Start with Stop!

In the New Criterion, Myron Magnet writes,

Lies have consequences. Because Biden’s order tells federal statisticians to collect all possible data about Americans by race, expect more “disparate impact” lawsuits and consent decrees, on the premise that any statistical disproportion reveals racism. So, for example, if blacks, 12 percent of the population, make up a third of the nation’s prisoners, the only explanation can be racist law enforcement, an idea that will lead to more federal hamstringing of local police and prosecutors and a consequent rise in crime. You can bet that Biden’s statisticians will not disclose, for instance, that the 23 percent of New Yorkers who are black commit 72 percent of the city’s shootings. Nor will his statisticians tell you that most shooting victims are black, and that to hinder police from stopping this violence is to ensure more murdered blacks and more dystopic inner cities where the law-abiding black majority will live in fear.

To tell black Americans that systemic racism is the cause of all their problems is to tell them that their fate is out of their hands, that they are passive victims rather than active shapers of their own lives. It is both discouragement and excuse. The reality is the opposite of what Biden’s order assumes. Despite instances of racism or insensitivity, black Americans do have equal opportunity, and, because so many can’t see that—because they are constantly told the disempowering opposite and have internalized that pessimism—they understandably don’t consider whether anything in their own behavior and mindset might account for their failure to rise.

I don’t underestimate how hard it is to learn to see outside one’s worldview or to change communal norms—above all, to replace the single-parent pattern with married families dedicated to imbuing children with virtue, ambition, and love of learning. But that’s the change needed for black America’s success, and all contrary messages from Culture War II only forge stronger mental manacles. At the least, we can all stop making the bondage worse by letting the lies pass unchallenged.

Adam Smith tells us that there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation, and certainly civilizations that have lost faith in themselves have long staggered on. But the threat to America is not only its internal erosion of republican liberty. The nation also faces a relentless rival for world hegemony, and China’s fast-growing industrial and military might—its ruthlessness in everything from stealing technology to militarizing disputed territory to crushing Hong Kong’s freedom—suggests that America won’t enjoy a cozy, British-style decline. Part of Xi Jinping’s scheme of national development—explicitly premised on the idea that “the East is rising, and the West is declining,” as several of his high officials arrogantly crowed—includes patriotic education aimed at teaching children “to love the party, the country, socialism and the people,” and to instill a belief in the excellence of Chinese civilization, with the flaws airbrushed out. Meanwhile, America, instead of cherishing its genuine exceptionalism, pores over its every past blemish and imagines others that don’t exist, encouraging shame rather than justifiable pride. In international competition, it’s not just the best hardware that wins the day, but also inner conviction, which America is working hard to snuff out.

Today’s conservatives should start with Stop! Stop the lies about the Founding, which—with the Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the Nineteenth Amendment to complete the Founders’ vision—is the most luminously perfect governmental contrivance in imperfect human history. Stop the lies about systemic racism. There is no plot to keep blacks poor, no police pogrom against blacks. Black progress now depends on blacks, though the idea that it rests on continued government manipulation of the economy, society, and culture is the creed that legitimates Democratic Party power and keeps the salaries flowing for the mansion-dwelling congressfolk and the critical race theory trainers, ethnic-studies professors, diversity deans, human-resources apparatchiks, media scolds, social-justice bureaucrats, and business people ready to take any line that pleases—all of whom profit from intentions rather than results. The Trump administration never managed to drain this swamp, which the Biden administration adds to daily. Conservatism’s crucial first labor of the Herculean cleansing that lies ahead is to finish this task, mindful always of the grievance that sparked the Boston Tea Party, the American Revolution, and the modern Tea Party: the power to tax is the power to steal.

Read more here: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/5/defounding-america