Ugly Truths Dept.

     Apropos of nothing, if you have any taste whatsoever for romantic comedy, and can endure a certain degree of raunch (rauncherie? raunchitude?), by all means delight in Katherine Heigl’s and Gerard Butler’s laugh-fest The Ugly Truth. Butler’s in-your-face misogyny comes off perfectly, and Heigl might have been designed and built in a lab for exactly this kind of role. Highly recommended.

     But that’s about 180^° from the real subject of today’s tirade.

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     To suppress a truth is to give it force beyond endurance. -- Originator unknown

     I know a fair number of intelligent, well-spoken people. Responsible to a fault. Serious about their opinions and the way they express them. Almost to a man, they’re seriously, deeply, committedly anti-racist. And of course, it troubles them no end that the one and only Certified Galactic Intellect of their acquaintance is an out-and-out racist.

     It compounds the felony that I refuse to hide it, or to be at all apologetic about it. Indeed, I argue for it, and for its implications for the future of the American civil order.

     The riots currently besieging America’s Democrat-controlled cities are an example of why I’ve reached the convictions I hold. American blacks have rioted several times even in recent years. City governments have done little or nothing to quell the disorder, vandalism, or violence. Rather, they’ve waited for it to “burn itself out” – which, mirabile dictu, has coincided with an armed counter-reaction from the police (occasionally), the citizenry (usually), or both. What an incredible coincidence, eh, Gentle Reader?

     As I’ve said before, a class is defined by its legal and social privileges. Those privileges do not need to be codified in the black-letter law to be real and effective:

     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.

     The reinforcement, over more than five decades, of the de facto existence of those privileges is the very foundation of the troubles besetting us today. It’s almost irrelevant that the Left has found the readiness of blacks to riot and loot politically useful. As has been said many times before, setting groups against one another in the name of “the revolution” is simply what they do.

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     Several commentators, including persons as august as Victor Davis Hanson and as forceful as Tucker Carlson, have decried “tribalism” and “identity politics” as the genesis of today’s disorders. They’ve called for an end to all such perversities and a return to the e pluribus unum ideal engraved on the money:

     These are knowledgeable, intelligent men; if their prescriptions are pointless or misguided, it’s unlikely to be a deficiency in evidentiary awareness or an error in logic. Nevertheless, they are mistaken, and I shall tell you why.

The ugly truth about “tribalism” and “identity politics” is that it cannot be quenched so long as even one “tribe” or “identity” refuses to abandon it.

     For at least fifty years, black racialist hucksters have promoted and reinforced the notion that “blackness” is an identity that commands an allegiance prior and superior to all others. Add the victim mentality fostered by the political Left, which has always found it useful to set groups against one another as a path toward revolution, and you have nothing less than a state of war: an insurgency largely defined by race that has rebelled against the existing order.

     Once one group takes up identity politics – what the Spanish once called particularism — there are only two futures available. In the better one, those promoting the identity group are roundly and widely scorned, ridiculed, and marginalized. This reduces the promoters to pitiable fringists who, whatever the magnitude of their “voice,” are thereafter regarded as examples of a peculiar mental illness. Their influence on events is effectively zero.

     The poorer future arises when the promoters and those who flock to their banner are listened to respectfully, as if they “had a case,” and are accepted and accorded social stature for their claims. While it might not be “inevitable” in the strict sense, identity-based privileges seem always to follow. The past fifty-six years have seen an accretion of privileges and differential treatment for black identitarians. Preferential treatment in education, employment, access to government contracts, and more lenient treatment for black lawbreakers – sometimes expressed in the refusal to arrest, indict, and prosecute them at all – have been the result.

     This is the course we suffer. It’s also the influence that made me, a “child of the Sixties” who was once passionate about racial equality, an out-and-out racist.

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     Maura Dowling, whose intellect, erudition, and energy are notable, laments thus:

     This will destroy our country if we let it. No more pandering, no more tribalism and identity politics, no more guilt trips. We are all one people and the enemy is at our gate and within. Speak up and stand up.

     Whether or not it might have been so in the past, and whether or not it could have been maintained thus, we are not “one people.” We will not be “one people” until black identity politics is destroyed. That will require a massive counter-insurgency: big enough, resolute enough, and forceful enough to suppress the race-based black insurgency and put an end to their hopes of becoming an explicitly privileged, supra-legal class: treated as above the law on account of “racism” and “victimhood.” Unfortunately, as our political class has revealed through its pusillanimity and flaccidity, by far the most probable form for such a counter-insurgency is through white identity politics. As civilized, law-respecting blacks have proved almost entirely unwilling to discipline their unruly brethren. American whites must band together in defense not only of their own lives, loved ones, and properties, but of American civil order itself.

     An interval of great violence, with many casualties, is likely to follow. The ultimate result could look a lot like this — and once again, this is not an end I look forward to with approval, much less with relish. It’s merely the one I find most likely.

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     I’m not the only commentator thinking along these lines. This morning, Karl Spence echoes my thoughts about what will be required of us:

     Leaving aside any question of race, or of due process, what are we to make of the notion that certain “rapscals” constitute a burden whose continued existence the world is better off not bearing? That point seems to be what President Trump was getting at when he warned, regarding the current disorders: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”...

     While Trump’s “looting, shooting” tweet provoked the usual pearl-clutching from all the usual suspects, it likely played much better with the public at large. Even those who hate Trump, even those who abhor racism and wouldn’t dream of hanging criminals, can hardly help desiring to see a more “orderly disposition” among their fellow citizens.

     A great many lampposts must acquire human ornaments before that “orderly disposition” can be achieved. If justice is to be served, a disproportionate number of those ornaments must be black. Justice to one side, there’s also the little matter of conveying to other blacks determined to maintain their privileged status that the party is over. But what force, what body of resolute men determined to see the American civil order restored, will see to the decorations if “our leaders” continue to decline the responsibility?

     Have a nice day.