“Right now we live in a world where the emergency room is filled with motherf—ers with paper cuts.” —Chris Rock
Ah, if only John Ellis were right and there was a chance for a moderate third party to emerge…but I’m not holding my breath. There is a sane center in the country, believe it or not. It exists beyond the reach of pollsters, who are tethered to either/or choices on either/or issues. Most people are more complicated than that. I would vote for a pro-life candidate who was also in favor of wholesale gun confiscation—yeah, I’m an antigun extremist—and was fundamentally reasonable on other issues; it wouldn’t be an easy choice—first trimester abortions should be legal—but make me an offer!
For years, I took road trips across America for Time Magazine and I found the Sanity Caucus everywhere, people who were essentially moderate but forced, by the exigencies of practical politics to take a side. I remember holding a town meeting in a small town in Iowa, 24 people—12 couples—showed up. The men were all Republicans; the women, Democrats. But they were in total agreement about one thing: the media were distorting the political landscape. “Why do you guys spend so much time on the Tea Party?” a woman asked. “We know who they are. They’re the crazies who show up at council meetings to protest the fluoridization of the water supply.”
That was more than 10 years ago. In the interim, the lunatics have taken over the narrative. This is particularly true on the right, where the Dominion lawsuit has exposed just how craven Fox News is. Even when it’s right…as it was in calling Arizona for Biden, ahead of the other networks, in 2000:
Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the two main anchors, suggested it was not enough to call a state based on numerical calculations, the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations, but that viewer reaction should be considered. “In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, “the game is just very, very different.”
Oh, really? Only because you bozos made it so. Only because you replaced news with propaganda—and fed frightened, non-discerning civilians nonsense rather than truth. Actually, I used to watch Fox News a lot on election nights because they featured Karl Rove and Joe Trippi—two guys who actually knew what they were talking about—doing analysis and the aforementioned Mr. Ellis and Arnon Mishkin and Chris Stirewalt and others on the decision desk. (By contrast, CNN indecisively offered vast panels of “experts” who weren’t really—with several obvious exceptions like David Axelrod—but they sure did look diverse, offering banal splatters of conjecture while Wolf Blitzer experienced bizarre eruptions of “really, really crucial” developments that weren’t.)
The damage that Fox News—and their phony cast of prime time characters—has done to the integrity of American democracy is inestimable. Or as Chris Rock said:
“When did White men become victims? White men think they’re actually losing the country…Did you see the Capitol riots? What kind of White ‘Planet of the Apes’ s--- was that?”
Of course, the right has had massive help from the left, which seems trapped in a never-ending delusional spiral. Take Perry Bacon in The Washington Post, who offers a detailed explanation of why today’s civil rights movement is different from the movement of the 1960s:
At its core, today’s movement is fighting systemic racism. Black people get lower pay on average compared with other Americans; they are more likely to be killed by police officers.
I don’t think that today’s challenges are necessarily harder than defeating Jim Crow. They are more complicated.
Bacon is a former colleague of mine, a good guy and a provocative writer. In a previous column, he rightly takes President Biden to task for being willing to override the DC City Council’s new crime policies (I mean, home rule is home rule). But he simply refuses to consider the main reason why today’s civil rights movement is smaller and less compelling than it used to be: things are just a lot better for black people now than they were back then. Not for all black people, certainly. More than half remain stuck in the bottom two economic quintiles. That’s far too many. Racism, encouraged by Fox Nation, remains a plague.
But what about that other half of the black population, those who have incomes in the middle class or higher? Yes, yes, the family wealth gap—a lagging indicator—remains formidable, but that’s largely a consequence of the redlining that limited the ability of blacks to accumulate wealth by purchasing real estate. There is a black middle and professional class that didn't exist 60 years ago. Perry Bacon the columnist wouldn’t have existed 60 years ago. In those days, with a few notable exceptions, commentators and TV presenters were almost exclusively white and male. This is progress. It needs to be acknowledged. Amazing that Democrats practically never do. Amazing that they allow the most extreme voices in the black community do all the talking, without giving them the respect of a sharp pushback. Why would anyone take seriously civil rights activists, like the Movement 4 Black Lives? They promote silliness like this: “an end to all jails, prisons, immigration detention, youth detention and civil commitment facilities as we know them.” It should be emphasized that the vast majority of black people—who have been a force for moderation and sanity in the Democratic Party—would think such a proposal is absolutely nuts.
I await two developments:
For African-American commentators who are not named Glenn Loury, Jason Riley or John McWhorter—or white liberals for that matter—to acknowledge that there is a Culture of Poverty in the least affluent reaches of the black community that accounts for much of the disproportionate crime and chaos, the roots of which stretch back to the overpowering horror and disgrace of slavery in America; it is a legacy of ancestors bought and sold and raped and separated from their children and lynched and flat-out terrorized. Perhaps someone should send Bacon, who went to Yale, a copy of Caste and Class in a Southern Town by John Dollard, who taught at Yale nearly a hundred years ago (but would probably be cancelled off the faculty today). We can’t begin to work on these problems effectively until we admit they exist.
I also await the Democratic politician who says something along these lines: “Congratulations, America! During the past 60 years, we’ve experienced the most explosive advances in human rights—black and brown and Asian rights, gay rights, women’s rights, you name it—in the history of our species. There’s still a lot more to be done, but all of America—even you palefaces in Appalachia who don’t want to admit it—have been essential to this rectification. Let’s keep at it. Let’s finish the job.”
Actually, I can understand—and sympathize with—the enduring anger of black America far better than the notional idiocy of the academic left, which seems to have launched itself into another dimension—Planet Sensitivity—where the greatest fear is that someone, somewhere, in some identity-swamp, might be offended by lucid prose. Here’s George Packer writing in The Atlantic about the Sierra Club’s attempt to castrate—oops! That’s a bad bad word!—the English Language in its guide for approved usage:
The guide’s purpose is not just to make sure that the Sierra Club avoids obviously derogatory terms, such as welfare queen. It seeks to cleanse language of any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion. In its zeal, the Sierra Club has clear-cut a whole national park of words. Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. Y’all supplants the patriarchal you guys, and elevate voices replaces empower, which used to be uplifting but is now condescending. The poor is classist; battle and minefield disrespect veterans; depressing appropriates a disability; migrant—no explanation, it just has to go.
To which I say: Someone call the EPA! One of our leading environmental groups is engaged in the wanton pollution of our intellectual atmosphere. This sort of censorship is all too common these days. Some of it is ok: I like y’all better than you guys; it’s more fun. But most of these glossaries are hypersensitive crap, intended to demonstrate a perverse brand of moral superiority, and to cast guilt on those not enlightened enough to bowdlerize their sensibilities. Happily, there are still vibrant, hardworking NGOs out there, eager for financial support, who are successfully fending off nitwit intrusions by The Woking Dead. Contribute to them. Not the Sierras.
I remain a thug—another bad word!—for sanity…and you can be, too:
Or you can just pass along this post:
Paper Cuts
Enjoy your writing, but disturbing how you just blithely threw women’s rights to bodily autonomy, out there as YOUR bargaining chip!