When Conservatives Lie: Robert Weissberg
Today’s Left lies, and does so on an industrial scale. Is diversity really our strength? Is race just a social construct? Sadly, at least for those who appreciate the truth, the Right is often just as guilty. Perhaps ideologues just cannot help it.
I seldom get overwrought about rampant falsehoods but the stench of dishonesty can be so over-powering that silence is not an option, and this urge is all the more compelling when the odor emanates from “our side.”
Consider the frequent conservative allegation linking liberalism and Democratic governance to the rioting in places like Ferguson, MO., or Baltimore, MD. According to these pundits, the root of these calamities are public schools run by teachers’ unions, an over-regulated, over-taxed marketplace, excessive bureaucratically directed work-ethic killing social welfare spending, and a moral relativism that undermines strong families among sundry other Great Society-style pathologies.
Yes, while it may be true that rioting exists in localities that are, indeed, liberal dominated and have benefited handsomely from today’s welfare state, the causal link is patently false. The real and indisputable truth is that race is key– the rioters are all young blacks and this race-related violence is identical to what occurred a half century ago in Newark, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities with a large underclass black population. The difficult-to-acknowledge truth is that there is just something distinctive about young urban blacks that pre-suppose them toward pandemonium. I cannot think of a single example of similar rioting among any other groups.
So, if these conservatives are correct, the cure of for future rioting is to increase private-sector run school choice, facilitate small business entrepreneurial skills and alter incentives to promote marriage and stable families or, in a nutshell, embrace the gospel according to Milton Friedman and just watch the re-birth of Baltimore and dozens of similar urban catastrophes.
This analysis is mistaken to the point of embarrassment. There are dozens of liberal-dominated American cities where the odds of a Baltimore-like riot are near zero. In fact, many conservatives would be happy to reside there despite high taxes, a fondness for wacky multi-culturalism, vigorous affirmative action schemes and Progressive, business-killing over-regulation. Many are university towns with well-deserved reputations for zany left-wing ideas (e.g., declaring themselves nuclear-free zones). Examples include Madison, WI. Ann Arbor. MI., Urbana, IL, Austin, TX and perhaps most ironically, both Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA.
If rioting does occur in these bastions of liberalism, it only involves blacks. Absent a lower class black population, America’s high-tax liberal venues are almost Utopian. When did rioting last occur in San Francisco or Portland, OR, two cities famous for their über-liberalism?
Going one step further, does anyone seriously believe that the violence and anti-intellectualism that plagues black-dominated schools would be reduced even slightly if teacher unions were abolished and schools now competed for enrollees? Trying imagining a Baltimore entrepreneur going door-to-door in the city’s black neighborhoods offering free tuition in his school that promised strict discipline and a no nonsense traditional curriculum? And can you imagine the new-found quality of life in the Baltimore ghetto if the criminal code were stripped to its libertarian basics.
Would lowering the cost of business start-ups encourage street corner denizens to establish retail shops to successfully compete with those now run by Indians, Koreans, and similar immigrants willing to work 18 hour days and subsist on tiny margins? Moreover, what could possibly compel cities with large black underclasses to turn toward low-tax, minimal government political solutions? I’d guess that even a soft libertarian candidate running for the Mayor of Baltimore would poll in the low single digits. These self-interested voters would be far savvier than those conservatives who offer a free-market vision. If this libertarian Utopia is to pass, it must be (ironically) imposed from without and would undoubtedly make matters 10 times worse.
Why, then, do conservatives, even smart ones, embrace such obvious dishonesty? Conservatives lie because they are cowards terrified on of being called cruel or insensitive. They have drunk the liberal Kool Aid and the wimp mentality has infiltrated their DNA. Picture the outrage if a contender for the GOP Presidential nomination announced that the only real solution to this anti-police violence is mass incarceration or, in the long-run, restoring tough discipline to unruly kids beginning in Kindergarten or making parents legally responsible for the damage caused by their rioting off-spring. Unfortunately, the old conservative get-tough solutions are now unspeakable.
Though multiple reasons exist for this self-imposed silence, let me conclude by mentioning just one: the role of 501(c 3) conservative think tanks, e.g., Heritage, CATO, AEI, among others. Their survival depends on attracting major donors, and in today’s Left-dominated political landscape, disproportionately targeting African Americans with harsh measures is verboten, a strategy guaranteed to alienated wealthy benefactors. Better to lie or propose useless ideas than reject “caring.” Who wants to be an evil ogre when it is so simple to insist that all this violence would vanish only if Baltimore’s Mayor embraced the free market? And never, never even hint of the role of race. Score yet one more Left victory.
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