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A Parable of Two Parties
The LORD sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor.
The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, . . .
No, wait. That one has been told before (2 Samuel 12).
There were two parties in a once self-governing nation where the people lived in ordered liberty under a constitutional government of separated and enumerated powers. At least for a while.
One party – we’ll call it the Party of Good Intentions – wanted to employ the power of government to make life fairer for the citizenry and to eliminate, or at least reduce, the flaws and suffering of humankind, such as greed and bigotry and material inequality.
The other party – the Party of Personal Liberty and Responsibility – wanted the government to protect the natural rights of the citizens (enforce just laws equally) from enemies, foreign and domestic, and to be otherwise too weak to interfere much in people’s day-to-day lives, believing the price of a government powerful enough to give you everything you want weighed against a government powerful enough to take everything you have as too steep. The PGI might have said the PPLR party coldly calculated the cost-benefit analysis, neglecting the adversity suffered by the people in favor of the freedom to fail. And when it comes to the federal government, it wasn’t wrong.
Over the decades of these two worldviews contending with each other, the PGI enacted “new deal” and “great society” legislation and became powerful in the federal bureaucracy (people of the PGI having an affinity for employment in such), academia, corporations, and news and entertainment media. The PGI essentially took over the commanding heights of society.
And in the process, the people the PGI claimed to want to help – blacks and other minorities (but especially blacks, and excluding Asians), blue-collar workers, women, and children – suffered terrible degradation. Up until the (subsequently ironically named) Great Society, blacks were more likely to be married than whites and, therefore, black children were raised in intact families. After the Great Society, though, the vast majority of black children were raised in single-parent households and the corresponding rates of crime, drug addiction, and poverty showed the results.
[Insert video of diapered toddlers cursing, hitting, and kicking police here – except it’s been removed by YouTube for “violating terms of service.” Also black teenagers murdering an elderly man by beating him with a traffic cone.]
Workers experienced stagnant wages (or worse) for decades, with a brief respite here and there when they were able to find work at all.
Women became enemies of their own bodies and reproductive faculties – of their very female nature – and were immiserated by their natural differences with men [insert Klavan line about feminism: “making perfectly fine women into terrible men”]. The feminist movement was inherently male-hating, causing the breakdown of relationships both at home, in the workplace, and even in churches, where feminist Catholics were disgruntled by the Church’s refusal to ordain priestesses, for example.
And what happened to children – fatherless, abused, and warped by transgender ideology – became unspeakable. Children of PGI parents were even used to increase their parents’ status among their peers during the faddish novelty of transgenderism, to the point of chemical castration and surgical mutilation of otherwise healthy teenagers. Only the number of children killed in the womb (over 60 million) surpassed the wickedness of it all.
The failure of the PGI to produce positive outcomes required that some party be blamed, since the PGI has good intentions. It’s right there in the name! So, scapegoating came early and often and culminated in every form of excellence – moral, academic, artistic, . . . – being labeled “white supremacy,” and heterosexual white males being particularly vilified. Shortly after the inaptly named Great Society was enacted, children in grade-school began to hear that academic achievement was “acting white.” This view made its way into every facet of national life, up to and including the singularly race-neutral subject of math, where correct answers were deemed white supremacy.
But, as the Party of Good Intentions was not interested in good outcomes, and was heavily invested in its identity as the “good” people party in opposition to the personal responsibility people, it never took responsibility for the damage it did to people’s lives and the national character. It just blamed the PPLR, despite the overwhelming evidence of its culpability.
Notably, the PGI was mostly led by privileged white people who developed a white savior complex because #GoodIntentions.
Published in General
And they lived miserably ever after?
Pretty much.
Good post WC. Not so sure the “white supremacy” crap started shortly after the Great Society legislation which I think happened in 1965. The black family destruction surely did happen then. But don’t remember the crap we are seeing about white supremacy until Obama got into office. May have missed something.
No, but when I was a kid, I remember black kids suffering under the illusion that academic achievement was “acting white.” And I do mean suffering. Blacks in Thomas Sowell’s generation weren’t told such things.
It rose to national prominence then, but had been percolating in various parts of the country since the 60’s.
The good news is that such places always concentrate at the top then collapse. The bad news is that the Chinese will inherit it. The good news is that the Chinese will collapse as well and rot. The bad news is that what we call the west will come to an end. The good news is that some places are small enough to ignore it all. The bad news is that once major countries in the west realize what is going on there may be a war. The good news is that some small places that learned won’t be targeted and we may get to start again.
But I recall that Jason Riley heard those comments . . . years later . . .
My brother was complaining about the “acting white” trope when he was teaching school thirty years ago.
“In twenty years we’ll be calling the one kid ‘doctor.’ The other one will be referred to as ‘the accused.'”
The bad news is whenever power is concentrated, the most ruthless rise to the top. The further bad news is there will be a lot of additional suffering among ordinary folk before the collapse happens. The good news is that sometimes the ruthless are, at that point, hung from a gibbet and justice is served. The bad news is, sometimes the ruthless die peacefully in their beds at a ripe old age and the people don’t get to see justice done in this life.
Yup, Jason and I are roughly the same age, I would guess. I remember it becoming an issue when I was a kid.
EDIT: He’s ten years younger. But, we’re of the same generation and “acting white” was just getting started when I was young.
I would like to emphasize how wicked it is to attribute excellence to racism — “white supremacy.”
The Left isn’t just bent on destroying America. It’s in the process of destroying humanity, and it’s succeeding with large swaths of humans when you see things like those young children using vile language and physically attacking police officers. Their innocence stolen at the tender age of 3 or 4! This is how you know leftism of of the devil.
Leftists would like to attribute that degradation to white, Christian men? Rubbish. That dehumanization is the result of leftists telling blacks they’re victims (have no moral agency) and mitigating natural consequences for bad choices (having babies out of wedlock) through the welfare state. Not to mention deriding Judeo-Christian ethics at every turn.
You’re more charitable than I. Their good intentions are smoke they deploy to hide, as much from themselves as from us.
It’s a parable. It’s not intended to be wholly accurate, just to teach a lesson. Like Nathan did to King David — “you are that man!” The PGI is the party of destruction, no matter what its actual motivations are.
Yes!