I Want a New Left

Racism, Sexism, and Asymptotes

My view of racism and sexism is that the big results were achieved ages ago in the 1960s and 1970s, and that what is left is just a little bit of mop-up work. If you know what the graph for a capacitor being charged looks like (see here), you know it is drawn as a curve that increases greatly at first but slows down the closer it gets to being fully charged. It’s true that theoretically, it never quite reaches that stage (being an asymptote), but so what? It’s close enough. It’s the same with race and gender relations. Lots of enormous changes were made so that blacks and women achieved near equality ages ago, and what little that is left to do will probably happen without much effort.

However, that is not how the situation is seen by the left. For leftists, we still have a long way to go in dealing with both racism and sexism. Somehow, they believe, we are not much better than we were in the 1950s. Here is an amusing statement of how things are these days:

Every major publication now has one black writer whose sole job is to write about how bad things are for blacks, how whites are to blame, and how nothing for blacks will get better because whites are just so awful. [Source: here; the author goes on to say, “The Atlantic has Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New York Times has Charles Blow, Slate has Jamelle Bouie, etc.”]

Incredible. And what is the evidence for this racism? I will be told that the police have it in for blacks. Yet, every incident is of not an ordinary black citizen, but of someone who is a criminal. Plus, these racist police officers never seem to go after Indians or Latinos or Asians, just blacks. Yet, if they were really racist, then they’d go after every non-white group equally. (Just for the record, a black I know complains about being stopped by the police a lot in a certain nearby town, but as far as I can tell, he speeds a lot, so this is only to be expected.)

Then I will be told of incidents in which ordinary blacks were targeted not by the police but by ordinary citizens. Ignoring the many incidents of this sort that are fake, one can come up with equally many in which whites were targeted by blacks, so things even out.

In addition, we are constantly hearing about institutional racism, but in fact the institutional racism that exists is actually against whites, not blacks (in the form of affirmative action).

Plus, all of this ignores the fact that blacks have been causing a lot of their own problems by rejecting education, having babies way too soon, engaging in crime, and so on.

It doesn’t help their case that they are constantly expanding the definition of what it means to be a racist. (For example, objectivity in science is racist.) Naturally, you will never achieve “equality” if you keep moving the goalposts. Most of us look at this process and sneer, because we think the “race hustlers” are saying this sort of thing just to keep their gigs going. Nor does it help their case when they ascribe motives of racism which simply aren’t there. Hillary did this in her latest speech in India the other day; it just couldn’t possibly be that poor whites were voting in their own economic self-interest. No, it had to be the case that they were angry that blacks were getting rights.

As for sexism, we all know that feminists believe that women are paid less than men for the same work, but we also know that this has been debunked many times. As I believe Christina Hoff Sommers argued, if that were true, then companies could fire the men and hire women more cheaply to do the same work and make lots more money. Since that isn’t happening, something is wrong. And what is wrong is that when one compares as closely as possible, the pay gap disappears. It only seems to be there because women choose somewhat different jobs, don’t work as many hours, etc.

Likewise, women make choices not to go into STEM fields, even though they could. But most would rather do something else entirely. Yet, the lack of women in STEM fields is supposed to show how sexist our society is.

So, I’m sticking with my view that lots of progress to eliminate racism and sexism was made several decades ago, and so all the whining is not about much of anything.

Redistributions as Morally Desensitizing

In my latest book, I gave quite a few reasons for believing that governmental redistributions did not work very well and ought to be abandoned. Among them are that government money needn’t go to the poor and can end up in the hands of the rich instead, that some poor people end up getting taxed in order to fund any redistribution (since there is never enough money coming in), that they keep the poor poor, and that they make those taxed angry that their money has been stolen while those receiving benefits come to have an entitlement mentality. Along similar lines, here is something I hadn’t thought of at the time: the very idea of governmental redistributions makes leftists insensitive.

I first saw this with the adjunct crisis. I was completely surprised that none of the leftist academics were interested in the crisis and wholly ignored it. Though they often knew the adjuncts personally, they shunned and mistreated them. It was easy for tenured leftists to be angry about exploited workers in corporations, but when the same problem appeared much closer to home, they acted no differently than corporations did (or if anything, worse). The idea seemed to be that this was someone else’s responsibility and not theirs, so why should they concern themselves with it?

