By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
America has major problems.
Our economy has been stagnating for years on end, and the
so-called recovery under way will have to continue at this pace for years
simply to get us back to where we started. When it comes to the social ills
plaguing America, the prospectus doesn't look any rosier: increased rates of
unwed motherhood, continuation of vast killing of the unborn, and cycles of bad
decision-making leading to generations of crushing poverty.
None of the solutions to these problems can be found in
greater government action. Yet the left suggests that only greater government
can fix the issues that trouble Americans.
That's because, according to the left, one grand,
unifying problem underlies all the other problems: Americans are nasty.
Some Americans are poor because other Americans are
greedy. Minorities are disproportionately poor because white Americans are
racist. Women are trapped in socioeconomic oblivion because male Americans are
sexist. America is not a melting pot. America is a hell pit designed to consume
its non-white, male, Christian inhabitants.
How then can the patriarchal, xenophobic majority be
defeated?
Only with a coalition of victims.
That is a coalition the left has been building for
decades. Back in 1970, it was not unjustified to think of certain groups as
victims of the majority. In 2013, however, it's downright poisonous.
That poison spews from the mouth of the president of the
United States. Preaching to the graduating class at Morehouse College last
Sunday, President Obama told the black students that they would "have to
work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by." This, he said,
made blacks in America very much like Hispanics, gays and women, all of whom
are victims: "Many of you know what it's like to be an outsider; to be
marginalized; to feel the sting of discrimination. That's an experience that so
many other Americans share.
Hispanic Americans know that feeling when someone asks
where they come from or tells them to go back. Gay and lesbian Americans feel
it when a stranger passes judgment on their parenting skills or the love they
share. Muslim Americans feel it when they're stared at with suspicion because
of their faith. Any woman who knows the injustice of earning less pay for doing
the same work -- she sure feels it."
The true American experience, according to Obama -- the
shared experience that forges a unified view of our country -- is
marginalization. And marginalization justifies massive government
interventionism to foster e pluribus unum.
But what happens when that marginalization ends? What
happens when blacks in America are treated according to the content of their
character rather than the color of their skin? What happens when Hispanics are
welcomed with open arms? What happens when Americans become apathetic about the
sex lives of others? What happens when women are treated with the same level of
expectation and reward as men?
The liberal agenda goes bust. Obama knows that. And
that's why he must never allow consonance to be reached. It's why America must
remain a nasty, bigoted place: The moment that America becomes the melting pot,
liberalism dies. We can go about our business without fear and without need for
a huge government to wipe the slate clean for us.
And so the left inculcates victimhood. Generation after generation,
children are taught that they are the victims of the society that raises them.
Some Americans are indeed victims. But the vast majority of Americans -- of
every subgroup -- are not. There is no real coalition of victims. There is
merely a coalition of liberals masquerading as victims in need of a savior
government.
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