Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Why the Left Needs an Underclass
International news reports that the Muslim immigrant population in Europe has clearly become the continent’s outcasts. I believe this development is due in part to the violence and isolation of certain Muslims; it is also due to the left’s need for an underclass. As I thought about the nature of an underclass, however, I realized that many on the left demand an underclass in our own country.
Before the Civil War and to some degree afterward, the African-American population was America’s underclass. Once slavery was abolished, and even before in many cases, blacks as a group began to find their way, becoming literate, educated, and finding work. By the 1950s the group was emerging out of their role as an underclass and joining the middle class. But the political class of the left was not happy about their success.
The left decided it needed to “help” our black population. Without going into the details of welfare, US policy essentially created an underclass. Rather than celebrate and publicize the accomplishments of our black citizens, the left was committed to create the illusion of a helpless, hopeless class of people: we were losing our underclass with the progress of blacks, and a new underclass needed to be created.
Unfortunately, this effort to “lift up” African Americans has hurt them overall. Today, most black families are one-parent families without a father present. Many blacks have been convinced by leftist propaganda (with the help of the media) that they deserve to be helped, that they are entitled to assistance from the “white man,” and they continue to embrace this lie. Fortunately, many other black Americans have seen through this propaganda and have become successful citizens who have families, are church-going, and who have realized personal and financial freedom. Yet the left, which is determined to maintain an underclass, continues to promote the lie of their inferiority.
Why would they do such a thing? It’s hard to be certain, but I propose a few reasons. First, the political left needs to recruit more people to support their agenda; the black population had a history of deep oppression, the left leadership knew it, and capitalized on that history. But they also needed to convince the citizen population that portraying the country’s blacks as victims who need to be helped by the left is an admirable pursuit. Today, the leadership plays on the emotions of the population, calling for sympathetic action toward blacks. It suggests that accomplished, compassionate people should feel guilty for their own success and feel they owe it to others who are not so successful to “do something.” The leadership convinces them that feeling guilt is the same as doing something, that they can show their generosity by shaking their heads sadly at the very people whom they have hobbled, instead of simply freeing them from their contrived restraints. They choose to feel bad for folks who have less than they do and treat them as if they are less.
By creating an underclass and “trying to help them,” the left can feel much better about themselves: they are the benefactors, the heroes for those who are suffering. It never occurs to the person on the left that he or she is perpetuating the illusion of the underclass, and in fact works to reinforce it.
Another reason to maintain an underclass arises from the arrogance of the left: they have the solution for those who suffer from the illusion the Left has created. Only their solutions can work; they assume that black Americans cannot find their way forward with their own determination and hard work. And the left is ready to help them. But their “help” further cripples their recipients and erodes their faith in themselves.
Finally, someone or something must be blamed for this atrocious situation. An “other” must be conjured up, an entity that is wholly responsible for the injustices that the blacks are subject to. If it’s not the left that is hurting them, it must be the United States, particular the political right. In a bizarre way, the left has accused the US culture and government of harming blacks, yet ironically the Left has manipulated US law to debilitate blacks further. One only needs to look at entitlement programs: the very programs that are supposed to help blacks have further injured them. Even though the left has demanded those programs, the government takes the rap for hurting black Americans.
To the chagrin of the left, blacks are slowly beginning to find their way in society. The black unemployment rate at the end of February was 6.8%; before this month, the lowest was 7.4% in 2000. There are many examples of their progress. But the left may be nervous about whether blacks will continue to embrace their role as the underclass and continue to support the left leadership by voting for them; I suggest the Left is planning for the future.
As a result, the left is fighting for increased immigration, for illegal and legal immigrants. For now, they are championing illegal immigrants, those who are covered by DACA and even those who are not, including criminals. Since I believe the majority blacks in our country will eventually see through the lies of the left, it would make sense for the left to identify a new underclass, one that will see the left leadership as its saviors, and that will allow itself to be pitied by their fellow citizens on the left. Since the voters on the left have already been indoctrinated to the black underclass, including a new group should be easy.
Don’t you agree?
Published in Culture
“My guys”? I think we might be misunderstanding each other. By “experts” I thought you meant Islamists.
The underclass is so useful to the Left and the Right as a thing to rally for or against that if they didn’t exist somebody would have to invent them
We are on the same page, otlc. I get it. We are all in dire circumstances. Thoughts on what we can do to change direction?
Powerful point, @zafar. Not a pretty one, is it?