And that someone else is the government. Many of us have seen demands, after a natural disaster in a distant country, that our government needs to do something. Presumably, the person making such demands does not think of doing anything himself or herself, because they are not demanding that other individuals step forward and help just as they have. No, they expect our government to jump in, while they themselves do nothing. A few years back, someone did a study showing that conservatives gave more to charity than leftists did, which didn’t surprise me at all. Leftists expect their tax money to do charity work so they don’t have to. Then they get angry when rich conservatives don’t want their taxes raised, though in fact rich conservatives may be giving in other ways.

Often, rich leftists come up with creative excuses to avoid giving up their wealth. I mentioned some of these in my book, many of which came from the book If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? For example: believing that giving up one’s wealth won’t bring the revolution any closer because it has its own mechanisms that are not affected by such actions; or believing that the poor know how to live in poverty in dignity, while they themselves would not know how to do it; or that they themselves would be disadvantaged in comparison with other rich leftists if those other rich leftists didn’t do the same (never mind that poorer people will be even more disadvantaged).

Maybe the worst instance of moral insensitivity was when Lenin “dissuaded friends from collecting money for the victims of a famine, on the grounds that hunger ‘performs a progressive function’ and would ‘cause the peasants to reflect on the fundamental facts of capitalist society’” [Paul Johnson, Modern Times, p. 50]. For those who judge on actions rather than words, this is no different from what the apathetic would do.

How Framing Distorts the Immigration Issue

In this post from Steve Sailer, there are quotes from an article in the Washington Post claiming that white nationalists were trying to co-opt the movie Black Panther by pointing out how isolationist the blacks living in the mythical land of Wakanda were. Some SJW or another is quoted as pointing to a perceived difference:

“Wakandans are isolationist because they don’t want to become refugees,” said Kinjal Dave, one of the Data & Society researchers. “The far-right is isolationist because they don’t want to accept refugees.

Never mind that both parts of this alleged difference are wrong – see the comments for details – what is striking is how there are for such critics these days just two possibilities: either one rejects refugees or one accepts them on absurd terms. There is no third possibility. Accordingly, one is either a racist by rejecting refugees or one consents to a suicidal bargain if one accepts them. This is kind of like given a choice between either not being allowed to vote or being allowed to, but under the provisos that anyone who doesn’t vote will be put to death and there will be elections on one thing and another nearly every day. Naturally, lots of people would “reject voting” under those provisos.

With accepting refugees, the provisos are hidden but numerous: (1) there can be no pressure on the refugees to assimilate, (2) they must never be sent back, no matter what kind of crimes they commit, (3) the Americans most interested in having these refugees brought here will never have to live among them, so the problems they bring will be someone else’s burden, (4) anyone who mentions these problems will be called a racist, and they certainly will never be mentioned in the media, (5) the refugees will be valued more than poor whites, and so on.

The other day I called this suicidal immigration. So long as anyone debates this issue when framed this way by the open-borders supporters, they are bound to lose.

This Is Sad

Here is an article in Front Page Magazine about my high school, where there was recently a fight in the lunchroom between a Somali black and an African-American black (and their friends) that administrators did little to stop. When I went there, there were two blacks, one a year ahead of me who was an exchange student from Panama and one who was two years behind me. My entire class was white. Alas, the high school that was nearest to my home, but which I could not go to because I did not live in its district, was Edina, and it is also having big problems (as I noted with premature glee here).

The left is to blame.

Elizabeth Warren Again: Is It Possible This Guy Is Right?

In this column, the author insists that Donald Trump is winning the war over Elizabeth Warren, that he has branded her as a fake Indian and that she won’t be able to shake it. That's pretty remarkable, if true.

Meanwhile, here is a completely different perspective that claims that only Indian tribes get to decide who is one of them and that three different Cherokee tribes had looked at her ancestry a few years ago and concluded she was not one of them. From that perspective, it doesn’t matter if she gets a DNA test or not.

All of this matters because it speaks to her political beliefs. As a commenter at the first link puts it:

And thus, a graduate of Rutgers Law School winds up as a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. Anyone who understands the downward pressures in academia, and especially law which is all about prestige, know that’s only slightly more likely than tossing a stone in the air and having it carry all the way to the moon.

In other words, she got to the top not on talent, but on claiming to be what she wasn't: an Indian. Not only did she lie about her background, but her action meant that someone else more deserving may have missed out. But we can say even more. What should she have done in this situation? As an egalitarian, she should have protested against what is obviously an inegalitarian system. But instead of doing that, she cheated her way to the top, and such an action does nothing to enhance egalitarianism. The academic left is filled with people who know that academia is not at all egalitarian, and yet they say and do nothing.

