No, it’s not a Weiner, Spitzer, Filner-related headline, but we’ll get to it in a moment. But first, “Conservatives Should Point and Laugh as Detroit Dies,” Kurt Schlichter writes at Townhall:
Not surprisingly, in a Times article referring to the miserable condition of a city run by a liberal Democrat machine for half a century, there is no mention of either liberalism or Democrats. That’s like writing about obesity and not mentioning food.
The liberal elite, which loves root causes, absolutely refuses to admit that the root cause of Detroit’s woes is liberalism itself. Liberals are like a drunk who wants the benefits of sobriety while continuing to hoist highballs. Step One is admitting that their ideology has a problem.
Fat chance. For liberalism, the answer is “5,” and it’s the “2 + 2” that’s somehow screwed up.
We conservatives should sit back and giggle as liberalism hits bottom. No, Detroit’s collapse won’t teach liberals anything. The big cities and the blue states will fail no matter what. Liberalism is the locust of political ideologies; it will eat everything in sight and then starve.
But Detroit may serve a useful purpose once again as a cautionary example for future generations, so for that reason as well we should welcome its passing. And as it dies, the last words ringing in its ears should be the voices of laughing conservatives saying, “We told you so.”
I’m not sure if conservatives should point and laugh at Detroit’s woes — that doesn’t sound very compassionate, to use a word now largely discredited, for better or worse. But it’s worth pointing out how self-inflicted Detroit’s woes are. Or as Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2010, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer:”
For many years, conservatives said — maybe they still say — “Black Americans, on the whole, are conservative. They are certainly well to the right of their leaders — their self-appointed leaders. Black Americans favor traditional morality, law and order, school discipline and reform. Jesse Jackson, Ben Hooks, and Al Sharpton are far outside the black mainstream. The ‘black leadership’ is like Bella Abzug; black Americans are more like Gerald Ford.”
I myself talked that way. But I stopped, at a certain point — when black Americans kept voting for the Democratic presidential nominee 88 percent, 91 percent, 94 percent . . . I said (to myself), “Do not commit the error of condescending. If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”
I have had a long-running argument with Armando Valladares, the great Cuban dissident. He believes that people in the Free World who are pro-Castro, or soft on the regime, are merely ignorant: They have no idea what takes place inside the country. They are brainwashed, by Castroite propaganda. Wait’ll the regime falls, just as the Nazi regime fell, and the camps were exposed: Then everyone’ll know; then everyone’ll despise the regime.
No, they won’t. They could despise it now. I do. You do. Armando does. (More than 20 years in the gulag will do that to you.) Information about Cuba has been available since Castro seized power in 1959. About a decade ago, after years of debating Cuba, I had a terrible thought: If people in free countries are defending Cuban Communism — maybe it’s because they like it.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard,” H. L. Mencken famously wrote nearly a century ago, when Woodrow Wilson was taking our nation down a dangerous path, with ramifications still being played out today. Whether it’s our flat-lined national economy (being propped up by those areas of the nation that have rejected as much of “progressivism’s” socialist worldview as is possible) or the complete collapse of a city like Detroit, at some point, Americans need to reconcile the poor economic health of the nation (I was tempted to type “malaise”) with the choices they’ve made at the ballot box.
Update: “Poll: Race relations have plummeted since Obama took office.”
If only we could have seen this coming in 2008…
(Schlichter article found via Maggie’s Farm, which has loads of other links today worth perusing as well.)
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