Why the Madness of Democrats? Part 3

Napoleon famously advised, "Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake."  The current lunacy of elected Democrats cheering on as the cities they misrule burn to the ground, Hollywood-villain style, would seem to be an example of this principle.

Somehow, seeing all of the Democrat disaster cities suffering from this exact same madness, at the exact same time, gives us pause.  Is it really wise to just assume they're all off their rockers and that they'll be suitably defenestrated at the polls?  Or does the simultaneous, coordinated nature of the issues seem like an organized insurrection?

The argument against ever allowing any Democrat anywhere near any position of power ever again seems like it should be compelling.  It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to detect the observable fact that many elected Democrat officials have decided to give riotous, destructive mobs space to vent their frustrations instead of shutting them down so long as the riotous assemblies don't trash the ruling Democrats' houses.

This has resulted in many police officers being injured and permitted the destruction of millions of dollars worth of public and private property.  Do Democrats expect social order to spontaneously arise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Minneapolis police station or the Atlanta Wendy's?

We found it more than a little inexplicable that so many elected officials, who presumably would like to be re-elected and sent on to higher office, would act in this manner.  There are a few explanations that might apply in a corner case here or there, but none that are satisfactory for such a widespread bout of coordinated insanity.

For instance, it's quite possible that some of them fear a primary challenge from the left of the sort that took out veteran Democrats such as Representative Joe Crowley and Representative Eliot Engle.  That may even be true in Seattle and Portland, whose entire electorates seem to have succumbed to the same self-destructive madness.

But it surely couldn't apply in so many cities all at once, particularly not in places where primaries aren't happening this year.  Through the course of this series, we've explored and discarded several theories, leaving both ourselves and our Gentle Readers still deeply unsatisfied.  So, let's keep trying.

The Greek Tragedy Theory

The Greeks had a standard tragedy plot where some poor schnook got caught up in the inexorable jaws of fate.  The chorus starts chanting "Doom, doom, doom" about halfway through act one, and the action continues until he suffers his inevitable fate.

By that theory, events make the man.  A more modern way of putting this view might be, "What's going to happen's going to happen - just make sure it doesn't happen to you."

The Greeks had another saying, "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."  In those plots, the main character is literally insane, or becomes so over the course of the plot, and carries out unwise actions which lead to utter destruction.

On that basis, the man makes the events.  We see examples of this in modern reality, such as two supposed military geniuses Napoleon and Hitler making the exact same career-ending mistake of invading Russia too late in the year, something a geographically-inclined child could have predicted wouldn't end well.

History, therefore, shows that reality is a complicated, messy mixture of men making events and events making men.

To us, a fairly credible explanation for the Democrats' continued cozying up to riotous mobs is the arrogance brought about by decades of success.  Historically speaking, once any ruling elite becomes pampered, arrogant, and disconnected from the lives of ordinary people, their younger members feel exempt from their ancestors' respect for longstanding moral and spiritual imperatives.

While it is true that many if not most longstanding traditions such as driving on the right or stopping for red and going on green are not fundamentally important to societal survival, our lefties have decided that there is nothing at all good about any aspect of American society.  The Bernie, Lenin and Marx faction, conveniently abbreviated BLM, has stated that their leaders are trained Marxists and that their intention to tear down American society completely and reconstruct it from scratch, much as Mr. Obama's "yeswiccans" planned the fundamental transformation of American society.

This is all predicated on a supposed desire to right historic wrongs done to long-dead black people.  There's no doubt as to the reality of those wrong: yes, slavery was every bit as evil as advertised.  However, as the schoolroom saying goes, "two wrongs don't make a right," and today's violence is doing nothing to make life better for anyone and makes life far worse for people in low-income neighborhoods whose stores have been destroyed.

Fortunately for the left, that isn't their goal - indeed, they couldn't care less about making life better for anyone other than their power-seeking selves.

What Democrats really think of blacks

The Washington Post tells us that when Mr. Obama spoke at Rep. John Lewis' funeral, he compared Mr. Trump to Bull Connor and George Wallace who used fire hoses to oppose Mr. Lewis' marches for civil rights in 1965.  Neither the Post nor Mr. Obama saw fit to remind anyone that both of these men were staunch Democrats.

Although he criticized Mr. Trump for not attending the funeral - to which the President had not even been invited, of course - he didn't mention the fact that Mr. Biden, the current Democrat candidate for President, also skipped Mr. Lewis' funeral.

