By Noah Rothman
Thursday, November 13, 2025
It wasn’t all that long ago that the mere invocation of
ethnicity sufficed for an argument. A pointed claim that someone of majority
extraction had offended another with a minority identity was enough to result
in investigations, summary firings, and national scandals. An accusation, or
even the sly implication, of racial bias was enough to disarm any criticism,
which is perhaps why claims of racism are so often deployed as a weapon of
first resort by those who find themselves in the hot seat. That weapon has been
overused, though, and it’s looking more and more inert.
This week, Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez stirred up “chaos” on the
House floor, leaving her colleagues “shocked and dismayed,” when she mounted a
“rogue” effort to condemn her Democratic colleague, Chuy García, for behaving
condemnably.
Last Tuesday, on Election Day, García announced that he
would not seek a fifth term in office in deference to his cardiologist’s advice
against it. That would have been an unremarkable announcement had it not come
just hours after the filing deadline to run for García’s Illinois seat in
Congress had elapsed. Conveniently enough, though, García’s organization had
been surreptitiously gathering signatures for his chief of
staff to run for that seat — a petition that was filed just before the Monday
deadline. García’s seat will surely pass to his handpicked successor now that
the district’s Democratic voters were denied the chance to weigh in.
The maneuver is nakedly contemptuous of the voting public
as well as democratic conventions. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could argue
otherwise. So they haven’t. Instead, García’s champions have resorted to
implying that anyone who resents the congressman’s cynical maneuver secretly
hates Hispanic people.
That this wild brushback pitch has been met with only so
many rolled eyeballs shows how far we’ve come. It’s mortifying to recall an age
in which mindless appeals to racial solidarity were once effective rhetorical
attacks. But the punch they once packed is gone, and the good white liberals
they were meant to appeal to (or, at least, silence) are no longer quite so
emotionally manipulable.
Not that this intellectually vacuous line of
argumentation is going away. For those who cannot fashion a compelling
argument, it’s the only weapon they have. And they’re going to keep using it.
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