You’re Just Wrong, Hillary

Hillary claimed recently on a trip to India that her supporters are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, and forward-looking. She’s wrong. Her supporters are no different from those people in Britain who have led it to Telford and Rotherham, or those Germans who led Germany to the gropings on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, or those Swedes who have led Sweden to incidents involving hand grenades. They may be forward-looking in the short run, but certainly not in the long run.

America (and California) in the Middle of the Twentieth Century

The America I remember from my childhood was a conservative sort of place, with anti-communism dominating the scene. Every teacher I had was patriotic (with the possible exception of some English teachers I had in high school). In elementary school we said the Pledge of Allegiance every day. In second grade I remember there being prayers. Everyone’s father had served in World War II (as did my father, and my mother, too). We were worried about nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and the United States had made alliances with all kinds of right-wing dictatorships that were anti-communist, just to prevent the spread of communism. Liberal politicians like JFK and Hubert Humphrey were anti-communist. On the right, people were so rabidly anti-communist that some thought that the fluoridation of water was a communist plot. In fact, everything for such people that upset the status quo was a communist plot. I stopped paying attention to them, just as I have now stopped paying attention to all the leftists who cry “racist” at just about everything.

Movies were patriotic and had none of the America-hating themes that they now have. Many were Westerns, and if not that, then war movies. Lots of television shows were either Westerns or about World War II (Combat, for example, or Rat Patrol, with some of them being silly, like Hogan’s Heroes or McHale’s Navy). The only exception to patriotic movies was Dr. Strangelove, but it was very unusual for its time.

People dressed up more, and they avoided using swear words. Religion was very important, and national magazines often had columns by respected religious figures (who never seemed to be liberal). Every child in my neighborhood went to church every Sunday (except a Jewish family, who went to synagogue on Saturdays). Many of the Catholics went to a Catholic school, and one boy went to a Lutheran school. The idea that someone who was not Catholic would go to a Catholic school was as ridiculous as the idea of a boy going to a girls’ school. Colleges and universities were basically like high school, except that they were more serious. If one heard of some college students getting up to something, it would be nothing but a fraternity prank; it would not be a demonstration, of which there were none, and it would not be a group making demands of the administration (why would any administrator pay attention to the students, who were ignorant, rather than the professors, who were there to teach the students?). And just as no non-Catholic would think to go to a Catholic school, no non-Catholic would think to go to a Catholic college; likewise, Catholics would not go to Protestant colleges. And those institutions adhered to the religion with which they were associated rather than being mostly secular. They might even require chapel every day.

Lots of the adult males owned guns, and it didn’t matter if they were Republican or Democrat. This was all considered very normal. I grew up in Minneapolis, and lots of people went hunting, and since Democrats tended to be blue-collar people (or else Catholic), it seemed very normal that blue-collar types would have guns and go hunting.

Minneapolis seemed like an ordinary city that had nothing very distinctive about it, except that its ethnic mix (with Germans and Scandinavians) was slightly different from that of St. Paul, which had more Irish. Presumably it was more liberal than Dallas, which was unfairly blamed for the assassination of President Kennedy (that is, even though the only known assassin had lived in the Soviet Union and so was likely a commie, the media somehow blamed it on Dallas’ right-wing atmosphere).

Politics was very worker-oriented, though as the Sixties went on, more and more emphasis began to be placed on race.

Did I live in a weird little pocket? As far as I can tell, no. If most of the country had been wildly liberal, I’m pretty sure my conservative parents would have warned me about it. If there was a pocket back then, it was in New York City, which may have had lots of liberals who lived and thought differently than people in the rest of the country. However, even there I have to wonder. Lots of television shows were set in New York City, and there was nothing about them that suggested anything different from the rest of the country, except in terms of ethnic mix and possibly having more crime.

Likewise, California did not seem like a terribly liberal place, for it elected Ronald Reagan as governor. And as far as I can tell from books and movies from before the late Sixties which were set in San Francisco, it was just an ordinary city.

Now I’ve been told (by an old communist) that at one time, every worker in America was a member of the communist party, but that era was dead long before I arrived on the scene. Presumably, it was killed partly by the Nazi-Soviet pact and partly by Joe McCarthy.

