The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Equality Update: Plessy and Ferguson Could Not Be Reached for Comment

Posted on | February 16, 2013 | 17 Comments

In Aurora, Colorado, an elementary school set up an after-school tutoring program from which white students were deliberately excluded. When the mother of a 10-year-old white girl complained, she got a phone call from Mission Viejo Elementary principal Andre Pearson explaining that the program is “focused for and designed for children of color.”

This revival of public-school segregation — unexpectedly! — caused Pete Da Tech Guy to notice that Aurora school policy sounded oddly familiar:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

Of course, that’s from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which upheld the “separate but equal” rationale of segregation

We might pause to wonder what sort of curriculum could be “focused for and designed for children of color,” but that would be a distraction from the larger theme, namely the liberal obsession with Equality. During the recent National Review Institute Summit, Charles Krauthammer felt it necessary to point out, “There is a reason that in the New York Harbor there’s a Statue Of Liberty — it’s not a Statue of Equality.”

This is a distinction liberals don’t want us to spend too much time thinking about, because it takes only a few minutes of reflection for anyone familiar with history to understand what atrocities have been committed in the name of Equality — a term I capitalize, along with words like Progress and Science, when referring to such concepts as objects of idolatrous reverence for ideological fanatics.

Liberals have a religious devotion to these intellectual abstractions, and they are profoundly indifferent to the actual consequences of these ideas when pursued as matters of public policy. If the pursuit of Equality requires that we send women into combat — indeed, Rep. Charles Rangel suggests America’s daughters should be subject to the military draft — anyone who objects is automatically condemned as a hateful bigot.

That kind of radical certainty is incompatible with thoughtfulness, and must be drilled into people’s heads by rigorous indoctrination, carried out in environments where dissenting opinions are suppressed and contradictory facts are excluded from consideration. Who needs gulags and re-education camps when we have places like Fordham University?

Live long enough, and you become accustomed to seeing liberals engaged in weirdly ironic contradictions of their supposed principles. In the 1970s, many peaceniks who had demanded U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam managed to find arguments to minimize, justify or excuse Pol Pot’s murderous reign of terror in Cambodia. This was the point at which the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the 1960s New Left became apparent, a fate that had previously been experienced by the Old Left during the Stalinist era. As always, where leftists lead, liberals follow:

Liberalism has no fixed goal. We will never reach a point at which the liberal will say, “enough.” Grant all his demands today, and tomorrow the liberal will return to demand more.

What one usually hears — when attempting to get liberals to describe their principles or to explain how we are expected to pay for their endless demands for more, more, more — is either:

  • A lamentation of present conditions requiring that we “do something” to ameliorate the specified wrong;
  • A claim that our policy should be more like that of some European social democracy where p0licies favored by liberals are said to have been proven workable; or
  • A rant blaming Republicans for the problems.

These arguments always involve errors of fact or errors of logic, and never suffice to demonstrate that liberal policies are superior to all other possible policies, but liberals always make up for their shortage of facts and logic by their surplus of anger and self-righteousness.

So when you point out one of these glaring contradictions — segregation of “children of color,” instituted as a means of achieving equality — don’t expect liberals to recognize (and certainly, they will not admit) that this might be evidence of the failure of liberalism in general.

If they could be persuaded by evidence, they wouldn’t be liberals.

 

 


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Category: Colorado, Education, Liberals, Racism

Comments

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Evidence – actual facts – mean nothing to the Leftist because, in order to be a card- [and water-] carrying member of that group requires that one denounce and purge Truth from one’s thinking.

  • http://twitter.com/JohnPSquibob John P. Squibob

    But liberals believe in truth, as long as it’s each one’s individual truth, as opposed to Truth.

  • http://twitter.com/wjjhoge WJJ Hoge

    Here’s an interesting thought experiment.

    Imagine watching that Principal explain the situation to Linda Brown Thompson (of Brown v. Board of Education) and Martin Luther King. How do you suppose that would go?

  • Cube

    The explanation would consist of two words: “SHUT UP!” There is no defending this position and he knows it. But if you can silence the critics, you don’t need a defense.

  • Steve Skubinna

    Liberalism requires that humanity be perfected. Since we live in an imperfect world that can never happen, and so liberals will always have grievances to fight. Note the current rallying cry: fairness.

    America was not built upon fairness, but upon opportunity and equality under the law. Granted it took a long, long time to get anywhere close to that (and oddly, modern leftism is widening existing gaps and creating new ones). The liberal definition of fairness requires taking from others.

    That’s fair.

    It requires an elite class determine who is worthy of the largesse and distribute it.

    That’s fair.

  • http://wizbangblog.com/ Adjoran

    Leftists only believe “each individual’s truth” insofar as those truths remain within the leftists’ range of acceptable versions of truths.

  • http://wizbangblog.com/ Adjoran

    Plato’s Republic was the ideal society, run by Philosopher-Kings in various disciplines who ruled dispassionately and evenhandedly with wisdom and foresight and without bias for beliefs or individuals. The only defect was the complete dearth of persons qualified to be Philosopher-Kings.

    Liberals fancy themselves qualified to be Philosopher-Kings, not by any degree of learning, experience, or talent, but solely due to their moral purity – as judged by themselves alone, naturally. No matter how often their ideas fail or at what human costs, the absolutely immaculate purity of their intent authorizes them to persevere with the same concepts and plans which have never worked and will never work because whether or not they work is beside the point. The only point is that the liberals want them to work.

    That’s enough for them and they cannot fathom why it isn’t enough for us.

  • Adobe_Walls

    Take that a couple steps further. MLK came to believe that some extraordinary measures where necessary and justified in order to make up the effects of institutionalized discrimination (affirmative action). Surely he recognized the moral inconsistency of compensating for the ill effects of negative discrimination based on race by institutionalizing positive discrimination based on race. Would he still advocate that course if he could have known what those policies have morphed into? What would he have to say about the notion that “gay rights” were on the same moral imperative as the civil rights he fought for?

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    They’re all different together.

  • jsn2

    Why do democrats always want to divide people along racial lines? The party of race and social engineering once again want to elevate the preferred race above the rest. An evil ideology attracts malevolent followers who want to rule the “others” which always leads to Brown Shirted (or white robed and hooded) enforcers stomping on the innocent.

  • jsn2

    Activate the San Andreas fault and sink California into the Pacific. Then, find a way to get rid of Chicago.

  • Wombat_socho

    “Yes! Yes! We must all be individuals!”

  • http://opinion.ak4mc.us/ McGehee

    Leave Chicago to the glaciers.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    And would he have rejected the Communism he was embracing late in his life?

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Give it some time and you’ll see it become Detroit II.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Their ultimate goal is to reduce The West to rubble and, upon the ruins, build their Heaven On Earth. So anything that Balkanizes the people is encouraged. Chaos is what they seek.

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    Anyone notice how drafty it’s gotten lately?

    Time to buy some polartec jackets and stuff to pack away in the bunker. And maybe a few stainless steel spear heads for hunting after the glaciers arrive.