Tied themselves in knots

The Anchoress has some thoughts on why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama can't criticize each other as honestly as either might want to. In brief, honest argument (as opposed to innuendo, unsupported assertion, and a grab-bag of rejoinders tailor-made for sound bites) would explode too much of the mythology to which both candidates subscribe.

As the Anchoress points out, "identity politics" has made some questions toxic, and that's a shame.

Like Dash (the boy) noticed in The Incredibles (and Syndrome the villain paraphrased), "if everyone is special, then no one is special."

His point is a good one, but needs elaboration: our cultural problem is not that we think everyone is special (or the corollary to that statement, which is that everyone is a victim). We are each of us made in the image and likeness of God, which makes us as special as it is possible to get. Likewise, as Christians sometimes say, we all have our crosses to bear -- or as my erstwhile colleague Mark used to put it, "our bears to cross." So you could safely agree with progressive shibboleths about specialness and victimhood, but only if you remember the context from which they came.

Everyone's a winner by virtue of having been loved into existence. But everyone's also a loser as a consequence of had his or her passport to heaven defiled by sin. The common denominator in each case is human dignity in the revolutionary way that it was first explained by Jesus. You and I rate enough to be "winners" and "losers"; our God does not ignore us. Astoundingly, he invites each of us, regardless of our station, talents, or upbringing, to call him "Father." As basketball aficionados might put it this time of year (and as Thomas Howard did put it in a great old book), we've all been invited to the Big Dance. Yet what makes sense in a theological and moral context does not survive translation into the mundane world of public policy without a proper regard for freedom and where we got that.

Politicians who traffic in identity politics have abandoned history to bet on grievance, and that's a sucker bet.

(I revised the original post to make it a bit clearer)