Race, Class, Gender, and the New Rules

Race, gender, and class are the trinity of modern liberalism, and all three are becoming increasingly complicated.

While growing up in the heroic era of the civil rights movement we were taught that the race issue was a rather simple of matter of judging a man by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin, but such simplistic notions of racial equality are apparently no longer applicable. The great civil rights cause of recent months has involved a black teenager who was fatally shot while attempting to kill a white police officer, and we read that the organizers of one of the many protests demanding the officer be punished for not allowing himself to be murdered are insisting that only “people of color” participate, although they will generously allow “non-people of color” to stand nearby in solidarity. Aside from the new civil rights movement’s curious insistence on a return to racial segregation, we’re also jarred by its terminology. “People of color” has always struck as uncomfortably close to “colored people,” a phrase that was banned from polite conversation way back in our boyhood days, except at meetings of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which seems to be exempted by some sort of grandfather clause, and we’re not sure if the unfamiliar description of “non-people of color” is meant to imply that we’re not people or just that we’re not sufficiently hued, but in any case the new rules will take some getting used to.

The latest news is also forcing us to reconsider our past lessons regarding what were once called the sexes but is now known as the genders. In our formative years the feminist movement insisted on that same simplistic notion of equal treatment that the civil rights movement once championed, to the point that such old-fashioned acts of chivalry as opening a door or offering a bus seat to a woman were considered insulting and women were allowed to be as irresponsibly promiscuous as the most libidinous man. Feminism thus defined proved predictably popular with the least chivalrous and most libidinous men, and the resulting bacchanal that is contemporary college life has predictably proved so unsatisfactory to those women who retain a traditionally feminine desire for love and commitment that it has been deemed a “culture of rape” and the feminists are now insisting that any woman who has been unhappily seduced be able to have the cad thrown out of school without due process. Contraceptives are still to be subsidized, and anyone who who thinks less of the women who choose to be irresponsibly are faulted for “slut-shaming,” but any man who still plays by the earlier rules would be well advised to get himself a lawyer. The issue is further complicated by the recent invention of several new sexual categories other than male and female, including such exotic and seemingly rare categories as transgendered and omni-gendered and a few others that we’ve had to look up on the internet because the dictionaries haven’t yet caught up with them, and we shudder to think how arcane the rules for their relationships might be.

Class used to be simpler, too. In our younger days rich people were all right so long as they earned their money in an honest and socially beneficial way, poor people were all right so long as their poverty resulted from hard luck or heredity, and most people considered themselves somewhere in between and thought themselves all right as well. Back then the rich people were presumed Republican, the poor people Democrat, and the folks in between chose sides according to their personal preferences. Now the very rich and the very poor tend to be Democrats, which imbues both with a sense of nobility, while the folks in the middle tend to vote Republican, which earns them a reputation as boobs. Because the Democrats’ candidates are invariably from the wealthier end of the party, usually having earned their wealth through political connections and speaking fees and marrying rich widows and other not very honest or socially beneficial ways, it requires a more complex theory of class than Marx and Engels ever conceived. The wealthiest and most liberal communities in America are the most segregated by both class and race, the poorest and most liberal communities can be counted on to continue voting for the policies that have created their segregated squalor, and the new rules somehow allow the former to retain their sense of moral righteousness and the latter to retain an even more spiritually satisfying sense of victimhood.

Keeping up with all these changes is proving exhausting, and we’re inclined to stop trying. Better we should keep on judging men by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, treating women with the respect we would want for ourselves, and assuming that the rich and the poor and the folks in between are all right unless we have reason we think otherwise. This might make us racist, sexist, and classist, but we’re unlikely to avoid those charges now matter how hard we try be up-to-date.

— Bud Norman

Chest-thumping and Finger-pointing

The President of the United States was in a noticeably sour mood on Monday, which is understandable. Things have been going so badly for him lately that even the journalists he took time to address have been noticing, what with his failure to whip up any enthusiasm for so much as an “unbelievably small” missile strike on Syria and the economy still sputtering along and much of the public beginning to figure that his signature Obamacare is a boondoggle, and as he took the stage he was even being upstaged by the mass murder occurring at a nearby naval facility. The surly speech he proceeded to snarl out despite the distraction, alas, is not likely to help with any of it.

After a brief acknowledgement of “the tragedy that’s unfolding not far away” the president even more briefly addressed the recent events regarding Syria, but his heart didn’t seem to be in either subject. His reference to “yet another mass shooting” hinted at yet another round of efforts to enact more pointless gun control laws, but he’s clearly not enthusiastic about it after his last attempt suffered a humiliating legislative defeat, and we suspect he was being cautious as it wasn’t even yet known if the shootings could be plausibly blamed on the Tea Party. He’d already given a network television interview over the weekend that tried to portray his capitulation to his gleeful Russian tormentors on the Syrian issue as a diplomatic masterstroke, and was thus content to humbly explain that his agreement to outsource the problem to Vladimir Putin was “an important step” that might someday eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons “if implemented properly.”

