What are progressive Democrats trying to accomplish by depolicing crime-ridden inner cities? This policy has resulted in, or is at least associated with, the deaths of thousands of blacks, disproportionately young men (see the work of Roland Fryer and Rafael Mangual). Such casualties are preventable when there are adequate police force levels in high-risk communities. What is the actual goal of what Randall Kennedy called “racially selective underprotection” in his 1997 Race, Crime, and the Law when deliberately practiced in these neighborhoods?
What are progressives trying to accomplish when they remove standards in college admissions and employment opportunities? What is the goal of recruiting individuals on the basis of their skin color instead of on the basis of their accomplishments and talents? What do you think progressive Democrats are trying to accomplish by establishing a custodial state in which around 80 percent of black children are born out of wedlock and in poverty, two of the major factors in the relative lack of merit and talent in this demographic? Why would progressive Democrats create and perpetuate the criminogenic conditions that result in the grim reality that five percent of the population perpetrates more than half of the homicides and robberies in America?
What do you think progressive Democrats are trying to accomplish by opening the southern border and inviting millions of mostly young military-age men to cross over, and then busing and flying them to cities all over the country, setting them up with room-and-board? And what of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children authorities have lost track of? Why do Democrats want to extend the franchise to those who enter the country illegally or overstay their visas? Do progressive Democrats really want cheap foreign labor to drive down the wages for the workers they claim to represent? Of course they do. They want this and all the rest of it. Yet, according to exist polls, 87 percent of black Americans voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
For most of my life I labored under the false belief that, of the two major political parties, the Democrats were better for blacks than were the Republicans. This was because I was born into a Democrat family, and the career path I chose, the academic path, was a path of structured reinforcement in partisan attitude. I awakened in steps—not nearly as fast as I should have—to see that the corporate state progressives have sought since the late-nineteenth century, and institutionalized in the 1930s, was assembled from the remnants of the slaveocracy the Democratic Party had represented before and during the Civil War. This was the same party that maintained the urban ghettos and established the custodial arrangements there that oversee millions of warehoused and redundant workers, now disproportionately black and brown, the promise of melting pot upended by Kallen’s salad bowl.
Progressives go one about racist Republicans, but Republicans don’t run the inner-city neighborhoods where black men kill each other on a daily basis. Conservatives aren’t responsible for the conditions that give rise to such pathologies. Indeed, their communities remain orderly and safe. While it is true that I only voted for a Democrat for president twice in the past thirty years, I had for much longer than this enjoyed conditions largely governed by Republican politicians without supporting that party at all.
Reflecting on my political choices, I seek a political party that will stop spending money on forever wars, secure the southern border and deport those who illegally enter the country, oppose multiculturalism and promote colorblind individualism (equality before the law), abolish policies and programs rooted in identitarian politics, end government surveillance of citizens, stop interfering with the people’s rights to free conscience, speech, assembly, and association, safeguard children from unscrupulous doctors and those who seek to indoctrinate them, defend and preserve women’s spaces and sex-based rights, defend the right of the people to be armed and to defend their persons and property, secure elections in which only citizens vote, deconstruct the permanent political class (the administrative state), dismantle the technocratic (regulatory) apparatus, and restore in the federal government the balance of powers identified in the Constitution.
The Republican Party is far from perfect, and the establishment—the donor and permanent political classes—remains a powerful force in party politics, but the party is changing in the right direction, especially in the House. However, no political party could be more antithetical to the political wants I have identified above than the Democratic Party. Whomever I vote for in 2024, it won’t be a Democrat. A big reason for this is because black lives matter. Not as a slogan. As a moral imperative.
freedom and reason 