The U.S. Is In Real Decline—Really! Part Two: Racial Relations Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/23776-2/

And on the pedestal these words appear:“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”

I say America is in serious trouble because the Left has attacked systematically all of the U.S.’s great strengths and advantages on the world stage. It apparently thinks it must dismantle the old America before it can create a “new” America, something like a European Union state, only far more radical and volatile.

One, we were the only multiracial constitutional state that had avoided the tribalism and violence of the Balkans, a Rwanda, or the Middle East. Europe, for all its public grandstanding about ecumenicalism, has yet to have a black president or prime minister. The idea that a Barack Obama could become a Russian or Chinese citizen and reach similar pinnacles of political power is absurd. (And for that matter, include Mexico and much of Asia and Latin America.)

Yet race relations in the U.S. are at a historic low. More than 50 years of affirmative action have morphed into woke extremism, or the idea of racially separate graduations, dorms, workshops, and safe spaces. When working out, keeping a reasonable weight, camping, or showing up on time are now deemed racist, then there really is no more Civil Rights movement which has instead descended into caricature.

The more minorities reached parity with, or exceeded the income of, the majority population, the angrier and more volatile racial relations became. The operative principle seems to be something like “Before we can have racially blind relations in the 21st century, we must first make up for the racism, largely in the South, of the prior two centuries by similarly fixating on race, but in reverse fashion of granting preference to nullify past bias.”

No one dares talk about the violence of the inner city that makes 19th-century Dodge or Tombstone seem tame in comparison. No one discusses the utter failure of the inner-city schools or the need for intact families and omnipresent fathers to ensure any chance at parity. Instead, there is apparently the notion that if blacks appear in 50 percent of television commercials, such ecumenicalism will magically either curb gunslinging on Saturday nights in Chicago, or improved math scores in the Detroit or Baltimore public schools.

Why do we obsess over the supposedly suggestive illiberal themes of Jason Aldean’s, “Try That In a Small Town,” when rap and hip-hop for decades have institutionalized violent misogyny, homophobia, violence against the police, anti-Semitism, and blanket anti-white lyrics?

Orwellian censorship, coupled with deplatforming, cancel-culture, ostracism, and shadow banning, make any reasonable discussion of race taboo. The Left—instead of the old 1960s agenda of integration and assimilation—leveraged race and tribalism to create permanent constituencies, nursed on grievance and victimhood, and expectant of endless government redress and largess.

In a strange development, the Left believes by according affirmative action and reparatory admissions and hiring to the African-American upper-middle class and wealthy and privileged, thereby the mostly neglected black underclass, trapped in the neglect and pathologies of the inner city, will somehow benefit.

After George Floyd and the defunding of police forces and the decriminalization institutionalized by the Soros-funded prosecutors, there was an epidemic of inner-city crime, as smash-and-grab and carjacking became commonplace and swarm shoplifting became quasi-legal.

The result is that while elites of all races are bonding as never before, the minority underclass is angrier and more separate from the mainstream than at any time in the last half-century. That reality is evident by the avoidance of entire swaths of urban America by liberal city-dwellers—even as the latter are prone to call “racist” anyone who describes honestly their segregationist behavior.

One sign of toxic racial relations can be found on online newspaper and internet news sites that report crime.

When a murder makes the news and the perpetrator is known to be black (55% of all homicide offenders constitute 12% of the population), the news site either does not describe the race of the murderer or mentions it only at the very end of the article—usually in dire contrast if the perpetrator is considered white.

Yet if one reads the following comment section (and published comments are increasingly rare despite usually being carefully censored of racist and foul language), the so-called reading public, often disguised by pseudonyms, appears utterly cynical. The posters express disgust with the dishonesty of the media, but also no longer show much sympathy for “root causes” or why blacks continue to murder others (mostly other blacks) at over four times their numbers in the general population. Oddly, the more leftwing media tries to censor the news to disguise racial disparity, the more the public resents its one-sided selective censorship and veers into outright hostility.

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