I’m in the middle of reading an “American Despotism” series of opeds by Newt Gingrich in The American Spectator. The latest is a piece on the black violence in the years after the civil rights acts were passed in the 1960s.
Now that black Americans found they could openly challenge the old order, the level of anger grew. The activists became more unwilling to wait and be patient. This combination of progress and frustration was the same kind of unstable, combustible social setting that led to revolutions in 18th-century France and 20th-century Russia.
This, of course, plays into Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution concept. After the revolution, when the Promised Land doesn’t appear, the revolutionaries get angry. And they burn the place down, whether it’s Robespierre in France, Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, or the blacks in the US of A.
To which I offer the following maxim, straight off the presses.
Politics Never Solves Anything.
And, if you think of it, there’s the following obvious corollary.
The more politics, the more disappointment.
And that’s what happened with the civil-rights movement. Naturally, when you are leading an army to the fight you tell your supporters whatever it takes to keep them up for the fight. And so, like Moses, you promise to take them to the Promised Land.
But it’s all a lie. If you are a solider in the army that just won a world war, then you realize that you just lost several years of your life And for what?
If you are a black in newly post Jim Crow America, then all you got is the right to put your shoulder to the plow without the overseer lashing at you with his cowhide whip.
No wonder blacks are angry.
But then there are liberals. Here’s Richard Hanania reviewing the reviewers of The Origins of Woke.
The Atlantic wrote a hostile review. Steve [Sailer] did the point-by-point response. I don’t have much to add, but the review was an opportunity to reflect on liberals and how they approach sensitive issues surrounding race…
liberals are simply unable to think clearly on race or sex issues…
My view is that even smart and well meaning liberals have a deep emotional need to deny truths about group differences… I see the fear in their eyes when you bring up inconvenient facts.
The point is that liberals have brought group differences into politics, and they insist that there are no differences between races, between sexes, except due to oppression and injustice. And if you disagree you are a racist. And they cannot retreat, because if they do, it would mean admitting that all the low-IQ bitter-clingers and deplorables were right.
So I make the following pronouncement: If “we” want to solve the race question, solve the group differences problem, then we are going to have to take those issues out of politics. Or, as lefty Jürgen Habermas came to think:
[H]umans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world, the lifeworld of Husserl, with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement.
If you are going to develop moral agreement you can’t just say OK, if you don’t agree with me, you’re a racist. Because when you call someone a racist you are saying they are an enemy. And there is only one thing to do with an enemy, and that is to fight.
So I say that if you want to understand the mess at the border, the mess on crime and policing, the mess in the federal budget and the ballooning deficit, the problem is politics.
Decades ago, liberals decided that nationalism was literally Hitler. So building a border wall is fascism.
Decades ago, liberals decided that to help the workers we needed labor unions and the welfare state. Now, they want to kill the auto workers union by transitioning to electric cars.
Decades ago, liberals decided to make war on the patriarchs, to stand for the liberation of women, from no divorce without fault, from the prison of the suburban home, to careers, to “freedom to choose,” to sex outside marriage. Today, women are miserable.
Decades ago, liberals were outraged by racist cops beating up black men. Today they stand by as young fatherless black teenagers loot stores and beat up liberal activists.
Is there a common thread throughout all these liberal failures? I believe there is. I believe the common thread is the faith that you can solve problems with politics and government.
I don’t agree. I think that the only two things you can do with politics are: beat up the enemy, and gift your friends.
But 97.2 percent of problems in this world are not solved by treating the other guy as an enemy. And when government creates programs to gift its friends it just makes the world poorer.
Back in the day, the Progressive movement was outraged by the “spoils system” in the politics of the 19th century. I’d say that the spoils system run by Boss Tweed in New York City in the 19th century was no different from today’s corrupt government. Only Boss Tweed was a low-life who came up through the fire department. Today’s corrupt politicians came up through prestigious colleges and life training in activism.
But, unfortunately, whether we are talking about the spoils system of Boss Tweed or Barack Obama’s Deep State, you still face the same problem.
Politics Never Solves Anything.