C-SPAN reminds us of then-Senator Joe Biden "eulogizing Strom Thurmond 7/1/2003."  Buzzfeed didn't want anyone to forget that Senator Thurmond had a history of anti-black racism that would get him canceled if he were not a Democrat:

Biden's friendship years ago with Thurmond - a symbol of the kind of '90s bipartisan politics, and the civility and forgiveness Biden espouses - is an especially precarious piece of political history in an era in which Democrats are increasingly reliant on a young, impatient bloc of black voters native to the Black Lives Matter movement to whom Biden's absolving portrayal of Thurmond would likely qualify as a betrayal.  [emphasis added]

The Obama White House archives recorded Vice President Joe Biden's speech praising Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat senator who got his start as a Grand Kleagle of the KKK, an organization dedicated to preventing blacks from gaining political power through voting.

And every time I sat with the Leader -- I never called Senator Byrd "Senator," I always called him "Leader" [at least he didn't call him 'Dear Leader' - ed]...

Well, if there was ever a senator who was the embodiment of his state, if there was ever a senator who, in fact, reflected his state, it was Robert C. Byrd.

Somehow, Democrat Privilege causes the MSM to glide smoothly over these awkward moments in the history of Democrat treatment of blacks.

It isn't just blacks; Democrats have contempt for other minorities as well.  The Hill showed how Nancy Pelosi attempted to explain away Rep. Omar's virulent anti-semitism:

"The incident that happened with [Omar], I don't think our colleague is anti-Semitic," Pelosi said Friday.

"I think she has a different experience in the use of words, doesn't understand that some of them are fraught with meaning," Pelosi added of the freshman Democratic congresswoman who came to the U.S. as a refugee with her family in 1995.  [emphasis added]

Ah, yes, "Different experience in the use of words."  "Doesn't understand."  When "Dr." Martin Luther King was found to have plagiarized most of his thesis, Boston University decided not to pull his degree because he was from a "different culture."  They later graduated AOC with an honors degree in economics - we know how their boat floats.

Liberals have spent decades proclaiming victimhood for minorities, saying they are inherently so inferior and so ignorant that they can't succeed without liberal help.  That's an incredibly racist statement, but that's how they get votes.

"Soft Bigotry" explains what liberals are really all about.  They sincerely believe that their intersectional groups are so incapable that pretty much anything they do or say has to be accepted because, as Ms. Pelosi says, they just don't understand what they're saying.

That's why top liberals adore all those fake hate crimes - they "raise awareness," and that's all you can expect of such inferior people.

In like fashion, self-appointed black leaders such as Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson promote the myth that blacks can't succeed without their help.  And echoing them is the incohate Joe Biden's repeated pronouncements that voting Democrat is the very definition of blackness, and if you don't, you simply ain't black at all.

We reported back in 2008 that Jessie Jackson said that Barack Obama's recent criticism of black males and his calls for black men to take some responsibility for the children they father were undercutting Mr. Jackson's leadership of the black community.

Then-Senator Obama was entirely correct.  If fewer black children grew up without fathers, there would be fewer blacks in trouble with the criminal justice system.  That would "threaten" Mr. Jackson's "leadership"?  Indeed it would - the fewer unsuccessful blacks there are, the fewer need Mr. Jackson's lessons in exploiting victimhood.

The fact that Mr. Obama became President not once but twice shows that decades of "blacks can't succeed because the system is against them" are nothing but a lie.

Actin' White

The problem for a political party which bases electoral success on convincing blacks and other minorities that they're helpless victims who need Democrats to give them freebies, is that the American economy is so rich in opportunity that blacks like Herman Cain, Dr. Thomas Sowell, Dr. Ben Carson, and Justice Thomas have become wealthy or powerful without much Democrat help.  Indeed, most of them have had to overcome Democrat opposition to get where they are.

Although Democrats complain about the lack of black role models, they realize that successful role models like these will give the lie to Democrats' proclamations about black helplessness.  That is why they not only criticize any successful black or minority person who says that it is possible for blacks like Oprah Winfrey to succeed in America, they do their best to undermine black acceptance of the fundamental conditions for success by any group.

They seem incapable of noting the irony of Oprah Winfrey, a self-made black female who is one of the world's richest people, stating that white people - all but a handful of whom are definitionally less privileged than herself - are automatically more privileged simply on account of the color of their skin.  As Sen. Ted Cruz sagely observed, "What utter, racist BS."

It's been documented for years that black students who strive to learn in school are often criticized for "acting white," but we thought this to be a relatively limited view.  It turns out that we were wrong: the commanding heights of our culture hammer this toxic lie into young black skulls, the better to keep them poor, downtrodden, and easily manipulated.  What could be more condescending, racist, un-American, or just plain evil!