I think Susan lays out why the Left would have to invent them. The Right? Not so much. I don’t think conservatives need an underclass. Conservatism is completely viable without an underclass.
And yet their creating an underclass gives us a weapon with which to beat them, although I don’t think we do a very good job of it.
Overpopulation isn’t Latin America’s problem. Population densities there don’t compare to places like Belgium, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore. What they suffer from are Spanish Mercantilism and Napoleonic codes they inherited from the Spanish, i.e. administrative states. Everything is illegal unless permitted. See DeSoto “The miracle of capital”, or “The Other Path”. Their cities are indeed overcrowded because the major cities are the capitals where all permission are granted.
Moreover they do not know why their countries are so often corrupt and dysfunctional. They continue to vote for governments to solve their problems in every walk of life and they vote the same way here. The reason Democrats want an underclass is that they vote Democrat and make semi skilled workers available at lower prices. Over 90% of blacks consistently vote Democrat. Before the war on poverty most blacks were upwardly mobile and Republican. The groups we erroneously call Hispanics also overwhelming vote Democrat, not because they understand but because the term covers folks from Mexico and Central America who are not hispanic, These non hispanic indigenous Americans have seen themselves as victims for 0ver 400 years and fall comfortably into the underclass Democrats cherish. Latinos who came here legally and who are hispanic more often share our beliefs about illegal immigrants. Most hispanics at least a plurality could be made to understand our point of view if we would tell it to them, in Spanish but we don’t. Rubio occasionally did.
It’s been a while since I read Gertrude Himmelfarb and don’t have any of her books on my shelves or Kindle but I think her understanding of how Victorian thinking and attitudes pulled the underclasses out of squalor may be relevant.
Here’s a link to an essay; The Idea of Poverty; this is also the title of a book she published in 1984.
History Today blurbed it like this:
A review of her The De-Moralization of Society.
From a Commentary review of her Poverty and Compassion:
Have you read David Horowitz and Peter Collier’s work on the Great Society’s welfare recruiting in the late 60’s?
No. I mean people that study theology, generally. Islam is substantially different in this sense.
I have my doubts. Even the slightest deviation from the norm is dealt with swiftly and harshly. I believe radical change can only occur through the application of outside force.
I completely agree with this.
Christianity and Judaism arrived at a concept of separation of religion and state after they had been subject to prolonged instances where the state turned against their particular religion. They had seen what it was like to have the power of the state applied against them.
That never really happened in Islam. Islam went from victory to victory and rather quickly became the state wherever it was practiced. Religion and the state have always linked arms in Islam. It’s hard to see where the impetus would come from to get the religion to give up its secular attachments and power.
Every movement coalesces against something – often a group or groups – and part of that is identifying a group or groups that members of the movement can feel intrinsically better than.
Let me just say one more thing since I’m spending the winter in a city with a very large underclass. Life is good with cheap labor when you have an income well above average. You worry about crime, indeed there was a murder, probably a professional hit, in the bakery around the corner where I buy fresh bread every few days. You get dropped off with a driver and picked up by a driver, wherever you go especially at night, but you can get them with car and gas for 7 bucks an hour so you adjust to the risks. Live at the Met costs as much here as there, but nicer and during intermission you go out to a preset table with ceviche or sushi and whatever you want to drink. Problems with plumbing and need a handi man? We’ve had them in spades and it cost almost a hundred dollars for about 15 hours of work including materials. Of course the downside is that the left is growing and will probably destroy this place just as they will the US. It’s better for the underclass to move up but it can’t where there is a rigid state that controls everything. The Democrats want us to go there and some Republicans do as well by asking the State to fix the things the state screwed up in the first place.
And those American politicians that think they can be Catholic, or Protestant, or even athiest and still be their leaders are fooling themselves. Ben Carson was correct that Islam is not compatible with our Constitution.
I have listened to all the explanations of this very closely for years.
Two bits, hopefully germane:
The National Review had a piece by…I want to say Andrew McCarthy?—in which the author points out that the progressives describe the racial dynamic as a matter of white privilege and power over and against everyone who isn’t white.
The real American racial dynamic is that, for a variety of reasons ultimately, no doubt, extending back to slavery, black Americans are distinct from everyone else. Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Finnish-Americans (!) and even Redneck Americans do not form a distinctly troubled group.
As soon as this was pointed out, it seemed so obvious.
