The New Segregationists: Eye On Ferguson

Back in 2007, I wrote:

The removal of punishment as a deterrent to crime and antisocial public behavior would be bad enough if it were absolutely uniform. But it is not, and the situation is accordingly far worse.

When a society makes special provisions for a particular class of persons, such that those persons have a good expectation of not suffering for illegal or antisocial behavior, it has committed the worst imaginable injustice against the persons in that class who honor their society's laws and norms: it has equalized the legal, social, and moral positions of good citizens and thugs. Thus, if ninety percent of such a class is law-abiding and decorous while ten percent is violent, dishonest, or disruptive, the latter category will come to overshadow the former in the perceptions of persons outside the class -- not because ten percent is a majority, but because that anti-social subgroup is identified with the class's special set of privileges.

A class is defined by its legal and social privileges. The aristocrats of medieval times were not distinguished by their lineages or their deeds, but by the things they were allowed to do, without penalty, that commoners were not. There is reason to believe that the majority of medieval aristocrats were fairly responsible stewards of their lands and of public order within them. That does not justify the creation of a class of men who could wield high, middle, and low justice over others, but who would normally escape all consequences for deeds for which a commoner would be severely punished.

The American response to the failings of traditional aristocracies was the Rule of Law: the fundamental principle that the law must treat all men impartially, regardless of their identities or station in life. The old shorthand for this principle was "blind justice," meaning that the law must not see one's person, only one's deeds. In a society that respects the Rule of Law, a king would stand in the same dock as a trash-hauler, were the two accused of the same offense. All that would matter would be the evidence for their guilt or innocence.

In the absence of a scrupulously observed Rule of Law, classes with differing degrees of privilege will emerge. The flourishing of the members of each class will be influenced, often heavily, by the class's privileges and how effectively they can be exploited. Men being what we are, we will be moved to use those privileges in our own interest, both against competitors within our class and against other classes.

Success breeds emulation. If there are advantages to be had from the ruthless exploitation of a class privilege, over time more and more members of the class will be drawn into doing so. Thus, the coloration given to the class by its privileges will become stronger and more inclusive over time.

This is not an unbounded progression; as in all other things, a tendency toward equilibrium will ultimately assert itself. However, the mechanisms by which equilibrium is restored are always unpleasant. The deterrents that curb full exploitation of a class privilege, if any exist at all, will be applied by other classes, whether through the law, other social institutions, or "informally." "Informally" usually means lynching: the application of extra-judicial, often unmerited punishment to members of one class by members of another. In the usual case, the lynchers come from a more numerous class than the lynchees, though there are occasional exceptions.

Lynching, if it goes unpunished, is itself a class privilege. There are satisfactions in it that are incomprehensible to moral men who live in ordinary times. As with other activities with innate satisfactions, the popularity of the practice will grow over time. A mob that's tasted the blood of one aristocrat is seldom satisfied with just that one sip.

Lynching writ large is genocide.

That was written long before the troubles in Ferguson, Missouri.

---

Ponder well the following stories:

• Holder Drops Death Penalty For Accused Cop Killers
• Obama’s Racial Quota on Black Youth Punishment
• Revolutionaries And Radical Muslim Groups Hope Ferguson Lights The Fuse
• Waiting for Ferguson grand jury, St. Louis buys guns and prepares for worst
• Ferguson Protester Wants To Target People Who ‘Don’t Look Like Me’

Now ponder what hangs on the impending grand jury decision over whether to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown:

I’m not thinking near-term here; I fear a genuine campaign of genocide by American Caucasians against American Negroes. There’s no way to know in advance how much violence and lawlessness would be required to trigger such a reaction. Nevertheless, I maintain that the train of reasoning in the previous section is sound; there is a threshold which, if crossed, will evoke outright genocide. If that should come to pass, who would be more to blame than Leftist luminaries Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and the “unofficial” race-hustlers stoking the fires in Ferguson, Missouri?

---

The Left is heavily invested in victimism: broadly speaking, the proposition that all of us are either oppressors or oppressed, and that the former owe the latter an unlimited debt. In no case are they more relentlessly strident than in matters of race relations. Thus, it should surprise no one that prominent leftist voices have been egging on the “protestors” in Ferguson, edging asymptotically close to condoning violence and looting, while ceaselessly insisting that the fault for any such occurrences would belong, not to the “protestors,” but to the rest of us for “not doing justice for Michael Brown.”

Exactly two years ago today, I wrote:

The original New Segregationist pieces focused on racial segregation and how the media's suppression of important facts about trends in dissolution, profligacy, and criminality among American Negroes has contributed to it. Yet any collectivity designated for "help" will exhibit a comparable set of trends, more or less dramatically according to context and prior socialization. As always, it's a matter of incentives.

The late Clarence Carson, in his landmark book The American Tradition, made a critical set of points about the "civilizing of groups." Groups, he noted, can overwhelm individual rationality and morality, a point made with equal force by philosopher Eric Hoffer. Therefore, they must be denied legal and political standing; they must never become capable of asserting privileges or immunities that non-members don't possess. This parallels Isabel Paterson's penetrating partition of sociopolitical orders into Societies of Contract, where individuals are the sole recognized actors within the legal and political order, versus Societies of Status, where membership in one or another group dwarfs every other consideration about what an individual can do, or to what he can aspire.

Plainly, Leftist thought and policy departs completely from that insight; the creation of politically privileged and empowered groups is virtually the whole of Leftist politics. But that departure rests upon Leftists' need to see themselves as morally superior to the rest of us, in which effort their politicized "good intentions" are the indispensable element.

Whereas the media merely suppressed news about the sort of incident that might elicit a doubt or two about the unanimous good will of Negroes toward Caucasians and the safety of the latter among the former, the activist Left seeks a multiplication of such incidents, preferably as large and dramatic as possible. More, when such incidents occur, its sympathies and protective efforts are openly with the lawbreakers. Yet according to the Left, we who want only to see the guilty apprehended and punished as prescribed by law – who want nothing but peace with those who’ve remained within the law, regardless of their race – are the villains!

Is it possible to draw any conclusion but one? Given that conclusion, if the tide of violence should reverse and a wholesale slaughter of American Negroes result, who would be properly to blame? Who are the real racists here?

It’s well that the residents of St. Louis are arming themselves. Indeed, I hope the trend is nationwide, and nationally publicized. Consciousness of the potential consequences might be the only effective deterrent of a second Civil War – this one color-coded not by artifice of uniform, but by the flesh of the combatants.

We shall see.