Capitalism as Social Justice

One of the great sources of power for the Left in this country is its overwhelming presumed moral authority on issues of social justice. After all, it was (at least according to the left) the left that helped free blacks from institutional racism, women from institutional sexism, and our nature from institutional Puritanism. The left constantly makes wind about "social justice," claiming that everything they do is pursuant to that one final goal of a classless society in which everyone is equally protected and equally free. Those who argue against the truth claims of the left are characterized as arguing not against those claims, but against social justice itself. To the uninitiated observer, it may look as though those of us on the right are against people having rights, against hungry children being able to eat breakfast, against black people getting ahead, against the environment, against the "everyman" who keeps this country on its feet and for the corporate leaders who relentlessly work to keep him down and out, for dominating women's bodies, for religious extremism, for continued white supremacy, for pillaging other nations for our own benefit... The list goes on and on.

Such characterizations are obviously absurd, but they do raise a very telling point: the reason that many uninitiated observers are opposed to policies advocated for by the right is because they believe such policies will have the above-listed motives. Grievance theater up until now has been the special provenance of leftist authority: for every policy, a victim, and for every enemy, an oppressive-sounding misnomer. This would be unexceptionally banal were it not for the fact that this tactic of fear-mongering, hate-mongering, and disinformation has propelled leftists into positions of power throughout our country.

The leftists have a saying: "speak truth to power." That means that if you speak the truth, it will eventually gain enough power to change things. The fallacy is that the leftists speak the truth of grievance without the truth of causation to back it up. Uninhibited emotionalism allows them to capitalize on feelings of powerlessness to support and validate their social engineering programs.

And here's where the rubber meets the road: their social engineering programs cause more harm than they do good. This is not a question of ideology. This is a fact of history. Everywhere the left tries to change human behavior to conform more closely to their idea of the ideal, human behavior inevitably moves in the opposite direction.

There is no more shameful an example of this effect than that presented by the current state of the inner-city poor. Thanks to alliance-building during the late civil rights movement, the left has had almost complete free reign to try and socially engineer poverty out of the inner city. In the process of trying to do so, they have not only failed at eliminating inner city poverty: they have institutionalized it. It is no coincidence that "the Projects" is a term commonly associated with inner-city gang life; those selfsame "Projects" are in fact government housing projects. The schools that children routinely drop out of are government schools. The police that have been wildly ineffective at reigning in criminal behavior in the inner city are government police. The programs that keep the urban poor tethered to the Projects through incentivizing an unproductive, unaspirational lifestyle based on subsistence are government programs.

Let's take another example of government meddling for the good of all leading to suffering on a massive scale: the current financial crisis. The current financial crisis was caused almost entirely by the government incentivizing risk and disincentivizing financial prudence, all toward the seemingly positive end of helping poor people to afford their own homes. Again, this is not a matter of ideology. This is history. This happened, and there is no way that the left can weasel its way out of the facts by blaming corporate CEOs and Republicans. It was in fact the left that forced corporate CEOs into the position of lending to bad risks through coercive laws combined with artificially-created interest rates. The market was distorted to the point where the only thing that made any sense was to generate as many loans as possible no matter what. During the housing bubble, there were more than a few economists who pointed out that such "growth" was not only foolish but dangerous. The left either ignored those economists or heard them and decided that a financial crisis would not personally harm them in any meaningful way, and then ignored them.

My point is, it's way past time for the right to engage in a little grievance theater. As they used to say in the sixties, we need to raise some consciousnesses. The only thing I can think to do, in the face of such overwhelming social pressure to conform to the leftist worldview, is adopt the leftist worldview when it comes to direct action and disrupting the hegemony. Before we guffaw at the notion of street protests and lawsuits and the like, we must remember that this is how the left won as often and as decisively as they did. The right is typically weary of such things, especially the conservative wing of the movement, because it seems like we are somehow "giving in" if we participate in that sort of "hippie activism." Well, being a member of the pragmatic right wing, I respectfully disagree. The fact is, the left has won more often than it has lost because it has appealed to an emotional, non-intellectual set of strategies designed to effect the most people most often. They will continue to win if we do not adapt. One person at a time is great, but there are 360 million people in America, and chances are, you don't know many of them. If we are going to get our message out, it must be in a way that responds to the left's tactics. We cannot afford to pretend we are fighting two different battles. The battle we are fighting is a battle for the hearts and minds of our country, and the battlefield is found in the same.

Also, read this here.

Good idea B-Ran. I am all for putting faces to social programs.