A good parent doesn’t coddle their children or excuse their bad behavior. They want their children to be conscientious, resilient, self-reliant, and responsible. Children with good character and self-discipline are more successful in life, enjoy greater emotional and psychological stability, and are less likely to violate others than those who lack good character and discipline.
Democrats are well-known for their paternalism. This goes back to the days of slavery, where Democrats treated slaves as children, most obviously in restricting their autonomy. The party still treats blacks this way. This is why they infantilize and down-talk to blacks.
Are readers familiar with the work of researchers at Princeton, Cydney Dupree and Susan Fiske, who identify what they call “competence downshift”? It’s what turned Batya Ungar-Sargon from a progressive into a liberal. Dupress and Fiske found that white progressives, when interacting with black people, tend to use simpler, less “competence-signaling” language than they used with white audiences. The researchers interpreted this as a subtle form of patronizing behavior rather than overt hostility. This is an example of Democrat paternalism.
The unfortunate reality is that, in their paternalism, Democrats are bad parents. They establish conditions that make blacks dependent on their party and then excuse the bad behavior that results from those conditions.
Long ago, psychologists identified what they call “locus of control.” This concept was introduced by Julian Rotter in the 1950s. There are two types: internal and external. A person with an internal locus of control is self-starting and prepared to take responsibility for his actions. People with an internal locus of control believe that success or failure mostly depends on behavior, choices, and effort. Taking initiative can change circumstances. People with this orientation are more successful in life.
By contrast, those with an external locus of control tend to be helpless and irresponsible. They blame others for the situation their choices put them in. People with an external locus of control tend to believe that “Things happen to me” rather than “I make things happen” or “My actions influence outcomes.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, sociologists like Peter Berger and C. Wright Mills helped validate the external locus of control orientation. Their intent was not to promote helplessness or formally defend what psychologists called an “external locus of control.” Rather, they criticized what they saw as overly individualistic explanations of human behavior. Whatever their intentions, progressive social engineers saw in the critique a justification for government intervention in the lives they sought to manage. Thus, social critics participated in a project to diminish the agency of those who face hurdles in life.
It took a while to realize that conservative and liberal critiques of progressive social policy are correct, but I get it now. Progressive policies reinforce a fatalistic worldview. Academics built around this an intellectual justification with critical race theory and pressed it into the education system. CRT feeds social justice warriors a rhetoric. Its advocates target those who believe their circumstances are not their fault. Millions of people now believe somebody else is responsible for the situation confronting blacks.
This restricts poor people’s political strategies—or, more accurately, directs political energy towards supporting policies that are not in their best interests. Rather than insist on a more robust pro-worker economic strategy and the values of hard work and striving, progressives affirm a self-fulfilling prophecy and deepen it into structural dependency. They cultivate what is known as “learned helplessness.”
There is a political strategy behind this. Democrats did this knowing that those who are dependent on government will vote for the party that puts them in that situation and makes them that way. It’s like the child who is given everything at home: there is no reason to leave what amounts to a comfortable prison. Freedom is retranslated from the experience of the rough-and-tumble to having “free” food, housing, and medicine. The spoiled child lives in the basement. He does not bite the hand that feeds (although those with spoiled children know that is not always true). It is not that there is no role for the government in helping people in need. The problem is making able-bodied citizens helpless.
Excusing behavior complicates the problem. When those whom progressive social programs made dependent on government break the law—which is an inevitable entailment of such policies, since dependency breaks down personal responsibility and undermines the family, the primary unit and source of any integral social order—Democrats, the bad parents that they are, step in and prevent accountability for the unruly. They excuse their behavior and shift the blame. It’s not their children’s fault. They have elevated bad parenting to bad government.
It certainly isn’t the parents’ fault. They’re the ones who have the children’s best interests at heart. They’re sympathetic to the plight of the poor. Their heart is in the right place. They are good and decent people, compassionate and loving. Rather, it’s the billionaire’s fault. It’s the Republicans’ fault. They insist that the situation is the result of centuries of capitalist inequality and white supremacy. It’s the conditions, they say, not the behavior and choices of the poor. We have to study the root cases, we are told, as long as progressive policies are not identified as the root cause.
The situation of blacks is not merely the creation of the welfare state. There are structural forces behind the creation of the ghetto. Structure is not entirely irrelevant in understanding problems confronting people. This historical development lies at the feet of Democrats, as well. Behind the welfare state is the destruction of the American economy by globalization.
