The Left preaches tolerance but excoriates those who disagree with it. It claims to seek equality or its conveniently and endlessly malleable derivative, equity, but gives preferences unequally to favored groups. It brags that it’s a passionate defender of democracy but works to cancel legitimate votes by making fraudulent voting easier. It arrogates “science” to its partisan causes but rejects the facts of gender, abortion, genetically modified foods, COVID-19, economics, and much else. The list of hypocritical disparities stretches to somewhere over the rainbow.
But one disparity is perhaps weirder and more glaring than all the others. It is on the issue that obsesses the Left most of all — that of race. White gentry liberals, who run the Democratic Party and lead its militant base, are utterly out of sync with the racial minorities they claim to represent and insist they want to help.
Their tastes are different, of course. The white uber-liberal class strives toward the chichi and the hip in entertainment, foods, recreation, etc. Racial minorities, who are disproportionately members of the working class, tend toward blue-collar choices on these things rather than lining up with their professed protectors.
Divergence of taste is mirrored by a gulf on more substantive cultural matters. African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics tend to be more conservative on education and, to an extent, on marriage, family formation, and churchgoing.
And these disparities of taste and culture are increasingly replicated in politics, which is why racial minorities have been sliding away from Democrats over the past four election cycles.
A 2019 poll taken after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam was revealed to have worn blackface or a KKK outfit in his youth found that white voters were more upset about it than black voters were. Fewer than half of the former thought Northam should stay in office, whereas 60% of the latter were content to see him remain. On racial matters, left-wing whites are akin to religious converts, more fervent than those baptized in infancy.
As the New York Times
reported
at the time, “liberal whites — not minorities — are setting the tone on these issues.” The same story revealed that white Clinton voters, unlike black Clinton voters or Trump voters of either race, felt more warmly toward minorities than they did toward their own racial group. In this, they’re like the lily-white would-be African American,
Rachel Dolezal
.
The Left is in the awkward, not to mention arrogant, position of thinking it knows better than minorities what is good for them. Thus, Democrats push to defund the police in direct opposition to the wishes of African Americans who suffer most from theft and violent crime. The party’s suggestion that racial minority people cannot get and use ID cards just as easily as others is recognized by minorities themselves as what President George W. Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
A 2018 study found that liberals’ patronizing attitude toward racial minorities leads them even to
dumb down
the way they talk to members of racial minority groups, which is something to which conservatives do not stoop.
One should not be surprised that the Left’s leaders and ideologues are out of step, or that they think hoi polloi should do what they are told and accept things they do not believe. That is the way they treat all ordinary Americans. But on the issue of race, this knowing-better-than-thou attitude sits particularly uncomfortably, for it smacks strongly of the paternalistic arrogance of colonialism that, in theory at least, the modern Left detests.
The similarities are, however, as evident as the differences between them and late Victorian colonialists. Like those colonial officials, they regard themselves as altruistically governing lesser peoples not as they wish but for their ultimate good. They regard the lumpen populace as “new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child,” as Rudyard Kipling wrote of British colonial subjects in The White Man’s Burden.
Nothing could be more unfashionable today than this 1899 paean to imperialism, and yet it is not difficult to adjust a few details of the poem to capture the arrogance of today’s Left and yet remain faithful to Kipling’s original sentiments.
Does this not ring true of those who currently run Washington, the universities, and most of the national news media? Take up the liberal burden/ Go teach the Leftist creed/ Send out your pseudo-scholars/ Our captive people need/ The care of justice warriors/ Who will plant the good woke seed.
Today’s Left has become the thing it hates.
