Kris Kobach currently holds a 91 vote lead in his attempt to wrest the GOP gubernatorial nomination away from the sitting Republican governor of Kansas. East coast elites are up in arms because they fear that Kobach, a high IQ, hard-working, good-looking politician of unusually sophisticated views, would become vice-presidential timber, at least, if elected governor. The easiest way to stop him in Republican Kansas is to keep him from winning a GOP primary.
From Vox:
Racism is a problem of white elites, and Kris Kobach proves it
White nationalism and elite education make a powerful combination.
By Dylan Matthews @[email protected] Aug 9, 2018
Kris Kobach, who is currently holding on to a lead of fewer than 200 votes in Kansas’s Republican primary for governor, is one of America’s most effective advocates of racist policy. …
I don’t know what’s in Kobach’s soul. But I do know that one of the few constants in his career is an enthusiasm for policies that hurt racial minorities.
He’s not alone in that among elected officials. What stands out about Kobach is the pedigree. His résumé is the stuff of ambitious Ivy Leaguers’ dreams. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, as the top student in the government department, and received a master’s and doctorate at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. He attended Yale Law, was on the law review, and got an appellate clerkship. He worked for years as a law professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City, eventually getting tenure.
We have an unfortunate tendency in America to treat racism and racial resentment as a pathology of the white underclass. Takes about the need for Democrats to abandon woke “identity politics” typically cite a desire to win back the “white working class,” not white members of the Harvard Club.
But while there’s some survey data backing the idea that working-class whites are likelier to harbor racial resentment (see table 3 here), the racism that kept Jews and black people out of country clubs
The Golfocaust!
Naive people believe don’t believe me when I point out how much of the resentful worldview of so many of our media elites in 2018 is inspired in substantial part by the outrage they continue to nurse over family stories of how great-grandpa couldn’t get into, say, the Los Angeles Country Club in 1922 so he had to co-found the Hillcrest Country Club. But, if you pay careful attention, you can see how they can’t help letting this hilarious obsession slip out over and over.
(and out of Harvard) for generations is still around. And Kobach is a great example of how it can continue to have real political consequences.
The incredible effectiveness of racist elites
Institutions like Harvard occupy a weird place in our public culture, derided on both left and right for their complicity in various social ills (and of course no one loves to bash Harvard more than people who went there), but nonetheless associated with a kind of cosmopolitan sophistication. They may propagate, say, laissez-faire economic ideas, or reinforce class privilege, but surely they’re the enemy of base forms of ethnonationalism.
“Base forms of ethnonationalism” … so unlike elite forms of ethnonationalism, such as, to take one of a myriad of Harvard examples (e.g., Alan Dershowitz), Harvard President Larry Summers’ pro-Zionism.
Kobach, however, is a friend to white ethnonationalism. And Harvard not only didn’t stop him but helped give him the social prestige and power to carry out his mission.
Indeed, if anything Harvard seems to have helped Kobach find and develop his brand of racism. Kobach’s main mentor at Harvard was Samuel Huntington.
Samuel P. Huntington was such a racist that his other student proteges besides Kobach include Francis Fukuyama, Fareed Zakaria, and Eliot Cohen.
Huntington is a complicated figure, a pioneer in political science whose The Soldier and the State (1957), Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), and The Third Wave (1991) are justifiably considered classics.
What have guys named Samuel Huntington ever done for the United States of America? I mean, besides signing the Declaration of Independence or being a 19th Century governor of Ohio?
Seriously, the Huntington clan, which traces back to a single Puritan family who arrived in the 1630s, is likely the most broadly high-achieving in American history. The American Journal of Sociology exclaimed in 1936, “They are a great race, these Huntingtons…”
For example, in my county alone, there are two separate municipalities with “Huntington” in their name. One is a famous surf town. And you know what those blond surfers are like. Worse than golfers!
Matthews continues:
… Two decades later, he [Huntington] authored Who Are We?, a book arguing that America’s Protestant culture was being eroded by Latino immigrants; the white nationalist Richard Spencer has cited the book as a key influence. …
Vox is offended that the late Samuel Huntington, an American elite with roots deep in America’s founding stock who was proud of his people’s accomplishments in building America, merely existed. To Vox, Huntington’s career is like a lifetime of Matt Damon’s WASP impudently answering Joe Pesci’s mobster’s question in De Niro’s The Good Shepherd of “What do you people have?”
“The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”
Vox continues:
But Kobach’s experience at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale enabled his career. …
Kobach isn’t alone. White House adviser Stephen Miller didn’t have a Huntington figure during his time at Duke; in all the profiles written about Miller, I’ve yet to find one that mentions a professor who mentored him or even liked him. But it was Miller’s role as a conservative voice on campus during the Duke lacrosse scandal (a scandal that became a national affair only because of Duke’s elite status) that catapulted him into a career as a policy aide on Capitol Hill, and now in the White House. He, like Kobach, leveraged elite credentials to implement racist policies.
Stephen Miller’s one-man conspiracy to get the Durham DA, 88 Duke professors, and the national media to all trumpet a black stripper’s hoax about evil white Haven Monahan lacrosse players is one of the most diabolical plots ever hatched. And it was only possible because an elite college allowed one teenage conservative to enroll as a freshman: the lesson we must all take from this is that never again can elite universities allow themselves to become infected by even a single bacillus of skepticism. Eternal vigilance is the price of our precious freedom from speech.
Commenter Mr. Anon calls Miller’s infamous conspiracy to trick the great and good into making fools of themselves The Protocols of the Youngster of Santa Monica.
