PROGRESSIVES ARE WILLING TO lie, defame, and destroy for their cause because they are imbued with the idea that what they are doing is noble. They see themselves as the champions of the powerless, voices of the voiceless, and defenders of the underrepresented, the downtrodden, and the “people of color” who are everywhere oppressed. They are intoxicated with their own virtue, which is why no crime they commit or deception they practice can shame them or cause them to break with their own ranks. That is why, with the late and isolated exception of one political consultant, no Democrat defected over Clinton’s multiple violations of the Espionage Act, or the multiple corruptions of the Clinton foundation, or the pathological lies of Clinton and her aides to conceal their criminal activities. Not one of them said, “This is a bridge too far. I cannot support her; my party and country deserve better.” What justifies for them the actions and lies that to others seem indefensible is the mission, which is to be advanced at all costs. That mission is to beat the deplorables, the irredeemables—the racists, sexists, Islamophobes, et al.—and advance the progressive cause. The only way to bring Democrats down to earth, where they might feel subject to the same standards as everyone else, is to attack them with the same moral force they use to prosecute their mission; the only way to do it is to turn their fire on them.
To do this, Republicans need to direct their arrows at the Achilles’ heel of the Democratic Party: its monopoly control of the inner cities of America and its responsibility for the misery and suffering inside them. This control stretches over a period of 50 to 100 years in major cities like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Washington, DC, and many others. These are the centers of America’s worst poverty, highest crime rates, failing schools, and general hopelessness. They have been in the hands of Democrats and under their rule for as long as most of the people who inhabit them have been alive. Everything that is wrong with the inner cities of America that policy can affect, Democrats are responsible for: every killing field; every school that year in and year out fails to teach its children the basic skills they need to get ahead; every school that fails to graduate 30 to 40 percent of its charges while those who do get degrees are often functionally illiterate; every welfare system that promotes dependency, condemning its recipients to lifetimes of destitution; every gun-control law that disarms law-abiding citizens in high-crime areas and leaves them defenseless against predators; every catch-and-release policy that puts violent criminals back on the streets; every regulation that ties the hands of police; every material and moral support provided to antipolice agitators like Black Lives Matter, who incite violence against the only protection inner-city families have; every onerous regulation and corporate tax that drives businesses and jobs out of inner-city neighborhoods; every rhetorical assault that tars Democrats’ opponents as “racists” and “race traitors,” perpetuating a one-party system that denies inner-city inhabitants the leverage and influence of a two-party system. Democrats are responsible for every one of the shackles on inner-city communities, and they have been for 50 to 100 years.
What have Republicans done to oppose this racism? What have they done to rally the inhabitants of these Democratic ghettoes to vote out their oppressors and turn these disasters around?
In the 2016 presidential election, the most underreported major proposal was Trump’s offer of a “New Deal” for African Americans and other inner-city dwellers. Trump’s “New Deal” was composed of three promises. First, for “law and order” and therefore for “safe communities”; second, for a $130 billion scholarship program that would provide inner-city kids with quality educations; and third, for high-paying jobs, which a safe environment and good education would go a long way toward making possible.1 Trump’s vouchers were designed to provide each inner-city child with a tuition of $12,000, which is roughly equivalent to the average tuition in tax-payer dollars already available to send children to public schools that don’t teach them.2
Consider the impact this would have politically. It would dramatize the Democrats’ failure to run decent school systems for the urban poor. It would expose the hypocrisy of Democrats’ opposition to vouchers for poor minority children while they send their own children to private schools. It would expose the real interests of the Democratic teacher unions that oppose vouchers because they threaten their stranglehold on K–12 education. If inner-city parents got word that Republicans were offering them $12,000 for each school-age child to secure a decent education, it would blow up the Democratic voting base. Without overwhelming majorities in the urban minority vote, Democrats cannot win national elections. Creating a voucher system that puts the power of the purse in the hands of parents instead of school bureaucrats would break the backs of the teacher unions that provide the biggest slush fund and activist core of the Democratic Party and the greatest opposition to school reform. It would expose the hypocrisy of teacher union officials who send their own children to private schools. It would take away the moral high ground from which Democrats regularly pound their Republican opponents.
The 2016 Democratic Party platform declares, “We will push for a societal transformation to make it clear that black lives matter and that there is no place for racism in our country.”3 If Republicans were to put the racism of the Democrats in the forefront of their speeches and campaigns, it would shred the Democrats’ phony but all-too-effective narrative and game plan.
Although Republicans are too polite to mention it, Democrats are the truly racist party. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, and national origin and thus outlawed the use of racial categories in hiring and admissions and institutional regulations generally. But Democrats and progressives spent the next 50 years distorting the meaning of the Civil Rights Act and subverting its provisions. As a result, racial categories are now prevalent in virtually every area of American life, spreading injustice and sowing divisions that deepen with every leftist assault on America’s color-blind social contract.
This is particularly true of universities, which are the vanguard institutions of the political left and thus foreshadow the American future if the progressive movement should prevail. In American universities today, segregated housing, segregated associations, and even segregated “spaces of color” have become not only accepted but increasingly normal, alongside racially rigged admissions systems that have damaging consequences, including elevated dropout and failure rates for the very minorities they are allegedly designed to help. This is a racism that goes unnamed but could and should be used by conservatives to expose the hypocrisy of people who use race as a political weapon to slander and silence their political opponents.