As I have argued in numerous articles on this platform, Democrats have always sought to undermine the American System. Developed by Alexander Hamilton during the Republic’s first presidency under George Washington, the American system was designed to protect domestic industry and jobs. Democrats obviate this system to pit the American worker against foreign competition. (See History as Ideology: The Myth that the Democrats Became the Party of Lincoln; Will They Break the Peace of Westphalia or Will We Save National Sovereignty for the Sake of the People?)
Economic nationalism created the most powerful nation in world history. Today, after decades of globalization, America’s greatness is diminishing. Representing the narrow interests of the corporate state, progressives pursue free trade, offshore jobs, and, in the 1960s, open the country to mass immigration. As a result, America suffers a vast surplus population of able-bodied persons, disproportionately black. The burden of administering life for those displaced by the transnationalist project has been placed on the taxpayers’ backs.
* * *
To get a bit more technical, in criminology, we distinguish between integration and regulation. Integration aligns with the psychological concept of internal locus of control. A person who is integrated with prosocial norms controls his or her own behavior. The well-integrated follow the law. They are law-abiding strivers. Those who are less well integrated in society, on the other hand, require external control.
Here, sociologists have attempted to validate their antisocial and unruly behavior. In the late 1930s, for example, Robert Merton redefined crime and deviance as “innovation” and “retreatism” and theoretically reconceptualized these as “adaptations” to unchosen circumstances. Those who innovate (crime) and retreat from society (drugs and homelessness) are then regulated, governed by external forces. This is where law enforcement enters the picture—if progressives would allow cities to use it. The point is that big government becomes necessary to manage the innovation and retreatism. And big government inevitably manages everybody. In this way, the external locus of control is generalized.
At the core of Merton’s anomie/strain theory was the premise that social structures can pressure people toward deviance when cultural goals are emphasized but legitimate means are unequal. This spawned a school of thought that became dominant in the 1960s, exemplified by the advocacy of Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven. This idea underpinned the logic of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which engineered government dependency in black communities and expanded government, already greatly expanded by previous Democratic presidents, as seen with Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party thus actively undermines both requirements—integration and regulation—for a decent and orderly society. Their policies disorganize families and communities. The result is generations of people who are poorly integrated with prosocial norms. This produces criminogenic conditions. On top of that, Democrats weaken the regulatory function that exists to manage the societal disintegration progressive policies produce.
As a result, crime, disorder, and violence are commonplace in communities governed by Democrats. Tragically, these effects, given the progressive command of society’s sensemaking institutions (education, mass media), have become widely perceived as normal.
It’s the normality of social pathology in Democrat-controlled cities and states that leads many people to assume crime, disorder, and violence are intrinsic to the nature of blacks. History shows otherwise. Before the Great Society, black families were as stable as white families. While there was crime and deviance (there always will be some, as Émile Durkheim long ago taught us), these pathologies were nowhere near the levels they would reach during and after Johnson’s presidency. But few people study history. Instead, many assume this is just the nature of those living in those communities that progressivism has disorganized. Indeed, some conclude that it is the nature of blacks that disorganized those communities in the first place. In this way, Democrats perpetuate the racism they engineered to justify slavery and Jim Crow.
Despite representing themselves as antiracists, Democrats are responsible for creating the negative perception that many have about black Americans. Not only have they made blacks dependent on the government, and not only do their policies undermine the policing function (which imperils everybody living in and near the ghetto), but progressives have also engineered the attitude and behavior that has damaged the collective reputation of black people.
* * *
Democrats attempt to deflect attention away from this reality by blaming the situation on “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” But the reality is that Democrats are the culprit. This tragedy is compounded by the fact that they get a lot of help from black leaders. Instead of encouraging black Americans to demand what’s right for their communities, to find a way to transcend their circumstances, progressives conditioned them to expect a life dependent on big government. Those close to the community encourage them to defend this way of life. The result is perpetual poverty and servitude, and neighborhoods rife with crime and deviance.
Progressivism, the politics of corporate statism and transnationalization, and those of the resulting administered life, drive the project of managed decline. Progressives replaced the American dream with a nightmare from which Americans need to be awakened. Indeed, we don’t need a vast state that generalizes the principle of parens patriae. We need a small, less intrusive government that promotes liberty, families, and personal responsibility. To the extent that the state gets in the way of anything, it should only get in the way of those forces that threaten the American way of life.
freedom and reason 