In his latest piece, the formerly insightful New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall asks, in earnest, “Can Democrats diminish the bigotry that Donald Trump has unleashed in this country?”
Edsall doesn’t list any examples of the “bigotry” that Trump has “unleashed in this country,” but he does say that “efforts on the left challenge the long history of Republican success in exploiting race and a host of ancillary issues — crime, welfare, social disorder, family breakdown, [and] homelessness.”
So there’s your indicator of what it means to “unleash” bigotry: to address any issue at all that would make life better for everyone — particularly for racial and ethnic minorities, who are disproportionately victims of crime, family breakdown, and social disorder.
Nobody blames minorities for crime, welfare, social disorder, family breakdown, or homelessness. But if those issues tend to afflict minority populations at a much higher rate, then that’s not a reason to stop addressing these problems — to write them off as unfortunate, permanent ills that are never to be confronted.
Talk about “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Liberals, who have increasingly become a mob governed by the sick ideology of social justice, only ever have one answer to any societal problem in America, and it’s to dump more money into lost causes. Dump more money into the broken public school system. (We spend more money per student than almost any other advanced country.) Dump more money into food stamps and Section 8 housing. Dump more money into accommodating anyone who wants to cross our southern border illegally.
None of that is meant to “fix” the problems. Fixing them is racist. This is all meant to accommodate these problems.
It’s like in 2018, when the Council of the District of Columbia voted to decriminalize Metro transit system fare evasion. Rather than having police apprehend freeloading riders for breaking the law, miscreants were simply handed a ticket that no one bothered to check if it was paid. This was the result of a liberal “civil rights group” study that found 91% of court summons for fare evasion were issued to black people — in a city that is predominantly black.
Do we need Andrew Yang here to “talk about math”?
At the time he voted for decriminalization, Councilman Robert White Jr., a Democrat, said, “I’m sad that’s Metro’s losing money, but I’m more sad about what’s happening to black people.”
This is the only attitude liberals accept as caring and kind. The only option is to accommodate suffering, failure, and bad behavior. Don’t set any standards for people. That wouldn’t be fair.
And of course, Trump is a “bigot” for talking about these issues. Edsall is an idiot if he buys into a worldview that claims any problem in America that remotely touches on race can’t be addressed.
