Leftism's Racist Roots
Editor’s Note. A version of today’s article was posted as The Racist Roots of Progressivism's Wish List October 2016 at The Roots of Liberty. An article published by Time, titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, prompted my snarky suggestion that I’d wait for them to offer similar exposes on gun control, pot prohibition, minimum wages, and Planned Parenthood, but I wouldn’t hold my breath lest I expire. In keeping with my on-going efforts to illustrate the growing divide between liberalism and leftism, I swapped out “progressivism” for “leftism” in both title and body, and added some contemporary commentary.
Pop quiz.
What do gun control, Planned Parenthood, and the minimum wage have in common?
Got an answer? Now, add pot prohibition to the list. Does that change your answer?
The essay title, of course, gave the answers away. The first three are high priority issues for modern leftists, and the fourth is one where leftists are have only recently started shifting. All four are rooted in racism.
Gun control laws were originally written to prevent blacks from owning guns.
Planned Parenthood was spawned by the eugenics movement which sought reductions in black birth rates because they were considered "feeble-minded."
The minimum wage was intended from its outset to protect white male workers's wages from the women and minorities who'd do the same work for less money.
Pot prohibition was first enacted due to anti-Mexican attitudes, and was later fully embraced out of bigotry against "jazz musicians," aka cool black people
One might object to characterizing these issues in the same fashion today, but that objection will be rooted in personal discomfort rather than dispassionate logic.
Consider that some proposals put forth to restrict gun ownership involve heavy taxation and/or mandated insurance coverage. Who does that hurt the most? The poor. The poor, who are disproportionately minorities. Need I mention that big cities with large minority populations (e.g. NYC, Chicago), have some of the toughest gun control laws?
Consider the abortion rate among blacks is 5 times that for whites.
Consider that the least-skilled workers in the country, workers who are most adversely impacted by higher minimum wages, are disproportionately minorities.
Consider that blacks comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses.
Of these four issues, only marijuana has shifted on the Left’s to-do list. The Left has a softer stance on the drug war than the Right, but its policy prescriptions are still rather half-baked (pun clearly intended), with this most progressive of all administrations continuing to resist the wave that has seen pot legalized in 37 states.
As for the rest? The minority inner cities are America's areas of highest crime, yet the Left continues to insist that even more gun control is the solution. On abortion and Planned Parenthood, the Left holds to a hard-line position on abortion access and wants it funded with public money. Pro-life groups estimate that 16 million black babies have been aborted in the past 40 or so years. Finally, one of the Left's highest priorities is a much higher minimum wage, which will inevitably force even more unskilled minorities onto the welfare ranks (which a cynic might think would please rather than dishearten those do-gooders).
Progressives, the progenitors of modern leftists, declared themselves the champions of minorities back in the Great Society days of LBJ's presidency, despite the fact that progressivism's party (the Democrats) not only waged much war against them, but also stood more strongly in opposition to civil rights legislation than the supposedly racist Republicans. Progressivism advanced policies (including the War on Poverty and its countless welfare programs) that have created a permanent underclass and a culture of dependence among minorities today. The Left continues to pound the message that only they stand up for the rights of minorities, a message that is rewarded with strong party loyalty and even stronger voting loyalty.
There's a thing about party loyalty: The stronger it is, the more likely it will be unrewarded in anything but blather. Barring connections or insider status, a party loyalist gives the party no real reason to act on the things he considers important. Parties and politicians have a primary goal: winning. The actions they take and the policies they pursue are driven first and foremost by the desire to gain and retain power. That is accomplished by garnering votes, and votes that are "in play" are votes that will draw attention. A loyalist requires far less attention or effort to be kept loyal - the tribalistic aspects of human nature take care of that. All the party needs to do to reinforce that loyalty is find ways to enhance that tribalism. It does by rewarding the community leaders, not the communities themselves. Those leaders then propagate the message that the community needs to be loyal to the party, and help quash the unfortunate truths about that party's history. Thus, the racist roots of many high-priority leftist aspirations, and their continued adherence to policies both born out of racism and harmful to minorities, remain undiscussed and unrecognized.
Racism is an obvious and ugly stain on American's history, and it continues to inform both societal issues and public policy. What, I believe, is lost in all this is the fact that racism was and is perpetuated by government force. Jim Crow laws were just that - laws. Gun control laws, minimum wage laws, drug prohibitions, all laws. The "solutions" to all the perceived ills of modern society? More laws. Affirmative action, forced association, and anti-discrimination laws that get more granular with each passing year. Redistributive laws - tax some to give to others. Laws that phase out benefits (other laws) as earnings increase, creating the welfare trap.
Leftism is, as much as anything else, the imposition of a desired social order via government force. We see in its history its antipathy to minorities, and we see in its current policies exploitation of minorities.
While today’s Democrats are not the racists that carried the label a century ago, the progressive (now leftist) policies that have persisted across the decades not only carry the whiff of original sin, they continue harm minorities disproportionately. Minorities are, unfortunately, convinced to continue to vote for the Left (though there are hopeful trends there).
What to do about this? Two things. One, point all this out. Repeatedly. Two, remind loyalists that loyalty is how one gets ignored, in practice if not in rhetoric. The liberty movement could make big inroads here, pointing out that the real enemy is government itself. The leftists are certainly not going to come clean. As for the conservatives? They may, finally, be waking up to the reality that there are many blacks, latinos, and asians who will better fit in their tent, and simply need the flap held open. The 2022 mid-term election results in Florida tell a tale.
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Peter.
“When "hate speech" became a thing, many moons ago, who among us predicted that it'd go wrong, that it'd expand beyond the N-word and similarly blatant epithets? Yes, it was the libertarians, and while misgendering is not (yet) a crime in America, there are way too many people who would flush the First Amendment down the toilet so that they can grant a few the power to punish anyone who doesn't speak as they demand. Stanford's flying monkeys may see their list as "suggestions," or something that should be voluntarily complied with by good people, but we've seen, time and again, how "suggestions" often result in punishment for those who do not go along. If not by the monkeys themselves, then by the people who see the enormous utility in leveraging, exploiting, and corrupting the social justice movement to advance their power-grabs and socialistic dreams.
As for “submit,” at first I figured they outwitted themselves. But, if the concept is removed from the language, how are we to act otherwise? If the behavior is conditioned as default without naming it, those of us who’d argue against it will have that much harder a time explaining what it is.
This is a thought provoking piece… I enjoyed reading it.