— by Odysseus
It Really is All About Race: Just Not the Way They Mean When They Say That
In the American polity of the turn of the millenium, the political left frequently accuses the conservative political figures or groups of racism. Any voiced opposition to any part of the left’s progressive program is accused of having its true motive being racism. Essentially, leftists accuse the conservative movement of cloaking its true racist motive in other political language, merely to hide a racist intent. This is what left-wing figures mean when they say that everything in American politics is about race.
The leftists’ understanding is demonstrably wrong when one takes into account how ideologically conservative black Americans are so warmly embraced by the post-Reagan conservative movement, all while those same conservative black Americans are reviled and targeted by the political left. However, their statement that everything in American politics is about race has a greater truth to it than either side recognizes.
The truth underlying the statement becomes visible when one examines the attitudes of the right and the left towards government. The typical people who consider themselves “left of center” have a great distrust of police and local law enforcement authorities, yet show great trust and deference towards other government action, particularly from Washington DC. This contrasts remarkably from the typical people who consider themselves “right of center” who have a deep, abiding, distrust of most programs, agents, authority, or regulations that emanate from Washington DC, yet usually trust police officers, courts, and the instruments of local law enforcement.
This begs the question: why do these groups see no contradiction or hypocrisy in holding such strong attitudes towards government power? Do they trust the government or do they not? It is the answer to this question that reveals why the core of the debate in America today really is about race.
The origins of political alignment in America in these turn-of-the-millennium decades lies in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. A significant percentage of the living population, the baby boomers, had their world view shaped by that struggle. They, in turn, have created an ideology that is hermetically sealed within that framework and promulgate it to any people they can convince. To people mentally locked into that period, the federal government (which will be referred to as the National Government, to distinguish it from the federal structure which was intended to leave the bulk of governance to the state governments) was the instrument used to force through needed changes on a largely unwilling population.
Consequently, a large percentage of the “elites” adopted an attitude that the citizenry could not be trusted to do what was morally correct so the National Government could and should be used to cram social remedies down the throat of a stubborn, reticent, ill intentioned populace. Because the defenders of segregation used state power structures, states rights, and freedom from government intrusion as instruments in their struggle to resist the desegregation efforts, the left only views those arguments or power structures from the viewpoint of how they were used in that one struggle. They seem incapable of conceiving any of the legitimate purposes that these positions occupied long before the civil right movement or when they are now being legitimately raised regarding the new issues of today. Therefore, the left has its favorable attitude towards National Government action, but is skeptical of the police which is largely local. Conversely, the right maintains a favorable view of the police, all while deeply distrusting the Environmental Protection Agency, Internal Revenue Service, or the Department of Agriculture.
Thus, many black Americans today see the National Government as a largely unalloyed source of “goodness” and view any appeals to restraining national government spending or power as the arguments of racists trying to impede the forces of good for obviously nefarious purposes. Meanwhile, the conservatives, angered at unwanted, impractical mandates forced upon them by the National Government, have been turning a blind eye to the growing capriciousness of local law enforcement officers, simply because they are not from DC.
It is the American Left, for whom “everything is about race”. Unfortunately, conservatives are utterly tone deaf as to how their positions are heard by people still obsessed with the race issues of fifty years ago. This is precisely because the conservative knows himself that his position is truly not racially motivated and cannot imagine how others might percieve it to be so.
The modern American left’s monomania about race and its consequential fixed view of the benevolence of National Government action in domestic affairs ignores the wisdom of their historic predecessors. Even some of the most activist progressives of the left during in American history were not blind to the legitimacy of conservative arguments for restraint in the power and purview of the National Government. For example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom no one could confuse with being on the side of small, limited national government, recognized that redistributed wealth was akin to a narcotic, to which citizens could become addicted. He was not alone in being a progressive who, nonetheless, recognized that government action was both a powerful and a dangerous tool.
This pharmaceutical analogy is particularly apt and has been recognized by astute political leaders and thinkers since the time of the Founders. A National Government has the potential to wield so much sway over the economy, the society, and individual lives that its potential abuse is to be genuinely feared. The modern left is doing itself a disservice to cavalierly disregard the warning from conservatives as mere grumblings from racists. That powerful medicine administered during the 1960s civil rights movement, from which they received benefit, is not a panacea. It is not the correct medicine for every ailment of society. It is, in fact, toxic to the social organism when overused.
It is ignorance and folly to keep insisting on more of the same powerful ‘National Government Action’ drug to address every little ache or pain, regardless of how enamored one may be of its effectiveness in the 1960s. Like so many overly powerful drugs, the destructive side effects of its action are first being seen in the peripheral parts of the organism.
It is in the small towns, the farmlands, the mining towns, the fishing townships, the ranches, and the mill towns, where the cumbersome, rigid, ill- conceived National Government impositions are wreaking havoc. These laws and regulations — imagined and written by pie-eyed ivory tower idealists leavened with self-serving specifics from every business of sufficient size to employ well connected lobbyists — are both uniformly unsuited to the real world and rarely ameliorate the real or imagined problems they were purported to address.
As this author has pointed out in other articles in the Cassandra Times, top down, command governments and economies never work over the long run and are uniquely ill-suited to the goals of economic success or the fair dispensation of justice. The critiques and concerns of the conservatives about the dangers of unlimited government are honest, thoughtful, and made in good faith. They reflect the collected wisdom of the entire American experience over the history of the nation, from both political parties and on both sides of the political spectrum. At periods in history, both sides have experienced the ill effects of permitting the National Government too much power and influence. “Obamacare” alone is a sufficient exemplar of how the current generation of left-wing political leaders’ myopic focus on using the National Government to impose heavy-handed solutions to every perceived problem is both unworkable and destructive. They are unwilling to recognize the tyranny of their desire for “mommy dearest” governance. The conservatives are not racists; they simply acknowledge that citizens and humans have to be left to take care of themselves. Otherwise there is no freedom, dignity, joy or even hope.
Even mommy knows she has to let go of the bicycle and let her precious child go on her own. A life without skinned knees is no life, and an Orwellian/Aldous Huxley Brave New World is not a nation. It is a prison.
