Parties Take Turns Blowing Opportunities

DC-area attorney Nick James and Brett Stephens of the New York Times write very different columns that each, in their own way, show how badly Americans crave a real alternative to the central planning of the Democratic Party and the central planning lite of the Republicans. First, we have James rightly arguing that it is not Kanye West who is nuts for supporting Donald Trump, but the black Americans who are piling abuse on top of him -- for their decades of loyalty to the Democrats:

Thanks to those policies, although only 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families in 1960, fifty years later more than 70 percent of black children experienced this sad fate.

The truth is anyone who wants to know how well the Democratic Party has rewarded the black community for its loyalty only needs to look at Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, or Milwaukee to find an answer. In these cities, high rates of crime, poverty, academic failure, and racial inequality remain the norm after five or more decades of Democratic control.

Indeed, as Jesse Jackson lamented in a 2016 article, "the injustice is worse in modern Milwaukee than it was in segregated Birmingham. Black poverty, unemployment, and impoverished neighborhoods are all worse." [links omitted]

But what policies, Van Horn? you might ask. Well, one can support Trump without being nuts, and while I agree that school choice (which James mentions Democrats opposing) would be a very good step in the right direction, Trump's trade policies -- which James seems to support -- will actually have similar job-destroying effects to many Democratic policies, such as the minimum wage, and for the same reasons. But James is right to indicate that West should hardly take flack for seeking an alternative. It's just too bad that Donald Trump is failing to offer a real one, just as Reagan failed to do. The Republicans see themselves as more "practical," but seem oblivious to the need for questioning the moral base they share with the Democrats -- and thus still sets their agenda.

Moving on over to Bret Stephens, we see the Democrats failing to take the high ground in the mid-term elections, where, he indicates, they could have brought rational discussion back. He borrows an apt metaphor, of the left "piercing its own tongue," so it can "marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company."

Image via Pixabay.

And yet it is. Predictably. Once again, American liberalism has pierced its own tongue.

It pierced its tongue on CNN this week, when Hillary Clinton told Christiane Amanpour that "you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about." And when former Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday, "When they go low, we kick 'em."

It pierced its tongue last week when New York's Representative Jerrold Nadler pledged to use a Democratic House majority to open an investigation into Kavanaugh's alleged perjury and the "whitewash" investigation by the F.B.I. A party that can't change its mind and won't change the subject meets the classic definition of a fanatic. [links omitted]

Unlike the Republicans, who shy away from the collectivist political implications of the altruist morality they share with them, the Democrats embrace its ugliness to the point of alienating many people, and driving them into the arms of the Republicans.

Too bad for now that we have a non-capitalist in the White House as the "alternative" to the party that so richly deserves irrelevance, and seems so hell-bent on achieving it. I hope he does not end up in the Hooveresque position of making them look like they deserve another chance in power.

-- CAV