Chris Roberts, American Renaissance, March 16, 2017

Lefties have been squabbling ever since they lost the 2016 election. Those who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary insist that their candidate would have beaten Donald Trump. Those who supported Hillary Clinton say he would have done worse. I have written about this before, but the latest shouting match throws yet more light on the leftist mindset.

It started on Monday with Zack Beauchamp’s very lengthy essay for Vox, “No easy answers: why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism.” Mr. Beauchamp, a dedicated Clintonista, amassed a lot of data to attack the Sanders supporters’ claim that if the Democrats had moved to the left on economics, more lower- and working-class people (particularly whites) would have voted for them. The Sanders crowd thinks that’s how he would have won.

Mr. Beauchamp said this wouldn’t have worked because whites don’t support welfare-state socialism because they don’t want their tax dollars handed over to undeserving non-whites. He noted that with greater diversity comes less willingness of citizens (especially whites) to support government programs that benefit everybody. If whites are too racist for Mrs. Clinton’s moderate, neo-liberal welfare state, reasoned Mr. Beauchamp, they are certainly too racist for Sen. Sanders’ much larger, more socialist, welfare state.

Matt Bruenig, a partisan of Sen. Sanders, felt compelled to respond the very next day. His rejoinder is called “Liberals and Diversity:”

It is conservatives who say that we cannot mix different kinds of people, lest we increase social distrust, disharmony, and distance. It is conservatives who say that we need to monitor diversity levels in immigration to ensure that the immigrant share of the population does not get too high and to ensure that the immigrants who do come in are aggressively assimilated so as to erase the differences they initially bring with them. Not keeping diversity down and different groups separated from one another, conservatives maintain, will destabilize society, turn politics into a dangerous racialized contest for political power, and immiserate people in all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. . . . More and more, it seems like liberals in The Discourse agree with this basic conservative assessment of how diversity affects society. But, despite that underlying agreement, they somewhat bizarrely resist the conservative conclusion. Despite telling you that they think increasing diversity will result in children going hungry, as well as the mass incarceration and widespread discrimination of minority groups, they nonetheless support it. If liberals are going to adopt the conservative view on how diversity operates in society, then they really do need to also work out what they think the implication of it is. Conservatives are very clear: diversity has all these problems and so it should be restricted. But the liberal view — that diversity has all these problems and yet it should be expanded without restraint — is just incoherent on its face.

If Mr. Bruenig really thinks this is incoherent, he is innocent — even naïve. Mr. Beauchamp and other liberals like him are not incoherent on this point. If diversity leads to all kinds of problems, there is a simple solution: eliminate white people. Once old racist white people are gone, diversity will no longer have so many negative effects, and the Left can enjoy permanent electoral dominance, expand the welfare state, increase regulations, etc.

The Left talks about replacing whites openly. Vox has published articles such as, “Trump’s coalition won the demographic battle. It’ll still lose the war.” Hubert Collins, a frequent contributor to American Renaissance, regularly attends leftist events where prominent leftists openly talk about how great things are going to be once whitey is gone.

Most of the Left clearly believes that problems of diversity will iron themselves out when “diversity” no longer has to include white people. That’s why they long for a non-white America. Mr. Beauchamp thinks Mr. Trump beat Mrs. Clinton because white people are racist. He thinks Mr. Trump would have beaten Sen. Sanders as well because white people are racist. Solution? Wait until white America is going, going, gone. When there are no more white people, there will be no more racism and diversity will bear glorious fruit. Until then, the Left can try to win elections by convincing whites to abandon the Republican party that de facto represents them, by emphasizing identities other than race: sex, income level, social-justice virtuosity, urban snobbery, etc.

But it’s this utopian, triumphalist vision of post-white harmony that is incoherent. There are plenty of tensions among non-whites in America today — Hispanics and blacks, Asians and blacks, Somalis and blacks, Hmong and blacks, etc. — that aren’t going to go away just because white people go away. Indeed, diversity doesn’t work in entirely non-white places such as Indonesia, Rwanda, Uganda, Malaysia, Thailand, the Indian subcontinent, etc.

But that is not the incoherence Mr. Bruenig, or most anyone, has identified.

Mr. Bruenig, who is well-meaning and part of a subset of the pro-Sanders Left that holds little animus towards white people, should seriously ponder the question Mr. Collins raises here at AmRen: “Why do the most prominent leftist think tanks meticulously track demographic change?”

It’s because they believe the dominance of non-whites will mean the dominance of the Left, and hence, utopia. Mr. Bruenig thinks Mr. Beauchamp is talking about how leftist economic policies can win or lose elections, but he’s not. He’s talking about erasing white people, stupid.