Progressives and Race
I was googling around for something the other day and ran across this provocatively titled blog post from a dozen years ago. Being unfamiliar with the blogger, I was expecting it to be a white nationalist/supremacist thing. Reading it, I could see that it was entirely fictitious, so I then thought it was some sort of gag. I read the rest and there was no payoff. I went to the front of the blog and saw that it is still an active site run by a guy who believes he is famous. Maybe he is famous, but I’ve never heard of him.
Anyway, the blog post in question was complete nonsense. It’s the sort of thing that liberal nutters imagine happens all the time when they are not around to see it, but it never happens. No black person would tolerate such a thing as described. No black person would have tolerated it fifty years ago, much less in 2005 when the post was written. It sure as hell would never happen in New York City. But, the demand for racial injustice vastly outstrips supply so they invent these tales to make up the difference.
One reason for this is the Left has always defined itself as standing between an imaginary bogeyman and some imaginary victim group. It’s why calling them “socialists” is a category error. The American Left’s attraction to socialist economics was always in the context of the struggle mythology at the heart of their thing. When the most profitable victims to defend were working class ethnics with actual jobs making stuff, defending them from the privations of capitalism fit the psyche of the Progressive Borg.
Defending the working class lost its value a long time ago which is why you never hear the Left do it these days. They still use the phrase “working families” but everyone knows that means non-working families. It’s single women on welfare with children from an array of strange men. Otherwise, economics no longer plays a role in Progressive ideology, other than as a defense of the globalist billionaires who bankroll the American Left. The working man is now an enemy of the faith and treated as such.
Race, however, has always been a reliable avenue to create the preferred narratives because blacks are easy to paint as noble victims in the glorious battle against the forces of evil. The people opposed to identity politics are almost always white men, the bad whites. They are more often than not living out in the suburbs, which Progressives imagine as being hotbeds of Klu Klux Klan activity and the home of the Nazi Party. Of course, blacks have lagged behind everyone else in every measure so they are ready and willing to sign onto the role as victim.
The trouble is the calendar. That post was a dozen years ago. Up until a decade ago, the skins game worked flawlessly for the Left because no one bothered to challenge them. In fact, it had become custom to leave the issue of race to Progressives. They got to define the morality and the required public policies to fit the moral framework. But then Barak Obama got himself elected and then re-elected. He also accomplished very little in his time in office. It’s hard to argue that America is a racist country when a black guy gets to be in charge, despite not being very good at anything.
What everyone has noticed over the last decade is that it is no longer 1968 and black people are no longer the victims of white racism. In fact, if you are black and have anything on the ball, being black is an advantage. The demand for competent black people at colleges and corporations vastly outstrips supply so the competition is fierce and prices have soared. This has been true for a long time with Obama being an obvious example. If you examine Obama’s college career, it can only be explained this way.
Most Americans seem to have figured this out. The cries of racism over Trump and the alt-right are falling on deaf ears. That’s why the Left is screaming even louder, causing a fuss and demanding our attention as they throw public tantrums. It’s not really about race or the condition of black America. It’s about the Messiah Complex that has always been at the root of the American Left. They are here to save society from sin. If there is no one that needs saving then there is no need for the Left. The whole thing comes unraveled.
Then there is the problem of science. The mounting evidence from genetics, the cognitive sciences and population statistics undermines the central claim of the Left with regards to race. They argue that racism is immoral because race is a fiction. If race is a biological fact then racism could also be a biological fact. Birds fly, fish swim and humans self-segregate along racial, linguistic and ethnic lines. That’s what you see going on in this article about the biology of race. How can we maintain anti-racism when race is real?
This brings up a related dilemma for Progressives. The Europeans Left embraced “scientific socialism” as its source of legitimacy in order to avoid calling itself a civic religion, as well as to distinguish itself from Christianity. The American Left was slow to do this, but eventually embraced the idea in the last fifty years. Science has replaced God in their rhetoric as the authority from which they get their legitimacy. After all, only primitives with their boomsticks and sky gods reject science.
As science undermines the central claims of the Left and relegates blank slate ideology to the same dustbin as phrenology and astrology, something else will have to provide legitimacy for the Left. If being mean to homosexuals is wrong because gays are born that way, how can it be wrong for black guys not to want to live neat Koreans. After all, science says people naturally self-segregate along racial lines. Why is one form of nature wrong and the other cerebrated?
Perhaps the Left will once again turn to the heavens as their source of inspiration. The fact that the mainline Christian churches are siding with the open borders people opens the door for all of those secular Progressives to rediscover the social gospel. How they incorporate Jews and Muslims is a mystery, but to the believer, all things are possible. If saving the struggle narrative means rewriting the Bible, then they will rewrite the Bible, just as they have rewritten history. If Lady Liberty can wear a hijab to defend open borders, the Left can go to church in order to nail themselves to the cross.
To keep Z Man's voice alive for future generations, we’ve archived his writings from the original site at thezman.com. We’ve edited out ancillary links, advertisements, and donation requests to focus on his written content.
Comments (Historical)
The comments below were originally posted to thezman.com.
55 Comments