Written on February 14, 2012
Celebrate Black History Month by Slapping a Leftist

Of all the sins of leftism — its assault on our Constitution, its undermining of our inalienable rights, its hobbling of the economy — none is quite so wicked as its virtual enslavement of the black underclass. It was increases in welfare and the institutionalization of leftist attitudes that, beginning around 1964, brought a century of improvements in black life to a crashing halt. In this 2007 City Journal article, my brilliant friend Myron Magnet explained how it happened:

Though welfare was part of the answer, the real explanation was larger. It was cultural, not economic. Begun by the elites, vast changes reshaped mainstream attitudes in the 1960s. Sex became fine outside marriage, and illegitimacy lost its stigma. Drugs were cool; social authority and tradition weren’t. America was deemed a racist, unjust society that victimized and impoverished blacks, who could rarely better their condition and who therefore deserved generous welfare benefits as reparations for past and present oppression. If blacks committed crime, the system that drove them to it, out of poverty or as an act of protest, was at fault: we shouldn’t blame the victim, as the saying went—meaning the poor criminal, not his prey. Since people shape their actions according to the ideas and beliefs they hold, when these new attitudes reached the inner cities, what could result but an epidemic of social dysfunction?