This week's Sports Illustrated featured an article on French soccer star Thierry Henry. Henry, who is black, signed with the New York Red Bulls this season after spending over a decade playing in Europe. What shocks Henry most about America? Whereas European fans routinely insult and slur black players, Americans don't.
"I've been to a lot of arenas to watch NBA games and the Yankees, and I have never heard anyone have a go at a guy because he's from Puerto Rico or the Dominican or Africa or wherever," Henry marveled. "I can understand why people in America are kind of shocked [by European racism], because that doesn't happen in their sports."
Europe is far more racist than America. Yet the left is in love with European values. They love Europe's emphasis on promiscuous sex. They love Europe's redistributive economic policies. Most of all, they love Europe's willingness to abandon all principle in supposed gratification of multiculturalism.
Unfortunately for the left, Europe has proved itself a failure on each of these elements. Europe's emphasis on free love without commitment has created a childbearing holocaust -- Europe is not reproducing at even replacement rates. That failure to reproduce is hastening the decline of Europe's suicidal economy, which is so top-heavy with aging union workers that it makes Dolly Parton look like Keira Knightley. That failing economic structure means more and more reliance on impoverished immigrants, who are not interested in assimilating into what they perceive as a morally bankrupt culture. And that failure to assimilate destroys precipitating societal fragmentation.
As Europe collapses, however, the left clings even more tightly to the European model. They cannot allow the utopian socialist dream to die its well-deserved death.
How, then, do they bolster that dream? By proclaiming that they stand not for economic decay or familial destruction, but for tolerance. They blame capitalism for economic downturns, then state, as President Obama has, that tough times produce racism. In this view, capitalism produces racism.
It's false. Capitalism requires individual responsibility and accountability. People are seen as atomized units in a capitalist system -- they are either useful or they are not. They are not seen racially or ethnically or religiously. They consume and they produce, and those are their only relevant characteristics.
This seems cold, but it isn't. It's profoundly fair and profoundly anti-discriminatory. It creates a colorblind system -- the only color that matters is green.
Socialism, by contrast, requires a justification for why certain individuals should give money to other individuals for no apparent reason. Socialism has no moral justification whatsoever; poor people are not morally superior to rich people, nor are they owed anything by rich people simply because of their lack of success. Charity is not a socialist concept -- it is a religious one, an acknowledgment of God's sovereignty over property, a sovereignty the left utterly rejects.
How, then, can socialism justify itself? By pointing to capitalistic "exploitation." There's only one problem: true capitalism doesn't exploit. Capitalism invariably boils down to barter between two willing parties, neither of whom uses force to work with the other.
Socialism's answer is ingenious -- it points to phantom "institutional racism." Because white forefathers oppressed black forefathers, today's rich whites owe today's poor blacks money. Because most minority groups once experienced discrimination at the hands of majority groups, today's high-earners -- who, by and large, come from majority groups -- now owe today's minority groups cash.
Then, socialism rests on seeing people as members of groups, not as individuals. Rich sons are responsible for the existent or non-existent sins of their fathers; poor sons are due benefits because of their fathers' tough lives. Racism is a critical element of the socialist agenda -- focus on group identity provides the only supposed moral justification for redistribution of wealth. It's no surprise that when socialism fails, racism bubbles beneath.
Now, though, the left is running scared. They fear that the tea party culture and its attendant economics will do away with socialism's long-running cultural and economic dominance. That's why they attack the tea party as racist -- because if the tea party isn't racist, the socialists' moral raison d'etre is utterly defeated.
On Nov. 2, 2010, Americans will reject the socialist agenda and its race-tinged propaganda. Then socialists will truly panic. They will ratchet up the rhetoric; they will mine minority communities for race warriors; they will play racial dirty tricks. It will fail. Americans are not racists, and they are not socialists. That is why America is on the rise, even as Europe falls.
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