Until Democratic hypocrisy on race is confronted directly, Republicans will continue to point a loaded gun at their own heads. The 2016 Democratic platform condemns “the racial wealth and income gaps [that] are the result of policies that discriminate against people of color and constrain their ability to earn income and build assets to the same extent as other Americans.”4 There are no such policies, since federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or color. In order to justify this allegation, the Democratic platform claims that “people of color” were “disproportionately targeted for subprime, predatory, and fraudulent mortgages during the run-up to the housing crisis.”5 This is not only false; it turns the facts on their head. The fraudulent mortgages were created by banks held at gunpoint by Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, and Barack Obama, who led a campaign to label bankers as “racist” for rejecting mortgage applications from people who obviously couldn’t afford to pay them. Under pressures both legal and extralegal, the bankers caved to the progressives and created loans for people who did not have the means to pay them back. When the house of cards thus built collapsed in the so-called subprime housing crisis, a rash of foreclosures ensued through which the African American middle class lost half of its net worth.6
Republicans were well aware of this social disaster and cynical exploitation by its Democratic instigators, but they failed to make this an issue, just as they failed to characterize the economic policies of the Obama years—which took a disproportionate toll on African Americans—as “racist,” the way Democrats would have done. The failure to fight battles like this stores up future political defeats, since few people remember what actually happened in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, while Democrats are always ready to misrepresent the facts and pin these disasters on their opponents.
The most significant and ominous racial aggression by Democrats is the support they provide to the racist organization Black Lives Matter, which has declared war on police officers across the country and has instigated a series of ambushes and executions of law enforcement officials.7 These assaults have led to a suspension of the proactive policing procedures that held crime rates in check. A rash of homicides in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests have cost many hundreds of black lives in cities across America. Since the Ferguson and Freddie Gray riots, an additional 131 homicides have been committed in Baltimore alone, an increase of 70 percent.8 Black Lives Matter is officially endorsed by the Democratic Party, while Democratic funders like George Soros have raised more than $100 million to empower Black Lives street thugs in the name of “social justice.” Directly following the murder of five police officers in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter “protest,” President Obama invited its leaders to the White House.
A month before the 2016 elections, 100 Black Lives Matter activists gathered at the University of California to attack the Los Angeles police department with this chant: “LAPD what you say? How many people have you killed today? LAPD you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”9 The protest was one of hundreds in the last few years attacking police departments for an alleged “genocidal” war against blacks. There is no such war and no factual basis for this charge. A Wall Street Journal report shows that police shootings make up 12 percent of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths, which is three times the proportion of black deaths from the same cause. At the same time, according to FBI data, over the last 10 years, 40 percent of cop killers have been black, and police officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.10
Black Lives Matter activists and their Democratic allies are practiced liars with statistics. It is true that while blacks make up only 13 percent of the population, they account for 37 percent of the prison population.11 But blacks commit more than 40 percent of America’s violent crimes. The proper baseline for judging whether there is discrimination in overall arrests or shootings is the percentage of black participation in criminal activity, not black representation in the population at large.12 Nationally, black criminals account for more than 50 percent of the homicides.13 It stands to reason that they would be involved in a relatively high proportion of the violent encounters between criminals and the police.
Even more preposterous is Black Lives Matter’s claim—echoed by many Democrats—that America is a “white supremacist” nation. In addition to being patently absurd, this is itself a racist claim, as it implicates all whites. It is a particular absurdity in 2016, since America—having just elected an African American president twice—is arguably the most tolerant, least racist nation on earth. In the last 16 years, America has had 2 black Secretaries of State, a black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 3 black heads of the National Security Council, and more than 9,000 black elected officials at state and municipal levels.14 Major American cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are run by blacks, and many more are governed by black mayors, black police chiefs, black judges, nonwhite-majority city councils, and black superintendents of schools. How ironic that more than half a century after the end of segregation and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, after the integration of America’s military and schools and popular culture, the accusation of “white supremacy”—this racist incitement—should be the emblem of a movement for “social justice.”
Yet this is what the Democratic Party believes. Its official platform indicts America as “systemically” racist, and its leader, Barack Obama, has perversely claimed that racism is in America’s DNA.15 There is no way that Republicans can stop the “societal transformation” that Democrats are planning without confronting this mendacity on the race issue. There is no way Republicans can neutralize Democrats’ attacks without characterizing Democrats as racists for making this charge, which is a libel against Americans who are white. This may be uncomfortable for some conservative sensibilities, but it is necessary. When you are the target of a moral indictment based on a tissue of lies, there is no way to defend yourself without calling into question the moral credentials of your attackers.
The war that Democrats have declared on America’s social contract is a war on individual rights and individual accountability, which are the bedrock of America’s constitutional system. The stakes in this war are enormous. Democrats’ emphasis on group identities and group rights and progressives’ clamoring for “social justice” will lead inexorably to a collectivist tyranny. This is a fight for American freedom—the soul of what this country stands for and the foundation of all its success.