By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, April 15, 2021
Science fiction and comedy work in similar ways: You
can have as unlikely and outlandish a premise as you like, but the details of
your story have to work logically and philosophically within the context of
that premise — otherwise, you end up with midi-chlorians or The
Hangover Part II.
Politics, our lowest form of literature (somewhere
between reality show and professional wrestling), operates under similar
constraints, as Joe Biden (the role the late Leslie Nielsen was born to play)
is discovering to his discomfort.
Joe Biden’s character summary is, briefly, “Woke FDR.”
But this is a comedy, and so Biden, a man of the 1970s (the early 1970s)
is a fish out of wokester water on the 2021 political scene.
Woke-ism, if we may call it that, is to a remarkable
degree a phenomenon of the well-educated and the affluent, and especially of
people who occupy the commanding heights of business and culture or — here’s
where it gets ugly — positions immediately adjacent to those
commanding heights. This is, as I sometimes call it, the civil war between E-Class and S-Class.
There is no better place to watch this play out than in
the New York Times, either as an institution (e.g., James Bennett
being pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans to be replaced with
. . . a different rich white Ivy League graduate) or in its
pages, which are full of angsty stories about the heartrending travails
of wildly successful black playwrights who have shows being
produced on Broadway or African Americans who are serving as senior executives at major museums.
The Times offers the phenomenon in
concentrate, but you can see it everywhere, e.g. at the Golden Globes, where
the rich white host from a middle-class background (UVA ’88) made bitter jokes
with the other rich white host from a middle-class background
(BC ’93) about the awards show’s lack of diversity. If you look at that through
the right kind of woke eyes, it works — it’s the political version of
suspending disbelief.
And while the nation’s heart naturally bleeds for those
poor souls whose careers are stalled as also-rans at the Golden Globes — along
with the dispossessed minorities who are right on the cusp of being admitted to
Harvard Law but who might, absent an assist from affirmative action, be
relegated to Cornell or NYU and suffer all the horrors and indignities
associated with that — there are some persistent problems that continue to
plague a class of Americans whose interests and aspirations do not fit very
well into the spaces between the Cartier ads and the Patek ads in the Times.
Mayor Bill de Blasio insists that in his city “every
young person can achieve,” and touts as evidence of his success recent
statistics finding that one in four black students in New York fails to finish
high school on schedule. Forgive my English-major math, but it seems to me that
there is some considerable distance between “every young person” and “actually
a little bit less than three-fourths, if we’re being precise about it.” A world
of difference, in fact.
What is to be done about that? If we judge the Democrats
by their actions, then the answer is: approximately zilch.
President Biden has pledged to nominate a black woman to
a Supreme Court vacancy, in the not-unlikely event that one comes up during his
presidency. (There is pressure on 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer to
retire.) That must be exciting news to each of the nine black women under 55 currently serving as
Democrat-appointed judges on the federal bench. But being considered for a
Supreme Court appointment is not the most common kind of interaction that black
Americans have with the legal system.
In Bill de Blasio’s very woke New York City, 82 percent
of those arrested on misdemeanor charges are black or Hispanic, far in excess
of their share of the population. Black and Hispanic New Yorkers make up a
similar share of those who receive administrative summonses for things like
public drinking and disorderly conduct. Black prisoners in New York are more
likely to be subjected to disciplinary actions that weigh against their being
paroled and are more likely to have their parole revoked (if they receive it)
than are white offenders. Data from 2010 found that one in three black men in
the United States had been convicted of a felony. The emotional convulsions at
woke Harvard and on woke Broadway are pretty far removed from all that.
So is the Biden administration.
While he commits himself to a largely symbolic gesture on
the Supreme Court, President Biden proposes to make the real-world situation of
black Americans — and poor and marginalized Americans more broadly —
considerably worse by fighting the failed “war on drugs” like the Nixon-era
dinosaur he is. Most recently, he has backed extending the Trump
administration’s policy of seeking longer minimum sentences for those convicted
of fentanyl possession. The policy is opposed by, among others, the NAACP,
whose Hilary Shelton said in a press conference: “The Biden administration, its
leaders and economists, are faced with their first major test of
criminal-justice reform. If they choose to extend this Trump-era policy, it
will increase mass incarceration and the over-policing and incarceration of
people of color, and will be a missed position on Biden’s campaign promises.”
About this, the NAACP is undeniably correct. The
so-called war on drugs has imposed heavier casualties on the non-white than on
the white and on the poor than on the affluent. In ramping it up, Biden is
effectively ramping up a war on African Americans, the very people who made him
president, or at least escalating a war in which they will suffer
disproportionate losses.
On the other hand, black graduates of elite colleges with
outstanding academic performances and impressive curricula vitae will
continue to enjoy a slight edge in admissions at Harvard Law, and those
horrible redneck white-power knuckleheads who run . . . Broadway . . . have
been put on notice at last.
It’s a funny ol’ woke world.
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