OPINION: Identity politics thrives on division, and President Donald Trump has become the icon of a divided nation.<\/b>
\nEvery generation has its own axe to grind, attitudes to assume and enemies to attack. It\u2019s the way the young move into maturity, sometimes with smarts and sometimes without. Every generation wants to make the world over in its own
Action and reaction can be creative as well as destructive, but the rhetoric of a generation often overstates what it\u2019s for and what it\u2019s against, galvanizing each side to take issue with the other. We called the generation that survived the Great Depression to fight and win World War II \u201cthe greatest generation\u201d because good and evil were so clear-cut, and, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it in his tribute to the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, \u201cnever in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.\u201d
Leaders then were not perfect, but they had the intellect, information and passion for the good fight and could galvanize the home front. The newspapers, newsreels (television was hardly a gleam in anybody\u2019s eye) and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s fireside chats on the radio soothed rational fears and stoked public confidence.
Now we\u2019 re embroiled in domestic wars of a different kind, and the younger generations challenge democracy from within. They even march against free speech, making the protection of the fragile First Amendment evermore difficult. President Donald Trump does not have the gift of reassurance required for uniting people. His initial remarks about the conflict in Charlottesville, Virginia, though distorted by the media, deepened alienation even after he corrected course with firm condemnations of hatred, bigotry and violence.
Identity politics thrives on division, and the president has become the icon of a divided nation. These divisions became clear in the 2016 election campaign as Trump mocked the elites and Hillary Clinton scorned the \u201cdeplorables.\u201d Both jeered with a sneer, appealing to a low common denominator of resentment.
Democrats had designated minorities and women as victims, and, as Harvey Mansfield observes in Commentary Magazine, no Republican except Trump could exploit the weakness and absurdities of political correctness with the labels he put on the Democrats\u2019 designated constituencies for special favor in awarding jobs, honors and benefits.
\u201cWithout saying so \u2014 for in this Trump was cautious and prudent \u2014 he began to mobilize a white community to match the long-existing \u2018black community,\u2019 thus turning the strategy of identity against itself, \u201d Mansfield writes. \u201cIt was now Trump voters who were encouraged to think themselves marginalized.\u201d
Clinton\u2019s tin ear sealed her doom. Speaking at a town hall in Columbus, Ohio, she thrust her knife deep into miners\u2019 hearts. \u201cWe\u2019 re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, \u201d she said.
She later apologized to the miners who had already taken her measure. Her cold insensitivity became emblematic of Democratic identity politics and extended beyond the miners to all those who had lost their jobs when factories fled in hot pursuit of cheap labor abroad.
Her tin ear recalled in paraphrase Shylock\u2019s speech in the \u201cThe Merchant of Venice, \u201d only with the word \u201cJew\u201d replaced by the word \u201cworker.\u201d Those in the Rust Belt who tipped the election could say, \u201cIf you prick us, do we not bleed?\u201d
Trump exploited and exaggerated to great effect the newly perceived victims with the implication that many of these men and women, mostly white, were punished just as blacks were punished by racism. This was hardly more egregious than Clinton\u2019s radical feminists claiming moral equivalence with victimized blacks \u2014 prosperous middle-class women demanding \u201cliberation\u201d from what seemed to the Rust Belt to be a pretty good life. Even the Donald\u2019s vulgarity and indecent insults sounded to many as merely \u201ctelling it like it is.\u201d
The endless war in Afghanistan does not have the moral clarity of World War II, when everything here as well as there was at stake. The president eloquently made the case this week that \u201ca hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum for terrorists, including ISIS and al-Qaida.\u201d It was a useful reminder to all that \u201ca wound inflicted upon a single member of our community is a wound inflicted upon us all, \u201d and that \u201cWhen one part of America hurts, we all hurt.\u201d
He offered a deeply moving prescription for dissolving that hurt. \u201cLet us make a simple promise to the men and women we ask to fight in our name, that when they return home from battle, they will find a country that has renewed the sacred bonds of love and loyalty that unite us together as one, \u201d he said.
That\u2019s an unaccustomed idealism coming from Donald Trump, a man of erratic temperament who rarely shows such introspection or invokes the grander emotions. But it\u2019s a worthy invocation nonetheless from the president of the United States.<\/p>\n

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