Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 9:11am

The New Bigots

 

My favorite living historian, Victor Davis Hanson, explains how bigotry has found a home on the Left:

 

The stereotyped hatreds were battled by the melting-pot forces of assimilation, integration and intermarriage. Civil rights legislation and broad education programs gradually convinced the country to judge all Americans on the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins or their religious beliefs. And over the last half-century, the effort to end institutional bias against African-Americans largely succeeded.

But recently, other ancient prejudices have been insidiously returning. And this time, the bias is more subtle, and it can be harder to address than traditional racism against non-white populations. The new venom, for example, is often spread by left-wing groups that claim victim status themselves and thus, by their logic, should not be seen as victimizers.

Progressive senators such as Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) have attacked judicial nominees on grounds that they are Catholic, apparently because the Catholic Church and its affiliates officially disprove of abortion and gay marriage. . . .

Universities feel free to discriminate against Asian-Americans because their hard work and excellent preparation often leads to superb grades, test scores and application credentials. In other words, Asian-Americans supposedly distort progressive agendas of proportional representation, disparate impact and diversity by overachieving and being overqualified—purportedly robbing spots from other minority applicants.

Asian-American achievement also disproves the old canard that prejudice makes it impossible to find parity in the United States.

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies.

Go here to read the rest.  Identity politics is all about dividing the world into we angels and those demons.  This will not end well.  Catholics in this country should be far more alarmed about this than they are, but we have too many fools, and worse, in our ranks.

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Bob S. in NC
Bob S. in NC
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 7:16am

Hanson’s insights are both accurate and sobering. He tries to always hold out some hope and possible solutions but his current commentary sounds steadily bleaker. He has great angst with Trump but sees him as the as the only and last bulwark against a complete inversion of the American dream. His predictions portend great troubles ahead…

Bob S. in NC
Bob S. in NC
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 7:17am

Sorry for the extra “as the” in my comment…fat finger disease strikes again…

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 7:57am

Note to self. Praise the Lord. And, buy more ammunition.

The psychologistic community calls it “psychological projection.” It’s where the evil or pathological person projects her/his evil/pathology on others.

Projection is evidenced when a black/brown nationalists calls anyone that resists handing over her/his life, liberty and property a “Nazi” or “white nationalist.”

That “content of one’s character” crap quickly died soon after MLK uttered it. Since the 1970’s, civil wrongs law and precedent are largely founded on disparate outcomes, or the “effects test.” Say, when Harvard doesn’t matriculate a sufficiently large percentage of black/brown students, it’s prima facie evidence of racial discrimination. Now, it’s Asians, formerly the ivies quota-limited Jews.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 8:26am

Note to self. Praise the Lord. And, buy more ammunition.

More standard capacity magazines too, before they’re reclassified as high-capacity and banned.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 9:42am

Last night during his talk entitled “Environment and Sanity,” the priest at our parish described the identity politics that accompanies radical environmentalism as barbarism. It was refreshing to hear a Roman Catholic Cleric actually explain Roman Catholic doctrine clearly, concisely, unabashedly and unashamedly. I will type up my four pages of notes on his talk later today and post it on my Facebook page.

PS, during Father’s first talk (on immigration) a month ago there were 300 people in the audience. Last night (the sixth talk in as many weeks) there were maybe 30 people.  Most Catholics don’t like being told what Holy Mother Church actually teaches. They really don’t. I say, “Too freaking bad. Repent or else! We all gotta repent!.”

Art Deco
Art Deco
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 11:06am

Again, Alvin Gouldner’s The New Class, Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed, and Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites are instructive here. At this point, it’s a reasonable wager most of the professional-managerial class is in a properly subaltern and tutelary relationship to them. An aspect of that is an impulse to manufacture patron-client relationships. The Oriental and East Indians don’t need patrons. The white wage earning and petty bourgeois strata are less affluent, but they also seldom have any need of patrons for fulfilling their own personal objectives. So, these aspirant patrons target alienated and unassimilated populations. Most of these people don’t need patrons, either and the one’s that have (economic) problems in living aren’t common in higher education when higher education recruits according to demonstrated academic performance in secondary school. So, the whole exercise runs on a series of pretenses wherein white apparatchiks feed the vanity and sense of grievance of blacks and mestizos. It’s perfectly disgusting.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 11:08am

“most of the professional-managerial class sees the rest of us as being in a properly subaltern and tutelary relationship to them”

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 1:15pm

Another one for Art’s List:

The Uncivil War: How a New Elite is Destroying our Democracy

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 1:22pm

Another for Art’s List:

The Uncivil War: How a New Elite is Destorying Our Democracy

GregB
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 1:26pm

Glenn Reynolds did a similar article titled: “Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad”
URL:
*
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/01/15/glenn-reynolds-class-warfare-elites-explains-world-conflicts-trump-column/2569252002/
*
To me what we are seeing is little better than a reversion to neo-feudalism with identity politics creating new feudal lords who make up the new elite aristocracy.

