RUTHFULLY YOURS

All great people have a sense that they are destined for great things. Stacey Abrams predicts that she will be president of the United States by 2040.

Come what may of her White House aspirations this year, Abrams speaks like someone who believes she is bound for immortality—indeed, that she’s entitled to it. Her infatuated fans share this sense of historically assured victory.

The Washington Post recently published a work of widely lampooned hagiography on Abrams, depicting her as a polymath—a Prometheus of diversity handing down the fire of progress to man. It reads like the kind of flattery that despots used to make court scribes put together under threat of execution.

“Abrams is the author of eight romance novels under a pseudonym, started two small businesses, is a New York Times best-selling author under her own name and is a superfan of ‘Star Trek’ and southern hip-hop, including one of her favorite rappers, Ludacris,” records court historian Kevin Powell. “She is scholarly, but she can also wax poetic on football. She is a policy wonk, but she can effortlessly pivot to sending goofy memes to the children of good buddies.”

Can you sense it? Can you feel the ground shifting beneath you? Are you prepared for the Pax Abramsiana?

To Abrams and her sycophants, her loss to Brian Kemp in 2018 was just a hiccup on the cosmic road of justice that is wending, inexorably, toward 1,000 years of social justice utopia.

You laugh? The entitlement to power that Abrams radiates is comical to many people, but it hardly seems unjustified. One of the most powerful newspapers in the nation is publishing degrading fan fiction about her. Why should she not feel that history is on her side?

The Triumph of Diversity

What the Left finds appealing in Abrams is what she represents, not who she is. She is the devotee and beneficiary of America’s new creed, the religion of diversity.

Diversity turns on its head much common sense about what makes for a just and strong society.

No sensible nation would put a weak person, knowingly, in charge of government. Leaders need virtues like strength, courage, daring, and wisdom. But the triumph of diversity has replaced these virtues with their opposites. It is weakness, not strength, differences, not commonalities, that we celebrate. Rather than having to demonstrate a character fit to govern, a person is thought to be deserving of power if, and only if, they have a claim to victimhood.

The professional Left sees Abrams as the herald of a new America, one in which the weakest rule and ancient debts have finally been paid. In this historical sweep, an unimpressive person can take on grandiose proportions. It’s how you end up with passages like this in the pages of a once semi-respectable newspaper: 

Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far left of the stage, like a runway supermodel, stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly and smiles. Camera flashes explode. She next pivots and walks slowly to the center of the stage, freezes there and repeats the pose. Again, the flashes explode. Abrams is summoning her inner actress, and she is both enjoying the moment and getting through it to get to the conversation. She then pivots and walks to the far right of the stage, same.

There is no reason to allege insincerity here. Diversity is the lodestar of the professional Left: to them, Abrams is the mythic embodiment of the promise of Progress.

There is a whiff of the soft bigotry of low expectations at play here, too. The Post is mindful of the fact that Abrams likes reading, and also, music:

“When I was in 10th grade I was having a conversation with a friend, and I said, ‘I hate country music.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ And I didn’t have an answer. So I made myself listen to every radio station on the radio for two weeks each. But then when I engaged people . . . I could use that complexity of my musical likes to talk,” Abrams recalls.

Wouldn’t you like to have a vice president who listens to different genres of music?

As the worshipful tone of the piece suggests, Abrams is not some outsider to power: she’s a darling of the professional Left, and if there’s anything the professional Left loves more than identity, it’s phony credentials and the pseudo-insight that comes with being a card-carrying member of their class. In a case like this one, those (rather meager) credentials provide something with which to browbeat the unimpressed.

While conservatives reject the rise of Abrams as the absurd product of affirmative action on a national scale, the Left calls anyone who doesn’t find her impressive a racist. But let’s have some honesty here: it is the Left, not the Right, that is fixated on Abrams’ identity. It is the primary, no, the only reason for her prominence. For the Left, Abrams’ Yale degree is an afterthought. Racial chauvinism comes first. It is the strained denial of this fact that gives life to the strange, make-pretend feeling of her celebrity.

Really, credentials should be beside the point: a president or vice president doesn’t need a fancy degree, and having one doesn’t guarantee he or she will possess the qualities necessary to lead. But if we’re going to go by credentials, then a Yale education certainly failed to endow Abrams with any special virtue or insight as she delights in spewing Buttigiegian gobbledygook.

“Part of any job is being capable of learning all of the facets but coming with enough knowledge and curiosity and enough capacity to adapt quickly either to the challenges you face or the realities you confront,” she told the Post.

There’s nothing unusual about mediocrity in politicians—in fact, it’s almost a prerequisite. There are plenty of hacks in public office with Ivy League degrees. Abrams would be perfectly at home with them as a state lawmaker.

But ambition is a stubborn thing. We hear so often that “diversity is our strength” that only the foolhardy dare to contradict the mantra. And for ambitious people like Abrams, it’s not just a collective strength but a very personal one as well. She knows the game. So does Joe Biden, apparently.

Biden’s campaign surely understands that Abrams has secured a place within the pantheon of America’s elite religion, and that this religion—ideology, fandom, whatever you’d like to call it—commands an enthusiastic and ruthless following.

That Abrams lost to Kemp because of supposed voter suppression is not incidental, but essential, to her appeal. It bolsters her victim creds while laying the foundation of a heroic myth: the “racist” Kemp may have managed to throw up a levee against demographic fate, but victory will eventually come.

Demographic Revolution

Abrams and her allies understand her as being on the cusp of a demographic revolution that will change America forever. It’s not a secret.

Lauren Groh-Wargo, an ally of Abrams’ and executive of her group Fair Fight Action, told the Washington Post that Abrams shows “it is possible, and the best option, for Democrats to really aggressively be building this multiracial, multiethnic coalition,” adding as an afterthought that “reaching out to white voters” can help, but “we should be leading with [diversity] rather than leading with this idea that we have to start with the ‘swing voter’ concept. We lead with diverse communities of color and really let that drive strategy.”

Why waste time trying to persuade white people? Persuasion is out; demographic coercion is in.

Georgia, which Abrams narrowly lost using a conscious ‘diversity’ strategy, is on the way to becoming a majority-minority state, and Abrams has embraced demographic change as the key to victory for Democrats.

Recently a video resurfaced of a 2014 conference called “Race Will Win the Race” (that’s a real name) for the group PowerPac+, which advocates building a nonwhite majority to secure political power. It shows Abrams baldly laying out a strategy of demographic replacement.

Abrams this month complained that not giving illegal immigrants representation results in a “whiter, and therefore more Republican” voting base.

Last year, Abrams applauded Georgia’s “rapidly” shifting demographics, even tweeting out a chart that straight-forwardly presents the decline of the white population as a positive trend.

If these patterns hold, eventually it may not matter whether an ambitious person has the ability to govern a nation as large and complex as America. He or she could simply rise to power through the power of crude arithmetic. America would finish a decades-long breakdown from a republic where “fit characters” lead to a Balkanized democracy where representatives are no more than racial deputies.

A day may yet come when Americans will all live under Pax Abramsiana. Laugh at her if you wish, but don’t forget to study the phenomenon.