Those with eyes to see and ears to hear will note the loud and forceful undermining of what we consider to be bedrock requirements for managing any high-tech civilization in the reaction to "Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture" published in the Philadelphia Inquirer of August 9, 2017.  It spoke of the life "script we all were supposed to follow:"

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.  [emphasis added]

The evidence in favor of getting married before giving birth is unarguable - very few poor children live in two-parent households, but most children in single-parent homes are poor.  The poverty rate for married black families is essentially the same as the poverty rate for married whites.  Marriage is the most powerful anti-poverty program we've found.

These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.  [emphasis added]

This is where Prof. Wax came close to being canceled despite being the well-respected and tenured Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School:

The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.

Although she spoke of the anti-social attitudes of some working-class whites, Prof. Wax had committed the unpardonable heresy of blaming undesirable black outcomes on undesirable black conduct instead of blaming everything on white racism as John Lindsay did when writing the Kerner commission report.  She also stated this non-PC fact:

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.

The Twitterverse had a cardiac meltdown.  Googling "amy wax law professor penn" without quotes gives many articles about how virtuous Penn was in condemning her unspeakable racism.  The fact that liberals assumed that she was talking about black welfare mothers even though she was careful not to say so speaks volumes about their actual thoughts and beliefs.  Naturally, Google doesn't return searches for the abundant proofs that she was absolutely right, or any voices defending her position.

As with LBJ's original executive order, the federal government got into the act of deconstructing our society.  The Federalist described a letter from Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley to the Smithsonian Institution demanding to know why the National Museum of African American History and Culture had released a racist curriculum teaching how to identify "whiteness."

The curriculum had been posted on their website but was taken down after strong objection.

[Senator] Hawley noted that some ideas asserted by scholars as unique to white culture included "'Self-Reliance,' 'The Nuclear Family,' 'Objective, rational linear thinking,' 'Hard work is the key to success,' 'Plan for the future,' 'Quantitative emphasis,' 'Intent counts,' and 'Be polite.'" ...

"However, the position of the Smithsonian, as suggested by the materials prior to their removal, appeared to be more troubling: that these attributes are actually emblems of 'structural racism' in American life to be rejected rather than embraced."

As we see it, these characteristics are associated not with "white superiority," but with "cultural superiority" since, as Prof. Wax put it, "They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities."  Any group such as our Chinese and Asian competitors which carefully follows these rules will end up supreme over cultures that do not.

There is nothing white about Chinese or Japanese - just ask them!  Yet there can be no possible doubt that those cultures have achieved immense wealth and power in a spectacularly short period of time, precisely by following the "uniquely white" principles of 'Self-Reliance,' 'The Nuclear Family,' 'Objective, rational linear thinking,' 'Hard work is the key to success,' 'Plan for the future,' 'Quantitative emphasis,' 'Intent counts,' and last but far from least, 'Be polite.'

These time-tested principles work for white people in America, for Japanese people in Japan, for Chinese people just about everywhere in the world... and, yes, they work just fine for any black, Hispanic, or aboriginal individuals who choose to follow them, as countless people from Dr. Ben Carson and Oprah Winfrey on down can testify.

Alas, the absolutely deadly idea that "hard work is racist" is gaining ground in our public discourse.  Whomever adopts this as a life principle will probably end up very poor, and if they don't, it'll be because they are a brutal thief or tyrant, or because they've climbed aboard the diversity bandwagon which amounts to the same thing.

The Smithsonian isn't alone.  The New York Post tells us that the Department of Defense is on board:

Though facing severe budget cuts, the DOE has spent more than $6 million for the [anti-bias] training, which defines qualities such as "worship of the written word," "individualism" and "objectivity" as "white-supremacy culture."

These, too, are obvious paths to "cultural superiority."  How can a technician keep the lights on without strong respect for the written word of the repair manuals?

Blaming black family breakdown, which is the root cause of most widespread black problems, on white racism is nonsense.  As Thomas Sowell put it:

"Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that census data of that era showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940."

Anyone who claims that weak black family structure is a product of slavery and not the Democrat's Great Society welfare programs should be required to explain why the legacy of slavery skipped five full generations before asserting itself.

With the MSM firmly on their side, however, the "blame whitey" crowd counts on "Democrat privilege" to be able to avoid having to answer that question.  As far as we know, it's never even been publicly asked.

Most of the noise about abandoning longstanding traditions centers around destroying capitalism and replacing it with "socialism, this time done correctly."  That misguided trope is well known, but socialism "merely" leads to extreme poverty.  Denying the value of hard work, a rigorous, fact-based existence, and individual responsibility is a recipe for the total collapse of civilization - you can't even operate a society based on muscle-powered farming without hard work, respect for accumulated knowledge of how to make crops grow, and a sense of individual responsibility.