Not sure how this helps, but anyway…
Next bit: There’s the flood of immigrants into countries that don’t really have work for them to do, nor the cultural confidence to insist on their adapting and integrating…so the immigrants continue to be distinct and visible as non-Europeans, but also at least to some degree hostile and even dangerous. Over and above the actual danger, they are increasingly viewed by native-born-and-bred Europeans as an existential threat.
At the same time, Europe—especially in the Netherlands, but elsewhere as well—-is being a little slippery-slope-ish about abortion and euthanasia, with “life unworthy of life” all but stated as the rationale for aborting Downs Syndrome babies and euthanizing the mentally ill.
Somehow, the combination of these two factors seems…ominous?
This statement I believe is accurate, @katebraestrup, because most of them assimilated or weren’t seen as a threat; remember lot of southerners were afraid that blacks would organize against them, when blacks really just wanted to find their way in society. Of course, Asian-Americans were a smaller group and ultimately have been very successful. In some ways the blacks were a handy group to point to as needing help, ironically (in the ’60s) when they were becoming more successful and joining the middle class.
Unfortunately, for a multitude of reasons, enough of them are dangerous and isolate themselves so that they actually are a threat. A combination of the disastrous approach of diversity (which made assimilation difficult), the commitment to maintain their original cultural and religious restraints from their former countries, and the alienation that ensued, made immigration a very real threat.
I’m not sure how this point connects to the two previous points. The first two point to acculturation and the lack of assimilation and the dangers those create. If you could explain this last point (which, of course, is horrendous), I’d be glad to respond. Thanks, Kate.
I guess I was drawing a connection—tenuous and somehow inside out?—to the interwar years in Germany and Europe. In that case the internal Not-Us was largely imaginary; the Jews were so well assimilated that it required some effort to find out who was and was not Jewish, and the Jews were not even remotely dangerous to Germans and Germany (let alone Europa). Somehow, that’s not comforting; in the Muslim immigrants (and others, but primarily Muslim) you have a visible and unassimilated minority that actually does contain—as you say, Susan—demonstrably dangerous people who are protected, encouraged and enabled by many if not all of the rest.
It is difficult to discern an endgame that isn’t bloody and terrible. Europeans are getting mad. They’ll get madder.
Europe could “go Muslim,” I suppose. Or, a strongman could arise in Germany who promises to protect Real Germans from the crime and disorder (this should sound familiar?) and then there will be a discussion about how to solve the Muslim Question.
Long before the Nazis thought of gassing Jews, they were gassing Christians—specifically the mentally and physically ill or disabled. The T-4 program provided the template, the personnel and the equipment for the Holocaust.
There may not be a T-4 program, but there are doctors killing patients very deliberately, including children. Once it has been decided that a group of elite human beings has the right–indeed, the responsibility!—to determine who among their fellow citizens is and is not worthy of life, it isn’t hard to expand the latter category to include other people in that category, particularly when the targeted group has been declared an existential threat.
The Jews were strongly, if irrationally, believed to be an existential threat to Germany—Hitler wasn’t making that up to persuade people, he genuinely believed it, all the way to his last breath.
It’s not going to help that the Muslims in Europe arguably are an existential threat.
Hitler toyed with the idea of deporting Jews to other places—Madagascar was bandied about as a solution to the problem. Will a new strongman begin by imagining he can deport his way out of the immigration mess? Only to find that other countries don’t want Europe’s Muslims?
Eugenics was the transatlantic “settled science” of the twenties and thirties. Today, progressive Europeans believe the settled science of our day, namely that the Earth is threatened with catastrophe and that it is overpopulated with human beings. How difficult will it be for them to switch from “we shouldn’t have babies” to “maybe we need to bump off the troublesome excess?”
This isn’t really the point of your OP, but it seems, as I say, ominous. I have a hard time imagining a really good, peaceful, reasonable fix for the mess that Merkel et al have made.
In answer to your question, I think Merkel et al imagined that they were bringing in Huddled Masses Yearning To Breathe Free, and could redeem themselves—it was always about themselves—-by being the Saviors of the refugees.
An “underclass” or what I would call a distinct, welfare dependent class is useful insofar as they provide opportunities for experiencing oneself or ones class as both clearly superior and also virtuous. Apparently, such an opportunity was believed to be sorely needed, in Germany especially, but in Europe more widely as the Europeans have managed to theorize themselves into a crisis of low self esteem. (This, by the way, is also an echo of the 20s in Germany, even if the low self esteem in those days was caused by their defeat in the First World War and the economic shocks).
I’m not drawing one-to-one comparisons, just saying that there are some disquieting parallels that suggest we might know at least one way this movie ends.