With all that out of the way the president then spent the next several minutes boasting about the fine job he’s done on the economy, which no doubt came as a surprise to any people with personal experience of it. He noted that the unemployment rate has fallen without mentioning that it’s mostly because a record number of Americans have stopped looking for work and are not longer counted in the statistics, boasted of record production of natural gas as if he hasn’t been an impediment to it, gloated of the record amount of renewable energy being produced as if it’s even a negligible portion of the energy being consumed, and touted the “investments” made in new technologies without conceding how many of them have ended in bankruptcy. Space and reader interest will now allow a full refutation of the rosy scenario proffered by the president, but suffice to say that a far greater portion of the speech was devoted to assigning blame for the lousy state of the economy.

The culprit, unsurprisingly enough, are the Republicans. “The problem is, at the moment, Republicans in Congress don’t seem to be focused on how to growth the economy and build the middle class,” the president said, adding with characteristic snark that “I say ‘at the moment’ because I am still hoping that a light bulb goes off here.” He explained that the Republicans are only interested in cutting funding for education, scientific research, and infrastructure, which have apparently replaced poor people and old folks as the things conservatives hate most, and that any cuts to these sacred projects would result in economic calamity. He then scoffed at concerns about the deficit, proudly and dubiously claiming that he would soon halve the deficits that he had indisputably doubled in each of his first four years in office, and seemed to suggest that the budget cuts forced on him by Congress had nothing to do with it. Indeed, the president insisted that the “sequester” cuts that he once proposed and now blames on the Republicans are responsible for almost all of the nation’s economic ills. “That’s the opinion of independent economists, too,” he added, without mentioning any by name. If the Republicans don’t agree and persist in seeking any budget cuts they pry out of the president, he added, it’s because they don’t want people to have jobs.

“Congress’ most fundamental job is passing a budget,” the president said, and with such a straight face that he might not even be aware that the Congress went his entire first term without doing so because the Democrats were loathe to go on the record as supporting the president’s unprecedented spending. Although the president wasn’t so insistent on the Congress doing its most fundamental job at that time, he’s now downright strict about it because he wants a budget that includes full funding for his Obamacare law and is eager to blame the Republicans for anything that happens without one. “I cannot remember a time when one faction of one party promises economic chaos if it can’t get 100 percent of what it wants,” the president sniffed, even though the relatively few Republicans threatening to de-fund Obamacare say they’ll offer a budget with almost everything the president wants except that, and he seemed genuinely annoyed by the dissent.

The president obviously takes Obamacare personally, and given the law’s increasing unpopularity with the public it is not surprising the topic makes him so very testy. He continues to insist that the law will cause everyone’s insurance premium rates to go down and won’t hinder job growth and will fully insure the nation, even though none of those promises are actually coming true, and he continues to insist that it’s a malicious myth that it causing increases and will include health care rationing or cause employers to offer only part-time jobs so as to avoid its costly mandates, even though all of those things are actually happening. All the part-time employees who are paying higher health insurance bills and hoping that grandma won’t be told by the government to take a pill rather than get a life-extending operation might not persuaded by the president’s huffiness.

The last of the president’s true believers might be heartened by his pugnacious oratory, and cheer on his denunciations of those rascal Republicans, but anyone who doubts that higher taxes and more regulations and endless borrowing are the basis of prosperity is less likely to be persuaded.

— Bud Norman

Another Day, Another Tax

The proposed sales tax on commercial transactions conducted through this newfangled internet machine is not a matter of personal interest. Being old-fashioned sorts we prefer to handle the merchandise in some brick-and-mortar establishment and then make our infrequent purchases face-to-face with a friendly clerk, which also provides a much-needed reason to get out of the house, so the tax would have little affect on our finances.

Nor does the proposal strike us as especially outrageous, despite our instinctive aversion to taxes of any sort. Given the ravenous appetite for revenues of the federal, state, and local governments, it seems more remarkable that they hadn’t decided to take a bite out of this tempting e-commerce pie long ago. There’s even an argument to be made about fairness, as sales taxes are charged at all those traditional shops that employ brick-layers and mortar masons and friendly clerks. We suppose that internet shops also employ people, although for all we know they’re run with robots or trained monkeys, but in any case it is hard to see why the law should grant them a competitive advantage.

Still, there’s something unsettling about the recent enthusiasm for all manner of new taxes. In addition to the internet sales tax, President Barack Obama’s budget proposal includes caps on income tax deductions, further cigarette tax increases, limits on the tax breaks for contributions to individual retirement accounts, and a change in the way inflation is measured that also amount to a cut in the earned income tax credit. These follow the wide variety of other taxes hidden within the thousands of pages of Obamacare regulations, the cost of new regulations that the affected businesses will pass along to customers, as well as the countless new taxes cooked up at other levels of government, and although it doesn’t come close to balancing anyone’s budgets it does add up to a lot of money.

Obama famously vowed in his first presidential campaign that he would not raise any taxes on any making less than $250,000 a year, which is apparently the threshold of avaricious greed that merits punitive taxation, but even such friendly media as Politico and the Huffington Post have noticed that these tax increases reach down much further into the middle class. That vow wasn’t so famous as George H.W. Bush’s “read my lips” pledge, which the Democrats somehow successfully used to sink his re-election chances after he capitulated to a Democratic demand for higher taxes, but it was well known enough to have helped Obama get elected. Many people will be less enthusiastic about the president’s vastly expanded government if they understand that they’ll also be asked to pitch in more, along with those all those nasty rich people, and the sooner the realization occurs the better.

— Bud Norman