shoes? Jerry Rubin as secretary of
state? Jim Morrison? Let's not go through the debate again about whether

George W. Bush will be the legitimate president of the U.S. That seems
to be
the working assumption. That being so, why is the Times shocked,
shocked, to
find conservatism going on here? Times columnist Maureen Dowd calls it
"the
drowning of the Age of Aquarius." Are we supposed to be in mourning for
that? Gurus of death and dying list the stages of grief - denial, anger,
and
so on, passing through to acceptance. The Times is stuck in the denial
stage. The news has not penetrated to its editorial offices - the Skull
&
Bones clubhouse of liberal orthodoxy - that Hispanics,
African-Americans,
women, and Asian-Americans may sometimes be just as conservative as
"white
men." The Times cherishes a highly invidious and morally proprietary
sense
of race and gender, and does not like its women or minorities straying
off
the reservation. But when that happens, it is not a disorder of nature,
or
birth defect, or error in the coding. It may actually be the result of
moral
thought and conscious choice.

But forget politics. Even partisans may accept the premise that change
is
good, simply for the sake of change. Think of the new administration as
part
of the cycle of nature. The forest requires periodic fires. Politics and

government need seasons. Leaves fall off trees, ground freezes.
Eventually,
spring comes. Buds and birds return. Washington, D.C., is similarly
deciduous. It sheds liberals and conservatives from time to time.

I remember visiting the White House during September of 1992, in the
dying
days - the twelfth year! - of the old Reagan-Bush regime. I said to
myself,
the air here is suffocatingly stale. These people have no ideas. They
believe they belong in power permanently. They have ceased to think. In
a
matter of months, the ancien regime was out of office. The new Clinton
administration moved in.

Change. Good. Political ecology. The system refreshed itself.

Now, after eight years, change again. Good.

But this is not change at all, Democrats protest. This is a restoration
of
the geriatric old regime - Poppy's Over The Hill Gang come back to town,

reorganized by the dyslectic son, who is a traitor to his generation.
Back
in the Age of Aquarius (now gone the way of Ophelia) the countercultural

young used to say, "Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty." That stupid dictum
got
into their software. Even now, when they are themselves in their late
forties and early fifties, and Mick Jagger is about 96, the sight of any

white man with gray hair (Dick Cheney!) is a flashback to odious Dad of
long
ago, the punitive, privileged authority principle, the idiot who got us
into
Vietnam.

That was then. This is January, 2001. Time to move on.





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