Foxfier
Admin
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 3:45pm

PS, during Father’s first talk (on immigration) a month ago there were 300 people in the audience. Last night (the sixth talk in as many weeks) there were maybe 30 people.

I think it’s more to do with immigration being a lot more timely and morality-related than the environment; I’m guessing that I would be on the same side as Father for that one, and am less sure about Immigration, but I’d be more interested in the first because it has more to do with actual Church teaching.

Mary De Voe
Mary De Voe
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 4:21pm

Call the wall Ellis Island Wall. The immigrants were quarantined when they were contagious. Drug resistant tuberculosis is making a comeback with a vengeance. Medication destroys the liver. The Bubonic plague and leprosy is back and other unnamed and untreatable diseases are flowing across our Southern border. It is self-defense to build the wall.
I worked with legal aliens who suffered the drug resistant TB and had to be tested every two weeks for liver failure.

CAM
CAM
Thursday, February 14, AD 2019 10:52pm

Pro-Family Policy -Immigration vs upping the native birth rate on 2/13/19 Tucker Carlson Show:
CARLSON: President Trump recently called for nationwide paid family leave in his State of the Union address. Today, his daughter met with Republican senators to push a proposal for that. It’s a start, but is a few weeks off from work really better than an economy in which it only takes one working parent to support a family? What would a country that took pro-family policy seriously look like? Well, it might look like Hungary.
Like a lot of post-communist places, Hungary has a low birth rate. Rather than trying to fix that with immigration and importing new people, the Prime Minister is making a serious attempt to help middle class families have kids and raise them themselves. We spoke to Hungary’s Foreign Minister, Peter Szijjarto about that. Here’s what he said.
PETER SZIJJARTO, HUNGARY’S FOREIGN MINISTER: Absolutely. You know, we understand very well that if we are not able to turn around the negative trend of demographics, which his unfortunately a phenomenon all over Europe, then we will definitely not win the future, and we want to win the future, so we need more kids. We need to turn around the negative tendencies so we have put together an action plan. We have formulated our economy policy in this direction.

So the question in the families whether to be brave enough to have other kids must not be an economy decision anymore. This is where our policies put the focus on.

CARLSON: The truly conservative position. So our plan here in the West is to just let the depressed people die off and replace them with people from other countries. What do you think of that plan?

SZIJJARTO: You know, this debate has been there in Europe for a very long time whether migration is the right answer for the challenges on the labor market and on demographics and our position is totally different.

We think it must be up to decisions of certain nations and countries whether they want migrants on the territory of their country or not. And it must be the countries themselves to make decisions with whom they would like to live together.

Our answer is that migration is not the right answer, but it comes to challenges on the field of demographics or in the field of labor market. It’s family policy, modernization of the education, having more kids, helping the families to be able to have higher living standards and create a situation where families, parents can be brave enough to have more kids.

CARLSON: Could you end with telling us what you think the most important thing that Hungary has done to encourage people to get married and have children?

SZIJJARTO: Well, actually, we have formulated our economy policy in the way that supports families. We introduced a flat tax system and if you have kids, then you have deduction from your tax. You get exemption from paying tax based on the number of kids being raised in a family.

So if you are around average salary and if you have three kids or more, you basically do not pay personal income tax, which leaves a lot — let’s say a significant amount of money in your pocket and the family in order to be able to raise your kids and we have introduced obligatory kindergarten, which is free of charge and in elementary school, most of the kids get free meal and free books. This is what we do on the high school level as well.

So in order to allow families to be brave enough to have more kids, we have put together this family policy and this economy policy.

CARLSON: I’ve rarely thought we could learn something important from another country, but I think in this case, we really can. I appreciate you explaining it to us. Thank you.

SZIJJARTO: Thank you very much for the invitation. It’s been great being here.

CARLSON: Thanks.

(END VIDEO TAPE)

CARLSON: Imagine living in a country like that that actually tried to make it possible to enable families. Since we recorded that interview, Hungary has gone even further.

On Sunday, the Prime Minister of Hungary announced plans to exempt women with four or more children from income tax for the rest of their lives. That’s a crazy idea because why? No, it’s not a crazy idea. It’s a great idea.
https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/hungary-foreign-minister-having-another-kid-must-not-be-an-economic-decision-anymore

trackback
Tuesday, February 19, AD 2019 12:02am

[…] The New Bigots […]

Jacob
Jacob
Tuesday, February 19, AD 2019 4:43am

I notice that you use the expression “progressive senators” in your article. This propaganda term should be avoided. They are left wing and whether they are “progressive” or not is a matter of opinion.

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