The defeat that the Democratic Party has just sustained is being blamed by its more fanatical adherents on racism, misogyny, reaction against ‘lawfare,’ the stubbornness of Biden, the inarticulateness of Harris, the rubbishing of the Catholic church, open borders, potential involvement in foreign wars, the effects of COVID and inflation, and the focus on Trump’s personality.
Yet American elites resisted the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, twice vetoed by President Clinton before he ultimately signed.
But the sweep of Republican victories and near-victories suggest larger causes at work. Harris under-performed Mrs. Clinton and Obama as well as Biden and did so nearly everywhere. The Republican disaster in 1964 was a vote to sustain social security and the welfare state, such as it was. This year’s vote was a vote against seventy years of leveling down of standards of behavior.
Americans do not like sumptuary legislation, particularly federal sumptuary legislation. The extension of prohibitions against state-imposed racial discrimination first to private discrimination and then to ‘disparate impacts’ and ‘hostile environments’ has taken its toll.
The devaluation of marriage with the invalidation of sodomy laws, abortion on demand, the compulsory validation of ‘gay marriage,’ the legitimization of male homosexuality in all its aspects, and the validation of transgenderism even to the point of public financial support and insulation from parental authority convinced large portions of the electorate, particularly those charged with the up-bringing of adolescents, that the federal government was their enemy, not their friend.
The Clinton administration discarded the reports of two national commissions concerned with people at the bottom of society: the Dunlop commission recommending building-level labor organizations and the Barbara Jordan commission recommending skills-based immigration reform. (READ MORE from George Liebmann: Democrats Want to Lower the Voting Age)
Even the Bolsheviks reacted against sexual libertarianism, pressed to its limits. The 1918 Soviet family law with its instant divorce and free abortion was stiffened in 1926 in reaction to the depredations of fatherless youths. The Democratic family agenda or lack thereof has been sustained by concealment of inconvenient facts. The proportion of births to unwed mothers increased from 4 percent to more than 40 percent from 1970 to 2020, among blacks from 30 percent to 70 percent, and among black high school dropouts to more than 90 percent.
More than half of fatherless black men were involved with the criminal justice system by the age of 40. The likelihood of venereal disease infection is ten times as great for unprotected anal sex as for unprotected vaginal sex. Although there are thankfully drugs that allow AIDS sufferers a normal life span, until recently the cost to the government of these drugs approximated a million dollars a person over a lifetime, and the federal AIDS budget exceeded $40 billion per year. The incidence of suicide among the beneficiaries of transgender treatments is about six times that in the general population.
The effects of well-intentioned affirmative action programs are self-segregation, enhanced racial tension, and grade inflation leading to a reduction in studying, as a quest for meaningless grades is forsworn in favor of extra-curricular activities. “Disparate impact” ideology has prevented any serious effort through drug testing to curtail the consumption of both licit and illicit drugs by student populations, to the point where 20 percent of male youth are disqualified from either the military or labor market, with macro-economic costs. As long ago as 1927, Bertrand Russell wrote about the purposeless lives of young men whose consorts had “married the state” through provision of child care, food, medical care, and housing.
Fifty years ago, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed that the problems of blacks in large cities were the typical problems of urban proletariats the world over, which would not yield to the moralistic fault-finding of black ministers ascribing social ills to Confederate mores.
America’s northern liberals still have not taken on board these lessons, seeking to inculcate among blacks an ideology of self-pity forsworn by all other ethnic groups. Both Isaiah Berlin and George Kennan have analogized them to the well-born late 19th century Russian narodniki, who pitied peasants but did not understand them, and who paved the way for Bolshevism.
The gains that should have resulted from the civil rights movement have been largely negated by the effects of the welfare rights movement, the sexual revolution, and the drug war. Yet American elites resisted the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, twice vetoed by President Clinton before he ultimately signed; the Dobbs decision backing away from free love; and the beginnings of drug decriminalization, on which Democratic governors and the Biden administration have dragged their feet.
In 1947, Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma, lamenting the downtrodden state of American blacks, The dietary deficiencies and outdoor privies he deplored have since yielded to government programs, but the crime, family breakdown, and venereal disease statistics have grown markedly worse. (READ MORE: Firearms Control: It’s Time for a Common-Sense Bargain)
Perhaps a change will be wrought by November 5. Donald Trump is the opposite of a moral exemplar. His social conscience is well concealed, but he appears to possess at least a semi-efficient bull**it detector. Dislike of Trump does not justify disregard of the ordinary folk who brought him to power, and who want to think that the national government is not educating the young in false values.
The writer, who expresses his individual views, is President of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and author of works on law and history, most recently The Tafts (Twelve Tables Press, 2023).
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