So, Professor Drezner, We Meet Again. And THIS TIME THE ADVANTAGE IS MINE!
Dan Drezner appears to mourn for the days when I was his nemesis: Dan Drezner (2005): So How Do Mexicans View African-Americans?: "While Latino critics in the United States have their hands full combating discrimination in the Star Wars movies (link via Glenn Reynolds), Latinos south of the border have a slightly bigger problem.... dealing with their own racial prejudices. Traci Carl explains for the Associated Press: 'President Vicente Fox reversed course Monday and apologized for saying that Mexicans in the United States do the work that blacks won't....' An intriguing angle about this story is the ability of Jackson and Sharpton to go global with... that thing they do (though in this case they have a pretty valid point). Readers are heartily encouraged to predict the next world leader who will be required to mau-mau kowtow to Jackson and Sharpton for something they say. I think it's a toss-up between Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin.... UPDATE: Brad DeLong objects to this post without saying why he objects. From his comments section, I gather it was my use of the phrase 'mau-mau', which some argue is a racially offensive term. Wikipedia backs them up (though they treat it as a noun and I used it as a verb)—so let me take the opportunity to apologize for using the term...
Let me say that I read Drezner's piece in 2005 as an exercise in politics according to Karl Schmitt: that Drezner is following Schmitt's advice that one's first move when engaging in politics is to focus on identifying your enemies, and all else follows from that. Here the point of Drezner's piece is to assure (reassure?) his audience that his enemies are "Jackson and Sharpton... that thing they do", which is to confront white politicians who are then "required to mau-mau kowtow to Jackson and Sharpton for something they say..." And he defines them as his enemies even though "they have a pretty valid point".
I am glad Drezner no longer does this.
#publicsphere #politics
