White...Culture?

The Limited Sensibility of the Melanin-Deprived

Possible lyric for a country music song:

I woke up this morning on the wrong side of my head.

The appearance of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes in a video distributed by Donald Trump on Truth Social should be, I think, a moment of note—a sign that history can regress as easily, more easily, perhaps, than it progresses. Donald Trump, a 19th century Robber Barnum, is evidence of that; Peter Baker catalogues the crudeness in the New York Times. Trump stands in stark contrast to the clear cultural and intellectual and moral superiority of the Obamas (and the Bush family, I might add).

Let me diverge for a moment: Back in 2008, when Obama was running for president, I rode a few stops on his campaign plane. Michelle was there. Senator Obama asked me how, as a novelist, I’d write John McCain. Well, I said high-stakes gambling, public and private, would be part of it…and the contrast between that and his remarkable sense of honor would make for interesting contrast.

“Klein,” Michelle interrupted, “are you going to write a novel like Primary Colors about us?”

I was stopped cold, but the Senator was quick on the trigger: “Klein can’t write a novel like that about us.”

“And why not, Senator?” I asked.

“Because we’re too boring.”

I didn’t know Barack and Michelle well enough then to understand the profundity of that remark: The Obamas lived the sort of personal life that white christian activists pine for. They were rigorous parents, enough in love with each other to joke about their marital disputes and very, very conscious of how straight they had to appear in public—you didn’t want to come off as an angry black man or a smart-mouthed black woman. You had to campaign—and it was a campaign—for the notion that while black culture existed, and they didn’t deny their place in it, their primary identities were upper middle-class professionals who existed within the rubric of universal family values. They were like everyone else.

They had to do that in order to transcend the ideology—promoted by both the Democratic Party and the alt.right—that culture was an immutable, ethnic-based thing. Of course, the idea of America is the exact opposite. It is a simple notion. We are all the same; well, not exactly the same but similar enough to meld into a dynamic culture that we all can identify with and appreciate. I’ve often written that American music—an amalgam of black, Jewish, Latino, hill country Celtic styles—should be the model. The strength and unique brilliance of our music should be the path to the future; it precedes the socialization—and predicts the heterogenity— of our culture.

And yet, you have near daily racist excrescences from the Trump Administration—and the now-muted but still rooted daftness of the woke left’s identity politics. This week, quietly, we had the Trumpers propose a white supremacist as the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations:

Jeremy Carl, President Trump’s nominee for a senior State Department post, struggled at his confirmation hearing on Thursday to answer what should have been an easy question, since he wrote an entire book about it: What is white identity and why is it under threat?

After nervously rambling about white food and Black food, white music and Black music and white worship styles, Mr. Carl told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that a loss of a dominant white culture is weakening the country. [By the way, if I can just ask: can Professor Carl distinguish the difference between white and black barbecue?]

“White Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded and in which, until recently, they were the overwhelming majority of the population,” he writes in his 2024 book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.”

…When Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, asked if Mr. Carl believed there was an active effort to replace white Americans, Mr. Carl responded, “the Democratic Party, through its immigration policies, has certainly shown signs of that.”

And on, and on…Carl is a professor at the oft-overcooked-conservative Claremont Institute. There is, at bottom, a germ of truth in the case he makes: Segments of the left, especially the academic left, have found it necessary to denigrate Western Civilization in order to prove the excellence of other cultures. Colleges have eviscerated the glories of “dead white men” intellectual history—the teachings of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, the Enlightenment. Often, at their very stupidest, academic leftists winnowed, and twisted, all that great and humane western cogitation into a mere rationale for colonialism.

Certainly, there was a scintilla of truth to that in the past. Teddy Roosevelt’s gurgitations about the nature of brown people during the Philippine Insurrection—and the Japanese, during his peace negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese war: these base, bully ruminations make Trump look like Maya Angelou. Indeed, Roosevelt had a lot of Trump in him, lobbying the Congress to bestow the Congressional Medal of Honor on him for his Rough Ride up Kettle Hill in the Spanish American War…and then actually receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiation of the Russo-Japanese peace.

But there was a lot more to Teddy Roosevelt than his pervasive and ugly “take up the white man’s burden” bigotry. He understood his times in a way Trump does not. He read extensively, and joyously, and wrote beautifully. He understood that the American economy had become too concentrated in gigantic interlocking trusts, at the turn of the 20rh century, and needed to be broken up. He knew there needed to be government regulation, especially in the meat-packing industry. He understood that capitalism, if it was to survive, needed to be aware of the basic, human needs of the workers.