It is extremely difficult to devise a viable world view - Robert Owen's Utopians failed, hippie communes failed, the French revolutionaries failed, the Russian, Cambodian, and Chinese attempts to use Marxism as a world view led to millions of deaths, mostly from starvation.  We have no idea how many independent voters who are outside Mr. Trump's natural base will decide to vote against riots this coming November, but skyrocketing sales to first-time black and woman gun buyers hint that the number might be nonzero.

The Times, They Are A'Crumblin'

Some people share our horror at the prospect of Democrats, who argue that desiring police help in avoiding rape is white privilege, that rioting is peaceful protest, and who also regard these longstanding societal virtues as equivalent to racism, taking power in a "Biden" administration.  What makes the coming presidential election exciting is that nobody knows how many voters are in the legendary "silent majority."

We've observed that the leftist "march through the academies" has been going on for a bit over a century.  We know from the hysterical reaction to Mr. Trump's victory in 2016 that the lefties are not only true believers in the ideas they throw around, they believed that Hillary represented the Second Coming of Mr. Obama and would complete their long-awaited "transformation of America."

The "Greek Tragedy" theory assumes that Democrats have gone essentially 'round the bend with Trump Derangement Syndrome and are acting as if they already had the total power over all of us that they've craved for so long.  We need not assume that they've gone totally bonkers.  Their behavior can be explained in one simple, profound, and simply horrifying thesis:

Democrats regard President "Placeholder" Biden as inevitable enough that they don't have to worry about what the voters actually think.

It doesn't matter how many silent Trump supporters there may be, they reason: they have enough ways to cheat to grab a critical state such as Florida or Texas and keep Mr. Trump out of the White House no matter what.

The virus gives them an excuse to ban Mr. Trump's rallies, which were his most effective campaign format.  Twitter and Facebook have banned most of his campaign messages.  Mr. Trump cannot get his message out; his followers cannot gather to give mutual strength and encouragement, while leftist mobs roam the streets unmolested even without masks!

If final Democrat victory actually is inevitable, the theory goes, why not push their party as far to the left as they can?  The further left they go, the leftier their mandate will be when Mr. Biden takes the oath of office and collapses a day or two later in favor of his "woman of color" VP.  As we see it, they wouldn't be doing this unless they were truly convinced that BLM's program, no matter how many times it's failed before, is on the right side of history.

And, of course, past this election victory they really will have nothing to worry about: on the policy proposals already put forward by the Democrat Party, Republicans will be incapable of winning ever again, as President Trump has pointed out at some length.  The Democrat Congress has already voted to grant statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. (four free Democrat senators); the Senate Democrats have announced  that they plan to eliminate the filibuster and destrying any minority constraints on power; and the electoral college will be eliminated by the simple expedient of granting Congressional approval to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, thus granting victory to whomsoever can manufacture the most illegal votes in their heartland (obviously, those selfsame Democrat disaster cities).

Hubris, anyone?

The "Biden inevitable" theory brings up another Greek idea, hubris, which describes excessive pride or self-confidence   The definition includes this note:  (in Greek tragedy) excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.  [emphasis added]  Hubris is a special sort of madness which leads to ill-advised actions which help bring on doom.

History shows that Jews have maintained a distinct religion and culture for thousands of years despite many determined efforts to exterminate them.  They were dispersed from their Holy Land when the Romans under Titus sacked Jerusalem around 70 AD and wandered the earth having no land to call their own until President Truman recognized their government in Israel on May 14, 1948.

For whatever it's worth, the "arc of history" seems to indicate that organizations that harm the Jews, who claim to be God's chosen people, suffer ill fortune.  For example, Hitler's "thousand-year Reich" murdered millions of Jews, after which Germany was bombed flat and partitioned - a far worse fate than befell the Communist leaders of Russia and China, who murdered many times more people, but not Jews in particular.  More recently, Iran, whose government has stated that they desire to acquire atomic weapons for the express purpose of wiping out Israel, has suffered dozens of of mysterious fires and explosions which damaged critical infrastructure, some of which was associated with their nuclear program.

The modern Democratic party has shown itself to be no friend of Israel.  The Obama administration allowed the United Nations Security council to issue a resolution condemning Jewish settlements, "the squad" has made many anti-Semitic comments without any criticism from mainstream Democrats, and the 2020 Democrat party platform contains strong anti-Israel sentiments and going back to the Obama administration nuclear "deal" with Iran.

Mr. Trump, in contrast, moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an action which had been called for by US law since 1948, imposed sanctions on Iran, and has taken other actions in support of Israel.

Does the arc of history favor Jews over other groups?  As the ancient Greeks put it, "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."