Progressivism Losing Wars on Poverty, Justice, Truth

American progressives share cognitive deficiencies which produce stunning examples of paramnesia.

Consider: Progressives complain about miserable conditions in American inner-cities while missing that liberal officials have governed those cities for decades.

Left-wingers call conservatives "reactionary," but, today, "reactionary" better describes liberals who stonewall changes to any, even redundant or failed government programs.

Social Security is eighty years old, fiscally and actuarially unsustainable, yet hide-bound progressives would watch it collapse before reforming it.

More than eighty federal means-tested programs, many overlapping or redundant, are defended as "essential" by progressives who understand nothing about them other than that they "do good things for people."

Do they?

Since President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 opening salvoes in America’s "War On Poverty," poverty has won.

In the eight years before Johnson’s Great Society, the percentage of Americans living in poverty plummeted from about 22 to under 15 percent.

Today, 29 percent of Americans, including nearly 50 percent of blacks, receive means-tested benefits. The percentage of employed working-age men dropped from 80.6 in January, 1964 to 67.6 percent in 2014.

Blacks, especially, have been victims of the progressive poverty programs which harm many they were meant to help. Programs intended, in part, to end racial victimization have made victimization self-fulfilling.

A few white racists may openly express their bigotry, but the most destructive expressions of racism today are open and veiled accusations made by captains of America’s race "industry," professional agitators whose identities – and livelihoods — are derived from cynically preserving the divisive fiction that America remains a racist nation even while insisting that America must "come together" to defeat racism.

Racialists and their progressive allies exploit "politically-correct" reverse racism.

To race hustlers, the value of a life lost depends upon the pallor of the person who took it. Blacks killing other blacks, a white, or whites each other? Media non-events. But, if a white man kills a black man, headlines and communities explode even before the facts are known.

Trayvon Martin’s or Michael Brown’s life would have the same value if other blacks had slain them, but they’d remain unknown because their deaths would have no intrinsic or political value to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, Eric Holder and others who, preferring instead to lecture on and profit from it, don’t really want an honest national "dialog" about race.

They tell blacks, falsely, that poverty results from prejudice. They say that slums originated in slavery and are perpetuated by hatred, when, in fact, many blacks – and whites — are poor because they lack family structure and proper educations.

Inciting racial resentment and violence rewards political hucksters, but divides Americans, drives whites out of communities, destroys civic morale and authority and imposes enormous economic and social costs on the remaining minorities, many of whom become demoralized government dependents – casualties of the War on Poverty.

Racism exists, but, generally, Americans may be the least racist people on earth.

It’s liberals who control public education and perpetuate fatally-flawed poverty programs and shabby racial agendas who are central to the social and economic problems in American cities.