Jared Taylor on RT.

Is Fighting for Smaller Government Racist?

by Daniel Greenfield

When the NAACP allowed itself to be used by the Democratic party to try and smear a grass roots movement for smaller government as racist, the resulting controversy shone a light on more than just racism by individuals associated with the NAACP, but with the organization’s inability to delink class warfare from racism. If there is one thing that both the white media elites at Jornolist and the NAACP leadership agreed on, it’s that fighting for smaller government is racist.

The peculiar notion that reforming government by reducing its size is racist originates from the marriage of racial equality with class warfare to create the 40 Acres and a Mule politics covering everything from wealth redistribution to affirmative action to social welfare programs – all under the aegis of the federal government. And yet this same brand of 40 Acres and a Mule politics underlies the particular tragedy of the black community, whose leaders traded in aspiration and equality for government handouts, forcing them to make the argument over and over again that there can be no social justice without total government control.

When the Democratic party was forced to make the transition from a party of Northern businessmen and Southern plantation owners, after two Republican Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, put a severe dent in their Southern plantations and the Northern business offices that had formerly given the party a death grip on the country’s economy—it did so by redefining the “Company Store” to mean the Federal government. The Republican notion of individual rights and free labor met the new Democratic notion of ward boss handouts at the Federal level in a battle for the soul of the Black community, and the Democrats won. Not immediately, not conclusively and not absolutely—but they won, and the NAACP’s leadership demonstrates why.

The black leadership has gained distinct advantages for itself as a separate class, while disadvantaging the black community as a whole. Civil rights leaders who made their money on lawsuit shakedowns and diversity training seminars, corporate executives and business owners who got where they were through affirmative action programs that encouraged companies to hire one black executive for appearance not merit, and rewarded minority business owners for the color of their skin, rather than for results—helped create a black leadership that owed its position and power to government intervention, rather than ability. And in the process that same leadership marginalized more qualified people within the black community, while teaching the lesson that aspiration and ability did not matter, only connections and politics did.

Affirmative action politics closed far more doors than it opened

Affirmative action politics closed far more doors than it opened, but those who got through the open door knew exactly what they owed it to. Creating racial quotas as a way to select leaders was an effective tool for perpetuating the same system over and over again, marginalizing black candidates and business owners as a whole, while rewarding a select few who would then be in a position to praise and maintain things the status quo.

The racism charge leveled against the Tea Party is the doing of a leadership that sees itself as completely dependent on the Federal government, so much so that it finds any talk of reducing it to be dangerous and threatening. And as the Democratic party has identified itself closely with the domestic expansion of government and wealth redistribution politics, it has been able to manipulate the black community, to appropriate its decision making powers and use it as a political tool, while virtually eliminating its actual political clout. The sad state of affairs in which the official black leadership damns anyone who doesn’t toe the Democratic party line as Uncle Toms and “not real black people” reveals just who really calls the shots in this arrangement. And it is not the black leadership, which gets trotted out when the Democratic party needs them, and gets told to go home when it doesn’t. Which is no different than the treatment accorded to women’s or Jewish groups.

Tea Party is an attempt to salvage the financial viability of the Middle Class that has traditionally been America’s only reliable bastion of political and social equality

The attacks hurled at the government reforms advocated by Tea Party groups rely on invoking sixties racist boogeymen about States’ Rights, but the Tea Parties are not fighting to resegregate schools or lunch counters, as many times as liberal political bloggers may try and market that particular smear. Instead the Tea Party is an attempt to salvage the financial viability of the Middle Class that has traditionally been America’s only reliable bastion of political and social equality. And their targets are not Eisenhower’s forced desegregation and challenges to States’ Rights, a Republican President, but the out of control government expansion that began with FDR’s New Deal, which enforced racial segregation and plunged the country deeper into the depression.

Wealth Redistribution will never solve the black community’s problems, only worsen them. Which may be why most of the greatest African-American inventions took place before it, not after. All that spending has not helped the black community, in part because while the spending may use social welfare as a justification, it is mostly directed at building up the size of government itself. The gargantuan bureaucratic structures that form as a result only perpetuate poverty for everyone, while feeding money to a small group of insiders who are politically connected enough to benefit from it. The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disasters in which black homeowners were saddled with debt, that was then resold worldwide by bankers and brokers, is a typical example of what happens and where the money really goes.

Investing more money and power in the Federal government is short-sighted and unwise. Before the Federal government was forcing open schoolhouses, it was forcibly segregating Northern neighborhoods. Before it was filing lawsuits on behalf of black homeowners, it was demanding that Northern states return escaped slaves. Like all centralized power, Federal power is not moral, it serves the interests of those who wield it, who in turn use everyone else. To see such a system as dangerous and unstable is not racist, it is common sense.

The same system that has marginalized black politics to a few handpicked candidates running in gerrymandered districts, has done the same thing to the voice of the black community as a whole. Just as it has done to other groups across the United States. This plantation politics that promises protection in return for fealty is not only degrading and undemocratic, it is dangerous to everyone involved. And as the current escalation of Federal power threatens to destroy the Middle Class for good, it is important for everyone who believes in individual achievement and aspiration to join together and protect their present and their future from out of control spending and big government.