I mention all of this – and there’s a lot more I could say – because I got into an argument about it with a certain blogger and the other commenters on that blog. I’m supposed to believe that, presumably ever since FDR, America has been getting more and more leftist. I just don’t remember it that way at all. It was very right-wing when I was young, and even to the extent that it was liberal, it was not liberal in the way that it is now, with identity politics governing everything. (No liberal back then would have called poor whites “deplorables” the way Hillary did.)

Of course, it remains to be seen whether the liberalism of FDR and even more so the leftism that was generated during the Sixties is the future of America, or just a blip that will be forgotten by the end of this century.

No, It Is Not Time for Socialism; But Why Is She Saying This?

This piece from the op-ed pages of the Washington Post affirms that it is time for socialism. When I began to read it, I was expecting a lot of workers-are-downtrodden rhetoric, and there is some, but the real aim of the article isn’t actually helping the workers. It’s helping leftists to cope with Trump. The author, Elizabeth Bruenig, links to two writers – Andrew Sullivan (here) and Yascha Mounk (here) – both of whom are obviously taking the Trump presidency very badly. They both think democracy is being replaced by authoritarianism, that minorities are under attack, that a horrible form of nationalism is on the rise, and what not. The author’s suggestion is that socialism is the solution here, presumably because socialism would divert the attention of those attracted to nationalism in a healthier direction; maybe she's even saying that if the left hadn’t simply abandoned socialism and put all its eggs into identity politics, then nationalism would not be on the rise, Hillary would have won, and everyone would be happy.

Anyway, reading these people is a reminder of what a different world they live in. For example, the claim that Trump is authoritarian because he wanted to put his opponent in prison ignores a lot of context. Lots of little people think Hillary deserved to go to prison, because they themselves would have ended up in prison for doing the things she did. As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit puts it, the attitude of Hillary and the media is that laws are for little people. Trump sides with the little people on this issue, which is something the Democrats themselves used to do. This hardly counts as authortarianism.

Then there is this quote from Mounk, who wants nationalism to be more inclusive:

It is a state in which all members have the same rights and opportunities irrespective of the group into which they are born or the culture to which they belong.

This sounds fine and dandy, but does it mean he is against affirmative action? He doesn’t say so, so I suspect not.

Then there is this statement, which defies any comment I could make (other than that he is completely out of touch with reality):

Barack Obama has been an especially persuasive advocate of the idea that Americans should focus on what unites rather than what divides us and that the symbolism of the nation can inspire hope, even as we reckon with the injustices of American history.

Right. Do these people ever look at what the other side is saying? Basically, these and many other people like them seem to be engaging in projection. If they say Trump is racist, the truth is that it is Hillary who is racist, except that since she engaged in verbal abuse of poor whites, our media paid no attention. If they say Trump is an authoritarian, then the truth is that it was Obama who was the authoritarian. He made a lot of executive decisions, promoted (at least in our colleges and universities) dumping due process, and so on.

But what a different world they live in.

How To Deal with Hooligans (i.e., Antifa and Not the Soccer Variety)

There is a simple way to deal with hooligans like Antifa: ten-year jail sentences for their misbehavior. This is what Britain did to curb soccer violence, or so I’ve heard. (I heard it in a talk by Bill Buford, the author of the book Among the Thugs; he had joined some hooligans in order to write about them). Ten-year jail sentences for members of Antifa will do the trick. See here for the latest flare-up of their violence.

On Free Trade

This column by Kurt Schlichter pretty much nails it. Free trade is great when both sides are actually doing it. But when the other side is just dumping or putting up barriers to our goods and we want to retaliate, then we are told how bad that would be because it would lead to a breakdown in trade or something. This is like being punched repeatedly by someone, but being urged by onlookers not to punch back, because that would lead to a fight, and no one wants that.

Schlichter does not mention Smoot-Hawley, so let me take that up, too. It seems to be received wisdom on the right that the Smoot-Hawley act led to, or greatly worsened, the Great Depression, even though imports were a small part of the American economy at that time. (See this book, p. 144, for a saner discussion of this topic.) This may reflect a coastal perspective. If you live in a port city that services lots of ships (a hundred ships a day, as one song has it), you may think that importing and exporting is a big deal for our economy, but if you live in flyover land, as I do, it all seems very remote and unimportant. The big thing is (or was, when I was a kid) manufacturing and farming, and that was even more true back in 1930 than it is now.