Truly excellent points, @katebraestrup, worthy of an OP. We talk about the Muslim population and some of their destructive people; we talk about stopping the immigration; but we don’t talk about the population that’s in place. The parallels you draw are frightening and ominous, and the history of Europe also tells us that they are not impossible.
The parallels to the extermination of the Jews, the Christians and the mentally ill are not exact, but all these groups were seen not only as a detriment to the society, but a danger. Do we really want to go in that direction, in one way or another, with the Muslims in Europe (and I think that is the challenge your posing)? Kate, this really is worthy of a post, and I hope you’ll think about writing one: how will Europe respond to the population they already have, when things get bad enough (or something like that)? Thank you for describing your earlier point; much to think about.
The Östjuden were the bugbear; this had the advantage that the increasingly assimilated majority of German Jews were embarrassed by their Yiddish speaking, less urbane cousins from the east. (This dynamic carried over into the US. and was the subject of Stephen Birmingham’s classic Our Crowd.)
Then the Eastern European Jews started coming.
or this masterpiece:
In both cases, Jews began to succeed economically; in Germany this was largely the consequence of the social changes set in motion by the Napoleonic Wars. In the US and Germany there was considerable resentment; in Germany, there was also centuries of attitudes expressed in things like the Jüdensau Oberammergau Passion Play.
In the US, this mostly (though Leo Frank might dispute that) took more benign forms, such as numerus clausus applied to specific groups such as Jews (while this was most notorious in the Ivy League, my grandfather A”H, was one of three Jews in his class at a definitely non-Ivy medical school. He was denied hospital privileges at a prestigious NYC hospital which by some odd coincidence did not extend privileges to Jews.) There are HOA documents which preclude Jews, Asians and blacks from buying property. (One was for a development that began selling homes in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963.) Those clauses have of course been made illegal by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 but in many cases are still on the HOA books.
As to the effort necessary to find out who was Jewish, the Nazis were indeed pioneers in the use of (in this case, IBM’s) information technology to organize demographic information which had previously only been available in hard copy, often hand-written, often local records and render it accessible and manipulable. And usable for social engineering purposes.
Universities pretend not to know it today (or to blame “the Right” when reminded,) but National Socialism was very popular at German universities.
I can’t agree. European immigration policies have been an expression of overweening self esteem, at least on the part of the elites. Pride in the virtue of these policies has been broadly and deeply felt in, for example, Germany and Sweden… until the consequences became impossible to ignore and even then many explain it away.
I think you’re probably right, otlc, regarding the political elites. There may be a sense of helplessness in the general populations against immigrants.
That’s pretty recent. There was broad based virtue signaling for a long time.
Completely agree: it was called diversity, and Merkel finally realized that was a disaster. And yet she keeps letting them come. I suspect (in her elitist way) that she can convince them to behave and integrate. Good luck, Angela.
It’s terribly infra dig to do so. We can’t have that.
Great Post, Susan!
Joe E : “I have a hard time believing that people who were that smart didn’t know what they were doing with black people. I’ve always wanted to spend a couple weeks in Boston and Austin to sort through JFK’s and LBJ’s presidential libraries, see if there’s any incriminating evidence for that thesis.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, LBJ”s Undersecretary of HEW, as a consultant to War on Poverty issued the Moynihan report in 1965. A quote:
• “The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.”[7]
Commentary on the Moynihan Report from S. Craig Watkins in Representing Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema:
“The report concluded that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a ‘tangle of pathology… capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,’ and that ‘at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.’ Also, the report argued that the matriarchal structure of black culture weakened the ability of black men to function as authority figures. That particular notion of black familial life has become a widespread, if not dominant, paradigm for comprehending the social and economic disintegration of late 20th-century black urban life.”[8]
I’ve seen reports that the level of poverty was declining significantly in the late 50’s and early 60″s, but once the War on Poverty/ Great Society programs were enacted in 1965, the decline in the level of poverty only continued for two more years, and has remained roughly constant over that 50 plus years despite the trillions thrown at the problem.
I
I was thinking, specifically, of Merkel alluding to expiation for the Holocaust explicitly…there was a time, she said, when the refugees were fleeing Germany and now they come to Germany to be safe. And a Swedish government official who announced that Sweden really had no culture. There is a lot of material along these lines in Douglas Murray’s book The Strange Death of Europe. Or any of a number of interviews with him on YouTube.
Which may or may not be true.