Liberals sell innocence from America’s past. If bigotry is pronounced dead, the racket is over.
Suddenly America was in moral trouble. The open acknowledgment of the nation’s racist past had destroyed its moral authority, and affirming democratic principles and the rule of law was not a sufficient response. Only a strict moral accounting could restore legitimacy.
Thus, redemption—paying off the nation’s sins—became the moral imperative of a new political and cultural liberalism. President Lyndon Johnson turned redemption into a kind of activism: the Great Society, the War on Poverty, school busing, liberalized welfare policies, affirmative action, and so on.
This liberalism always projects moral idealisms (integration, social justice, diversity, inclusion, etc.) that have the ring of redemption. What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.
.. The “safe spaces” for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment. As minorities in these spaces languish in precious self-absorption, their white classmates, high on the idea of their own wonderful “tolerance,” whistle past the very segregated areas they are barred from.
.. . But to be innocent there must be an evil from which to be free. The liberal identity must have racism, lest it lose innocence and the power it conveys.
Canada Makes a Mockery of a Trade Deal
The Liberals want to expand Nafta to cover ‘gender rights’ and ‘indigenous rights.’
But Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland wants to make Nafta “progressive.” So Canada’s Liberal government proposes including new chapters related to “gender rights” and “indigenous rights.” Seriously. Ms. Freeland wants Nafta to reflect the government’s “commitment to gender equality” and “our commitment to improving our relationship with Indigenous peoples.”
..This is another frustrating example of Canada’s political culture. The Liberals are perennial fence-sitters, content to shift with the prevailing political winds. The current government is one of the most left-leaning in years.. The Liberals also seem intent on blurring the lines between political and economic reality and becoming a political and economic alternative to the U.S. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent profile in Rolling Stone—cover line: “Why Can’t He Be Our President?”—is part of a long-term marketing strategy to make the young, hip, photogenic leader a progressive hero in the face of Donald Trump’s America... only 43% of Canadians hold a favorable view of the U.S. That’s down from 65% during President Obama’s last year in office.. Canada’s political culture approves of preposterous proposals like gender and indigenous rights in Nafta. It’s the type of modern progressive agenda many Canadians want... If Canada and the U.S. can’t find common ground on Nafta, Mexico may end up becoming North America’s voice of economic sanity.
Liberalism’s Summer of ’17
Liberals whine about being governed by Trump. Pity those governed by them.
Many of those now climbing over the Democrats’ blue walls were willing to live under the original liberal governance model that existed before 1960 because it recognized the legitimacy of private economic life. The wealthy agreed then to pay their “fair share.”
.. Defenders of the liberal model argue that cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles are changing into sophisticated, cosmopolitan hubs that attract a new class of young professionals who will restore urban America. Instead, many of these urban revivals are producing a phenomenon economists now call “racially concentrated areas of affluence,” or RCAAs.
An area gets RCAAed when the residents who pack themselves into it are mostly white people whose median incomes are unprecedentedly greater than the city’s poverty level. Some of the most RCAAed cities are liberal duchies like Boston, Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia.
Today, private economic life, especially that of the urban middle class, is no longer a partner in the liberal model. It’s merely a “revenue source” for a system whose patronage is open-ended welfare and largely uncapped public-employee pensions. I’d describe the liberal-progressive governing strategy as ruin and rule.
.. Not widely noticed is that liberalism’s claimed beneficiaries—black Americans—are also fleeing its failures. Demographers have documented significant black out-migration from New York, Michigan, California and Illinois into Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina. North to south.
.. They are now asking the federal government, meaning taxpayers who live in parts of the U.S. not hostile to capitalism, to give them nearly $15 billion to replace the 100-year-old train tunnel beneath the Hudson River. Why should they? Why send money to a moribund, dysfunctional urban liberal politics that will never—as in, not ever—clean up its act or reform?
Maybe we need a new default solution to the urban crisis: Let internal migration redistribute the U.S. population away from liberalism’s smug but falling-apart plutonomies.
The liberals’ cult of Justin Trudeau
Justin Trudeau: Why Can’t He Be Our President?” asks the cover of the latest edition of Rolling Stone.
.. Trudeau couldn’t even get the nomination of the Democratic party.
.. Trudeau’s idyllic northern paradise is actually the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, and even Boy Band Angela Merkel doesn’t seem particularly eager to destroy the country’s fossil-fuel industry. Sensibly enough, he’s a big proponent of the Keystone Pipeline and Canada’s Kinder Morgan pipeline, which transports hydrocarbons between the oil sands of Alberta (which are “pockmarked,” RS gravely informs us, “like a B-52 bombing range”) and British Columbia.
.. “One of the things that we have to realize is we cannot get off gas, we cannot get off oil, fossil fuels tomorrow — it’s going to take a few decades,” he tells RS. “Maybe we can shorten it, but there’s going to have to be a transition time.”
.. So here’s Rolling Stone’s politics: We’ll forgive you for turning Earth into a coal-black cinder as long as you keep cheering for identity politics in these final moments of suffering we share together.
.. But if you really do want to live in a country led by Justin Trudeau, given that people not born American can’t actually be president of the United States, why not do what Rolling Stone writer Stephen Rodrick suggests in the kicker of his piece: “At this moment, Justin Trudeau’s Canada looks like a beautiful place to ride out an American storm.” Why won’t Justin’s American acolytes do what they keep promising to do and take off to the Great White North?
.. Lena Dunham is still among us despite her highly specific vow, “I know a lot of people have been threatening to do this, but I really will. I know a lovely place in Vancouver.” Actor Keegan-Michael Key similarly indicated he had a northern escape route planned out when he said Canada is, “like, ten minutes from Detroit,” adding, “That’s where I’m from; my mom lives there. It’d make her happy too.” Key has given no indication lately that he is following up on that.
.. It might just be that there is more to a country than who happens to be head of state at any given moment.
.. Our progressive friends, who alternate between saying, “Ha-ha, Trump can’t do anything!” and dressing up like extras from The Handmaid’s Tale, are proving yet again that their alarmism is meaningless. If any professional lefty actually gives any indication of being serious about leaving America, I’d be happy to start a Kickstarter campaign to pay for their moving expenses.