Nowhere is our democracy more vulnerable to degradation than through the workings of the politics of race. This is abundantly revealed in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas. At one level, Thomas' confirmation illustrates the vitality and power of our democratic process. He now sits on the Court because the polls showed his nomination to be supported by a great majority of American blacks. The key votes in the Senate were those of the southern Democrats who owed their elections to blacks in their states. Had those black communities rallied in opposition to Thomas as they had four years ago to Robert Bork, those Senators would have voted against the nominee, as they had four years before. In this way, democracy worked: the vote was governed by public opinion, rendered after more than three months of highly public examination. There is another level, however, at which the process showed how frail the ideal of democracy is, how susceptible to cynical manipulation is the public opinion to which the wielders of power appear to respond. Democracy requires that people be able to judge well who are their friends and who their enemies. By a cruel irony of human psychology, the more wounded a people has been, the more vulnerable they are to being manipulated by the very rulers who have injured them. We have just witness a new variation on an ancient theme. Over the centuries, the clever rulers of unjust regimes have told the downtrodden: "I am your friend, for I am like you. It is they who are different who are your enemies." The Czars of Russia used ethnic division to delay their overthrow, persuading Russian peasants that the ruling elite was part of their "Us" while it was the Jews who were the hateful "Them." White racism in the post-Civil War American South was fed by a similar dynamic. The dominant white classes made sure the suffering lower class whites distinguished "Us" vs. "Them" along racial instead of class lines. So long as the passions of group identity and group antagonism can obscure the basis for intergroup alliance according to shared interests, the interests of the rulers can be protected. Injured groups are manipulated to deal with their rage and frustration in terms of symbols and scapegoats rather than in terms of the realities of power. Let them eat hate. Now, with the Thomas nomination, we again see this pattern of elites engaged in the clear-eyed pursuit of interests while the common people are distracted by the symbols of racial identity. Bush nominated a black, but one who, he had good reason to assume, would use his power on the Court like a conservative white. He nominated a black whose politics and whose life suggested an identification not with black struggle, but with white power. At the level of interests, it was clear Thomas would enjoy the support of all those political forces that had always been antagonistic to black aspirations, forces that favored discrimination when it had been used to keep blacks down, and then opposed it when it was used to help bring blacks into the American mainstream. Jesse Helms' vote was never in doubt. No harm in having one black face on the Court if it says "Aye" when we say "Aye," and if it helps at the same time to defuse the resentment of those who feel oppressed. But what about support from the black community for this nominee to succeed that genuine champion of the powerless, Justice Thurgood Marshall? Here, interests were displaced by a parade of symbols, as the nominee dramatized himself as the personification of the disadvantaged-- the boy from Pinpoint, Georgia. The black community saw the face, heard the story, and most concluded: "He is one of Us." This is where injury compounds itself. Which would the black community see as "our man on the Court," a white judge who would protect their rights and interests or a black judge who would side with their oppressors? The more terrible the division of our society between black and white, and the less that blacks experience in their daily lives the possibility of crossing over the gap between the races, the more impossible it becomes for people who suffer from that division to experience their "Us" and their "Them" in other than racial terms. The supporters of Thomas trumpeted that the black groups that opposed the nomination --the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus-- were "out of step" with the real black community. This gap, however, had nothing to do with fundamental policy or ideology. It simply reflected different susceptibility to manipulation. White the larger black community was being distracted by the symbolism of putting one black face into the portrait of the Court, the more sophisticated leaders of that community were able --like Bush and Helms on the other side-- to focus on the issue of power and interest that were really at stake. Then came Anita Hill, carrying charges that threatened to transform the symbol of the oppressed into an image of an oppressor. These charges, though poorly refuted, were deftly deflected by another gesture of racial symbolism. By almost all accounts, it was Clarence Thomas' wielding of the imagery of racial oppression --the "high tech lynching," the "uppity black," the reference to the Klan-- that turned the danger away from the nominee. Though the accuser was black, though she had voiced the charges privately years before and was acting alone now, the racial ploy worked. In the black community, people rallied behind the supposed lynching victim. Many in that community were heartened, seeing in this racial rhetoric evidence that at last Clarence Thomas had learned who he really and inescapably is in this society-- a black man. They gave him his polls, and he got his seat on the Court. The process that began with the president's lie that race had nothing to do with his choice ended with the nominee's lie that race had everything to do with the charges against him. The first lie put on the defensive those politicians who generally work to protect the interests of their minority constituencies. How can we oppose a black? But it was with the second lie that they were wholly unable to cope. So disarmed were the Democrats by the manipulative charge leveled against them that they couldn't defend themselves, and hence left both their witnesses and their constituencies defenseless. Guilty only of an inexplicable incapacity to fight in the arena of the symbolism of violence and oppression, they ended up discredited as a lynch mob. As a result, some are saying that the man whose campaign lynched Willie Horton at the doorstep of his opponent in 1988 now stands to pick up black support in 1992. Power to the people.

Andrew Bard Schmookler is the author of Out of Weakness: Healing the Wounds that Drive Us to War. ??