In the Court of Tyrants

By James Kalb

Moral Mazes is an account of life in the corporate management suite by sociologist Robert Jackall. At bottom, it’s a description of life at court. The desires of the powerful are what matter, responsibility exists to be shifted, an Act of God (recession, change in management, public relations issue, whatever) might change everything overnight, and whatever happens has to be presented as part of a rational and controlled system in which one was right all along and nothing could ever interfere with the steady increase in earnings quarter to quarter.

Such a situation naturally leads to amoral self-seeking and endless manipulation of illusions in which the original purpose of the activity disappears. Rational management, it seems, isn’t so rational. In the twentieth anniversary edition of the book that just came out the author tacks on a discussion of the recent meltdown of the financial system that applies the same general analysis to explain why the people running the show were so irresponsible, self-involved, and generally clueless. What he says might have come out of Chronicles or any paleoconservative publication–he even gets into immigration as an example of our rulers’ fecklessness.

It occurred to me that I should try to combine Jackall’s analysis of the ultimate effects of the separation of management and ownership in large business enterprises with the analysis of the managerial state I put in my book The Tyranny of Liberalism.

So here are some thoughts toward a Grand Unified Field theory of the present situation:

• To understand what’s going on today we have to combine an analysis of business corporations with an analysis of the arrangements that supposedly act as watchdogs and limitations–government regulators, political overseers, professions like journalism, “civil society” institutions, and so on.
• Steve Sailer used to complain about the “marketing major postmodernism” of the Bush administration, and universities today have become much like other big self-aggrandizing institutions. Everywhere you look there’s spin, self-seeking, and lack of concern with reality behind a facade of rationality and concern for the public good. Everything has become like everything else in basic ways, with postmodern relativism an accurate reflection of important aspects of what’s going on.
• Differences of course remain between business and other sectors. Government is much more comprehensive than business in its organization and interests, and makes more of a distinction between the bureaucratic/rational and the political/factional aspects of its functioning. (As Jackall points out, those aspects tend to merge in business hierarchies.) The civil society sector (journalists, academics, NGOs) is more miscellaneous in nature and organization than the other two. It seems much weaker, but the appearance can be deceptive. The pen is mightier than the sword, and civil society has most of the pens.
• Such differences are no doubt important but I’m not sure how they play out. With respect to purposes the situation grows clearer. Business stands for getting the job done, delivering the goods, and making money. It believes in the bottom line. Government stands for the public interest. That’s why it’s into PC, which counts as the public interest because it stands for the interest of those who constitute the public in receiving an equal share of every possible benefit of society.
• So business vs. government is efficiency vs. equality. That’s no surprise, since it’s the same as the contrast between market-oriented right liberalism (usually called conservatism) and state-oriented left liberalism. To extend the analysis, the civil society sector (journalists, academics, NGOs) is supposed to provide ideas, analysis, and general informal oversight. Business, government, and civil society acting together are therefore supposed to provide the Good (efficiency), the Just (equality), and the True (information and expertise).
• In fact, of course, the internal politicking and external positioning Jackall describes play a dominant role in all three sectors. He points to that as a reason the connection between success and producing good results gets attenuated in business, and the same applies in government and the civil society sector.
• The usual argument is that each sector acts as a check on the others and no doubt that’s true on many points. One problem though is that collectively they constitute the ruling class. As such they have an obvious common interest over against the people at large. They claim collectively to constitute the best possible system but that’s doubtful so they undermine and discredit possible competitors.
• In particular, they hate it when people try to act independently (e.g., the TEA parties) and they don’t like the arrangements (e.g., functional cultural traditions and moral institutions) that make independent action possible. So they get together and establish the tyranny of liberalism. Anything outside rationalized egalitarian technocracy, family and religion for example, is at war with the Good, Just, and True–that is, with the condominium of business, government, and civil society. Such external powers have to be wiped out in the name of efficiency, enlightenment, protecting the weakest among us, whatever. The business of the people is to do and believe what they’re told, make the choices allowed them, approve what the ruling class has decided, and signal when there’s been a failure of public relations.
• Separation of ownership and management is always a problem. In the old days it was absentee landlords, today it’s the sort of thing described in Jackall’s book. That’s only one example though of the separation of functions that defines modern society. There’s also the separation of actor and expertise and regulator and beneficiary. The managerial state, in which the state becomes an overall system that takes care of us and supposedly knows better, is the sum of all such separations.
• So what to do? The idea of subsidiarity–let the people live their own lives!–seems the right idea in principle, but it’s basically just a way of restating the problem. It doesn’t tell us how to put that principle into effect except in bits and pieces here and there (e.g., “hooray for family values”). Still, saying there really is a problem is important and may be the most important single thing we can do at present.
• We can also say why there’s a problem. Carrying division of labor too far leads to the kind of irrationalities Jackall describes. Also, efficiency, equality, and expertise aren’t really the same as the Good, Just, and True. They’re what those things reduce to when bureaucratically rationalized. As such they certainly have some use, but if you always insist on them you’ll squeeze out the fuller versions that are your real interest.