Truest statement of the week II

 SocialistWorker.org has written very little on the 2012 election results, in part because it doesn’t have much to add to the contention of the Nation and the liberal media that a progressive surge of women, gays and blacks blocked the reactionary designs of “white men.”
In reality, millions of white workers voted for Obama in 2008 in the naïve belief that a black president would be more sympathetic to their interests. The last four years has disabused many of them. The final results are not yet in, but it appears that between 5 and 8 million less votes were cast in 2012, and most of the voters who stayed at home were white.
Of course, the “party of the nonvoting” dwarfed the winning candidate’s total too, as 90 to 95 million eligible voters abstained, including, it should be pointed out, some 8.5 million African Americans (more than a third of the eligible black voting population).
On the eve of the election, leading ISO member Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor posted a foul commentary (“Why they don’t challenge racism,” November 5, 2012), which treated as good coin an Associated Press report that “explicit racist attitudes toward African Americans have increased” in the past four years. Taylor took the opportunity to contend that this shabby and unsubstantiated piece of evidence demonstrated “the centrality of racism in American politics.” What Taylor means, in reality, is that the white population is imbued with racism, for which claim she provides, and can provide, absolutely no proof.
The piece is replete with references to “Black life,” “Black communities” and the need for a “Black agenda” and a “Black movement.” Essentially, Taylor complains that Obama did not pay sufficient attention during his first term to petty bourgeois African Americans like herself “whose vote was critical to the candidate becoming president in the first place” and who thus expected “that their particular issues” would receive some attention. The article reeks of selfishness and the striving for privileges.
The racialist orientation of the middle class ex-left is reprehensible and sick, and sinister in its implications. Such outfits and individuals will more and more openly lend their support to “democratic” imperialism as it encounters the opposition of vast numbers of people to austerity, repression and war.


-- David Walsh, "Organization stands on the 2012 election results" (WSWS).