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Recently, Stanford\u2019s Shelby Steele, one of the truly great thinkers and writers of our age, wrote the article: \u201cBlack Protest Has Lost Its Power.\u201d<\/p>\n
He noted the recent protests by black professional football players \u201cwere rather sad for their fruitlessness.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Protestors \u201cwere figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal to a black identity that had run its course.\u201d<\/p>\n
He explained: \u201cWhat they missed is a simple truth that is both obvious and unutterable: The oppression of black people is over with.\u00a0\u00a0This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless.\u00a0\u00a0We blacks are, today, a free people.\u201d<\/p>\n
He adds: \u201cOf course this does not mean there is no racism left in American life.\u00a0\u00a0Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is.\u00a0\u00a0We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our history.\u201d<\/p>\n
He concludes with a point we want to broaden here: \u201cBut the NFL protests may be a harbinger of change.\u00a0\u00a0They elicited considerable resentment.\u00a0\u00a0There have been counterprotests.\u00a0\u00a0TV viewership has gone down.\u00a0\u00a0Ticket sales have dropped.\u00a0\u00a0What is remarkable about this response is that it may foretell a new fearlessness in whites (and blacks outside the victim-focused identity) to say to blacks what they really think and feel, to judge blacks by standards that are universal\u201d<\/p>\n
We quote his argument at length not just because it succinctly states the central truth about racial matters in America, but also because it helps explain what has happened to statist liberals and politically correct progressives in American politics.\u00a0\u00a0It explains decades of history ending in the great liberal crack-up we\u2019re recently witnessing.<\/p>\n
Modern western liberalism is distinct from classical liberalism that\u2019s oriented to freedom, equal opportunity, progress and economic growth.\u00a0\u00a0But it has roots in that earlier liberalism, roots that anchored a tree that has grown twisted and perverted and borne poisonous fruit.<\/p>\n
Thus belief in equality before God, the state and the law was perverted into a requirement of equal outcomes in all matters except those in which minorities or other favored demographics benefit.\u00a0\u00a0So, one can sue colleges for having too few blacks enrolled, but not for having too many blacks on the basketball court.<\/p>\n
Similarly for individual freedom and its corollary that people may fail or succeed in their pursuit of happiness.\u00a0\u00a0It has degenerated into a notion that all are entitled to the fruits of those who create value for society.\u00a0\u00a0Classical liberals have long supported reasonable social safety nets for people unable to fully care and provide for themselves.\u00a0\u00a0But in the hands of progressives, etc. that allowance has become the massive redistributionist and punitive obsessions of the Occupy movement that seeks to punish those whose private efforts benefit society most.<\/p>\n
Third example: Limited government conservatives have long recognized roles for government spending and regulation to address legitimate market failures and negative externalities.\u00a0\u00a0But statist liberals and progressives perverted this idea into the modern administrative state that consumes an ever larger fraction of our economy (and thereby depresses economic growth and human wellbeing) and declares puddles on farms to be navigable waters that pre-empt farming or home building.<\/p>\n
For decades, statists and their PC fellows used not only protest and litigation, as did racial minorities, but also the politics of aggression and intimidation.\u00a0\u00a0Thus, minorities threaten to label folks who won\u2019t give them what they want as racists.\u00a0\u00a0And Democrat TV ads show conservatives pushing granny over a cliff in a wheel chair because they have the temerity to suggest income transfer programs may have become unduly large.<\/p>\n
In all this, leftists smugly labeled and bashed conservatives as racists, lacking in compassion, destroying the earth to satisfy their greed, etc.\u00a0\u00a0Aided by their captive empires in entertainment, the media and academe, they disdain serious discussion of facts, issues or balance.\u00a0\u00a0They declare themselves good and their opponents evil.\u00a0\u00a0So, any policies they advocate must prevail.<\/p>\n
Their problem is that many people quit being intimidated by them and began to push back by electing Donald Trump and a Republican congress.\u00a0\u00a0So, leftists and their echo chambers are now frothing at the mouth with incomprehension and rage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently, Stanford\u2019s Shelby Steele, one of the truly great thinkers and writers of our age, wrote the article: \u201cBlack Protest Has Lost Its Power.\u201d He noted the recent protests by black professional football players \u201cwere rather sad for their fruitlessness.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Protestors \u201cwere figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal to a black identity that had run its course.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88897,"featured_media":39310,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39309"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88897"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39311,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39309\/revisions\/39311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}