Much of the early opposition to Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, has focused on her racialist statements concerning the superior judicial wisdom of Latin women. Sotomayor is a member of The National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic solidarity organization whose name means “The Race.” La Raza is often confused with MEChA, a more openly and aggressively racist organization that advocates Hispanic racial supremacy and the reconquest of the southwestern United States by Hispanics. As recently as 2006, in response to a challenge from Georgia congressman Charlie Norwood, La Raza formally denounced MEChA and its agenda. We can take them at their word and accept the NCLR’s assurances that it is entirely concerned with benevolent community outreach programs, and still marvel that someone belonging to an organization called “The National Council of The Race” is allowed to get anywhere near the Supreme Court. We most assuredly would not be debating the merits of appointing a white woman named Sonia Stephens, who belonged to a similar organization with a similar name, dedicated to “community outreach” for poor people of Anglo-Saxon descent. If her name was Sonia Sotomacher and her organization was dedicated to the advancement of German-Americans, the president who nominated her would have been impeached by now.
The president who nominated Sotomayor gained his office despite a twenty-year membership in a viciously racist church. If Jeremiah Wright had been white, and spewed comparable venom blaming all the problems of white Americans on black people, his young protege Barry O’Bama would be an obscure fringe figure from the Chicago political underground, angrily spinning conspiracy theories to explain his crushing defeat in the state senate primaries.
Are Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor racists? No, but they are both proponents, and products, of collective power. Collective organizations are always the dominant forces in statist countries, such as America has become. Anyone who doubts this need only look at the way the American auto industry has been twisted into an incomprehensible mess for the benefit of a powerful workers’ union, which relies upon money seized from taxpayers to artificially sustain a business model that should have collapsed when business managers capitulated to unreasonable union demands.
Collectives focus the political energies of their membership, becoming much more powerful and influential than disorganized majorities. This is one reason why massive social upheavals, such as gay marriage, proceed despite majority opposition to them. The proponents of gay marriage are well-organized, well-funded, media savvy, and politically connected. The opponents are a large, disorganized group of average people reading the newspaper and shaking their heads at the absurdity of two men getting married.
The formation of political collectives is natural and inevitable – the right of free association, and the effectiveness of such organizations, guarantees it. The elected representatives of a republic will always be ready to listen to someone who represents a large group of voters, particularly if they have money to donate to political campaigns. The problem is that when the state swells in size and exerts control over all aspects of the economy and culture, these political organizations become disproportionately powerful, and those who don’t belong to such organizations find themselves overpowered and marginalized. In the socialist America of 2009, the entire economy has been restructured to benefit specific interest groups. If you want to buy an American-made car in 2011, your choices will be determined by environmentalists and auto workers’ unions, more than by consumer demand. The mortgage industry was turned into a suicide bomb because powerful interest groups made the government over-ride the influence of the markets. Meaningful educational reform is forever blocked by the teachers’ unions, which are much more influential, and brimming with political cash, than the much larger group of parents with children trapped in lousy public schools.
The state will always be more responsive to collectives with agendas that further the growth of state power. The teachers’ unions didn’t have to twist Jimmy Carter’s arm to get the Department of Education. Barack Obama doesn’t exactly look somber, humbled, or regretful as he takes over financial institutions and auto companies. Labor unions in general have gone from being collective bargaining associations that protected members from exploitation by rapacious businesses, to effectively becoming arms of the centralized state. In a practical sense, when you’re talking to the head of the United Auto Workers or National Education Association, you’re talking to a government official.
As the state grows larger, it increasingly becomes responsive only to large collectives, which increasingly require even more state power to accomplish their agendas. Because the Left understands this, it has always taken great pains to write the rules of American political culture to invalidate groups that oppose its agenda. ACORN and La Raza are noble community organizations, but groups the Left doesn’t like are sinister “special interests.” Virtually any collective organization with a conservative or libertarian agenda is swiftly discredited by declaring it hateful, racist, or fascist. There’s a good reason the Left got so hysterical about the Moral Majority in the Eighties, or becomes so agitated about organized religion in general.
The problem for Americans posed by the increased power of political collectives is that all such organizations are, by necessity, coercive. Big Labor wouldn’t have any power unless it could extract funds from its members and take their obedience to its agenda for granted. Nobody would pay attention to a union if half of its members could actively oppose its policies, or withhold their financial support from it. No one would pay attention to a minority association that could only claim to speak for some members of the minority. That’s why groups such as the National Organization for Women or NAACP use cultural power to aggressively marginalize dissenting members of the sex or race groups they claim to speak for. There’s nothing black liberal activists hate more than a successful black conservative – just ask Clarence Thomas. The last thing any collective can afford is for its members to start thinking they don’t need it any more. Near-absolute obedience to the agenda of the leadership is required to produce effective political power, so collectives always resort to draconian means to suppress dissent.
It will be increasingly difficult for Americans who don’t belong to collective organizations to enjoy cultural freedom or economic success, as a titanic government asserts the moral right to legislate its preferences in these areas, driven by the powerful interest groups that control the state. The power of the free market comes from vast numbers of free people making production and consumption choices in their own interest, producing an energy and vitality that dreary, plodding state-run economies can never hope to match. The economy of a free nation should be a race between millions of competitors surging forward, not a handful of clumsy, blinkered giants battling to control a rapidly shrinking arena. It’s not good for harmony, prosperity, or liberty that Sonia Sotomayor proudly belongs to the type of organization that Sonia Sotomacher would be required to be ashamed of.
