PJMedia's chief honcho Roger L. Simon tells a little story about his journey from left to right today. After he had "come out" he got a call from Michael Berman, brother of a liberal congressman from west LA and a liberal campaign mastermind. Only Michael was no longer a liberal. Why?
The message of The Wire is that the mess in the inner city comes less from "poor individual choices than [from] dysfunctional institutions", he writes. Self help won't do the trick. And while we think that nothing can be done here in the US, inequality is decreasing in Latin America through growth and "intelligently crafted conditional cash transfer programs like Oportunidades in Mexico and Bolsa Família in Brazil."
No doubt. Meanwhile the US is spending a trillion a year on education, $0.7 trillion on welfare, not to mention $2 trillion a year on middle-class entitlements. So do we now pile additional top-down programs on top of the utter waste of the current corrupt and ineffective programs? Or what?
Fukuyama talks airily about the inadequacy of "self help" but conveniently forgets that the urban problem has always been a cultural problem, of immigrants to the city finding a way to acquire the culture and the skills that it takes to make it in the city. And he forgets, what he wrote at the top of his article, that politicians and experts don't really give a damn about the poor. The politicians just want their votes, and the experts just want their sinecures and their tenure. If the politicians don't care and the experts are just thinking about their careers, who else is going to get the black underclass out of the ditch if not blacks themselves?
It all comes down to this. America has got to dish out some "tough love." No, not to African Americans, but to educated elite liberals. For too long educated liberals have sucked at the government teat and, burping from the rich nanny's milk, have pompously told the rest of us what to think and what to do.
It's time we told the liberals to "get lost." Because, as Michael Berman told Roger L. Simon, anyone who has seen what Democrats and liberals have done to African Americans cannot in good conscience vote for Democrats.
Because of what the Democratic Party did to black people, he said.But some people, like Francis Fukuyama, still haven't got the message. He uses a long piece about the TV series The Wire that chronicles the mean streets of Baltimore, Maryland--the gangs, the drugs, the wasted lives--to worry about the black and the white underclass. So what does The Wire suggest to him? Off he goes into the weeds of liberal delusion.
Blacks were the only social group that faced caste-like barriers to mobility. Their social and economic liberation and subsequent advancement required political power to achieve, first in a Civil War that ended slavery and left more than 600,000 Americans dead, and then in a long struggle against legal segregation whose end required strenuous enforcement by Federal authorities.The trouble is, he continues, that many on the right think that the end of segregation solved the race issue, and that the "government efforts like the Great Society’s War on Poverty were a counterproductive failure" and that nothing can "be done with regard to inner-city social policy."
The message of The Wire is that the mess in the inner city comes less from "poor individual choices than [from] dysfunctional institutions", he writes. Self help won't do the trick. And while we think that nothing can be done here in the US, inequality is decreasing in Latin America through growth and "intelligently crafted conditional cash transfer programs like Oportunidades in Mexico and Bolsa Família in Brazil."
No doubt. Meanwhile the US is spending a trillion a year on education, $0.7 trillion on welfare, not to mention $2 trillion a year on middle-class entitlements. So do we now pile additional top-down programs on top of the utter waste of the current corrupt and ineffective programs? Or what?
Fukuyama talks airily about the inadequacy of "self help" but conveniently forgets that the urban problem has always been a cultural problem, of immigrants to the city finding a way to acquire the culture and the skills that it takes to make it in the city. And he forgets, what he wrote at the top of his article, that politicians and experts don't really give a damn about the poor. The politicians just want their votes, and the experts just want their sinecures and their tenure. If the politicians don't care and the experts are just thinking about their careers, who else is going to get the black underclass out of the ditch if not blacks themselves?
It all comes down to this. America has got to dish out some "tough love." No, not to African Americans, but to educated elite liberals. For too long educated liberals have sucked at the government teat and, burping from the rich nanny's milk, have pompously told the rest of us what to think and what to do.
It's time we told the liberals to "get lost." Because, as Michael Berman told Roger L. Simon, anyone who has seen what Democrats and liberals have done to African Americans cannot in good conscience vote for Democrats.
Amen. I work in professional office next to educated, highly skilled AA's who shun the victim status and achieve on their own merit. Yet, all of them hate the conservatism they themselves practice. It's indoctrination or it's a "brotherhood" thing. It's like my father-in-law who quit working for the union as an organizer 50 years ago, disgusted by the corruption and nepotism, but still votes the union way (Democrat) without fail. I fear nothing will change people this entrenched.
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