There was, however, an infantile, noisy boyishness to TR that is positively Trumpidorean. His hilarious daughter Alice said Teddy wanted to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral and the baby at every christening. And that bellicose childishness—Jung called the archetype, puer aeternus—seems to me the epitome of the “white culture” that people like Jeremy Carl celebrate. Boys must be allowed to be boys. The ideology was expressed in its purest form by Trump’s Rasputin, Stephen Miller to Jake Tapper of CNN:

“Well, what the President said is true. The United States of America is running Venezuela. By definition, that’s true. Jake ... we live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

Ok, there’s some truth to that—and in the Great Power Game Trump imagines he’s playing with Russia and China, strength is certainly a quality that America needs to assume. But it is a blunt force instrument, outdated in a sophisticated world of wires (and of, as Trump recently found out, of whistles and cellphones.)

The academic left is an unindicted co-conspirator here. Its identitarian foolishness had a hand in the aggrandization of martinets like Miller...and Tucker Carlson…and Sean Hannity…and, well, you know the roster of miscreants. The desire to promote “white culture” is the mirror image of the disastrously inapt “anti-racism” that hucksters like Ibram X. Kendi used to guilt-trip pathetic white liberals (and which the Democratic Party too easily adopted as doctrine.) “White culture” is the thunderous macho reaction to the feminization of the Democratic Party. The Demofems’ constant, dismissive use of the phrase “toxic masculinity” comes to mind. There has been a feminist eat-your-peas quality to the rhetoric and policies emanating from the Democrats over the last several decades. Sporting metaphors are verboten..but the blurring of genders; the smudging of pronouns; the banning of phrases like “disabled” and “pregnant” and whole ethnicities like “LatinX.” Those were all okay, with only a whimper of protest, until their utter ridiculousness became apparent. And defeat in 2024 was total.

The Democrats presided over an Augean Stable of euphemism. And now, there is a need to get rid of that, to reprioritize our values. Americanism is more important than “white culture” or “antiracism.” What we have in common is not only more important than the things which divide us—it is more lovely, too.

And what do we have most in common? Years ago, a buddy of mine—Bob Herbert, then a columnist for the New York Times, went to South Africa on a reporting trip. Afterward, I asked him what was most surprising:

The Americans, he said. You could always pick out the American blacks walking free on the street, swinging their arms, laughing, shouting. The informality, the confidence that came from living in freedom. It was a crucial piece of knowledge: even “oppressed” American blacks, as they were styled by the left, were quantum leaps more free than most other people. Yes, white American racism existed. But it was a spent, anachronistic force. It was pathetic.

This, to me, is the essential American quality: informality. It’s why I’m a fanatic American patriot; the torrent of creativity constantly unleashed by our native—free—American informality. It’s why the Trump movement will wither over time. The boring “white culture” ceremonies do not capture the true American dynamic; Lee Greenwood could not begin to imagine it.. Nor does the strait-jacketed identity-driven intellectual poverty of the left have a clue. In fact, the political correctness—and identity politics—of the Democrats has been the most destructive assault on the idea of America since segregation. These folks simply do not understand the country they live in.

E pluribus unum, baby.

A few other notes

Another thing Trump and the Left have in common is the vestigial celebration of the manufacturing sector. Trouble is, people don’t really want those muscle labor—or medium-tech—jobs. According to the Wall Street Journal:

There are also supply-side constraints on manufacturing employment. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs went unfilled at the end of 2025. Manufacturers report persistent shortages of machine tool operators and technicians who can repair complex new equipment, skills that take time and training to learn.

De-ICEd

Regular readers know that I’ve been following the case of Narciso Barranco, the father of three US Marines, who was arrested by ICE troopers in Los Angeles last year, as he pursued an “obvious” “terrorist” “conspiracy” to perform his job, trimming the bushes at an IHOP. He has been freed by the court, finally, as he is eligible—because of his sons’ patriotism—to receive permanent asylum. Well, bravo that. But how will Stephen Miller restore the months lost with his family? I’m sure that soulless prick hasn’t given it a first thought. If there is a hell, he is the supreme candidate for damnation. One hope: Perhaps the national ICE war against undocumented weed-whackers has crested. It has been an obscenity, the product of Stephen Miller’s mental illness in the first place.

I say to Narciso, I’m embarrassed-and infuriated—that you had to go through this. And to his boys: Semper fi! And thank you.

I’m a second-rater promoter. I’m told that an anniversary is a good time to remind readers of the service you provide…and nag them to become paid subscribers. We have just passed the third birthday of Sanity Clause. I’m truly grateful for the community we’ve built together. Your notes and comments have kept me on a not-so-straight and not-entirely-righteous path. Will you celebrate with me by taking advantage of this discounted Gift of Sanity rate???