It’s a reflection of the impoverishment of liberalism that explains why Gov. Bobby Jindal rankles so much its faithful, if somewhat less balanced, followers.
Last week, the Jindal
campaign asked Twitter enrollees to send in questions to him that he could
address at a campaign appearance. A few sent were useful and a few others provocative,
but serious in intent in both cases. Yet many were unserious and hateful, which
begs the question of why a relatively low-polling Republican candidate for
president would trigger such emotional, thoughtless responses.
It’s because, as this space pointed
out long ago when it became
clear Jindal would win the 2007 governor’s contest, that Jindal articulates
well conservative themes and he is from an ethnic minority group. Worse for
those of the immature bent, since then increasingly he has addressed issues
that unmistakably reflect his evangelical Catholicism.
Liberal Democrats never have had
use for nonwhite Americans, except for electoral purposes of keeping them in
power by exploiting these people. Minorities in America typically have
demonstrated significantly lower quality of life on a wide range of indicators
from income (lower), unemployment (more), educational attainment (less), public
safety (less), health (worse), and upward mobility (reduced). Further, until a
half century ago societal norms discouraged their access to equal opportunity,
except in the south where specifically for blacks it was institutionalized into
government policy.
Back then, while some liberals
continued their prejudicial treatment of minorities, such as the eugenics
outlook of abortionists, others more wisely joined with conservatives (most
outside of the south, as few existed genuinely in the south at the time, with
others claiming the label but as caricatures) to prevent government policy from
denying equal opportunity to anyone regardless of skin color. That succeeded so
that today if any sanctioned prejudicial discrimination is permitted by any
government in the United States anywhere, it is rare and isolated. (Keep in mind
that government policy always discriminates in some way – for example,
murderers are treated very differently than non-murderers – to produce
differential outcomes, so the question is whether that discrimination is for an
illegitimate reason such as because of prejudice against certain ethnic groups.)
But liberalism, wedded to the
unrealistic notion that human beings are perfectible, exceeded the just cause
of the provision of equality of opportunity and began to demand equality of
outcome, misconstruing the lack of equality in outcomes across races, as well
as along other demographic indicators, as a sign of systemic error that only
strong government could correct, when in fact that reflects, in a system where
laws stringently prohibit differential treatment except for legitimate grounds,
the differential contributions individuals make to society. Where in the aggregate
different racial groups accrued resources differentially, proper policy to benefit
all provides empowerment to individuals, by giving them incentives to orient their
timeframes to future achievement rather than present consumption and to provide
the least interference from government in acquiring and using resources to
achieve, that allows them through their individuals efforts to succeed, if
group members take advantage of this. Thus, over time, group differences erode
into insignificance.
Instead, liberals cater to present
orientations through transfers of wealth and power by strong government, in
doing so instructing people that they inherently are worthless without the aid
of these givers, misidentifying the cause of their inequality caused by the
disincentives of better inherent to liberalism’s approach to achievement by
instead ascribing lack of progress to some mysterious conspiracy keeping them
from gaining equality in outcomes. Liberalism is all about taking fish from
those who are willing to fish and giving the catch to those who don’t want to
or who have been conned into thinking they can’t, instead of teaching those who
can’t how to do so and making those who won’t do so.
The left does it because this
creates dependency and justification to give it power, and policy flows as a
result: emphasize transference of wealth to buy support, keeping control over
schools to ensure mediocrity that keeps overflowing the pipeline of skulls full
of mush that buy into its nonsense and reinforces learned helplessness, divide
the public by making some bogeymen to foster rancor against them so that client
groups out of fear support it, and so on. If the left does not have contempt for
the people it alleges to help, it patronizes them in seeing them not fully competent
to fit a master plan of societal transformation led by the guardians. Which is
why liberalism has kept so many people poor and dumb, even as it claims to have
the only policy prescriptions to produce the opposite.
An adequate study of the philosophy
of conservatism exposes these truths, yet many who do that who also decide to
enter politics do not go far enough or are unable to articulate its rich complexity
to mass audiences. They may speak in ideological terms, but they do not fully
understand or can explain well the underlying philosophy behind these. Jindal
is an exception; a deep thinker who steadily has improved in his ability to
convey the complex message. Additionally, unlike many candidates, he
understands the war of ideas and that he wins elections if he explains
adequately that complex message. Therefore, he is unafraid to shape policy and
electoral contests in ideological terms.
This makes him dangerous to the
left, magnified by his minority ethnicity. A central aspect to the command and
control strategy the left employs over minority group members is the creation
of false consciousness among them that American government outside of Democrats’
hands will oppress them, with a point of emphasis that nonwhites succeed only
by Democrat intervention. To have a nonwhite, non-Democrat articulate differently,
that success comes not from handouts but from a hand up that gives your own
efforts a boost, destroys that false imagery.
Thus the increased vitriol when it
is a nonwhite like Jindal who delivers the message that we’re all better off by
not having so few people pull the wagon for so many. Racism these days finds
its true home among liberals who remained obsessed about race, reflected at its pettiest in these Twitter posts
by addressing Jindal by his birth name instead of the name he has preferred since
childhood. It’s a simple sign of respect that you call people by the name they
prefer; does anybody go around calling Democrat gubernatorial candidate state
Rep. John Bel Edwards just “John?’
Maybe Edwards doesn’t want to be confused with the medium John Edward, or be thought of as the
adulterous, ill-wife-abandoning former Democrat presidential candidate John
Edwards, but for whatever reason he wants to be addressed (going so far as to
include it in his campaign website URL) with his middle name. Not to do so with
the intentional use of Jindal’s unambiguously non-European-sounding birth name
only can be because of a lack of respect, as opposed to criticizing Jindal on
the basis of policy or some other non-visceral reason, derived from racist
motives.
Throw in Jindal’s escalating
assertion of social issue preferences based upon his religious beliefs, and
this throws the left into panic mode. The left most detests the intellectual basis
of traditional Catholicism that rests at the core of the evangelical Catholic
movement, for it effectively challenges the left’s worldview that makes man the
measure and dares to extoll his weaknesses as virtues (which is much more congruent
with the ersatz cafeteria Catholicism
it condones that is more interested in a social gospel than the actual four),
and because evangelicals are so unapologetic over something the left takes
offense at which it thinks it deserves endless apologies, if not outright
repudiation of it by those deliverers. For that reason, liberalism has become
more accepting of bigotry against the faithful, as illustrated by the reactions
to the judicial fiat that stripped the ability of states to define marriage.
We must recall that, at its basics,
liberalism is nothing more than an emotive whine, shorn of any intellectual respectability
by fact and logic. When challenged in a way that exposes that and in addition in
part to do so by making reference to a morality that cancels liberalism’s
conceptualization that any dissent to leftism’s values makes one immoral and
worthy of forcible reeducation, but rather declares those values as errant and
mistaken with certainty, drives its acolytes over the edge.
This is why some in sociopathic fashion
are obsessed with hating him, and more generally he invokes strong reactions
among leftist true believers. Because it’s only having something to hate that
holds these people’s worldview together, with so little defensible intellectual
content left in liberalism to do that convincingly, and that he challenges all
of this so unapologetically.
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