Progressives Ignore Real Social Justice

Progressives Ignore Real Social Justice

– By Howard Sierer –

“If you’re a Black child living in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, you might very well wonder how the annual controversy over the number of Black artists winning Oscars impacts your life.”

So writes radical leftist and proud Marxist Fredrik deBoer in his book “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,” deBoer is well known for writing essays castigating the American left for allowing itself to be gentrified into an effete, self-perpetuating ruling class.

His book explores how George Floyd’s killing energized a nation that was already wrestling with the COVID pandemic. Tens of thousands poured into the streets to protest. Major corporations and large nonprofit groups—institutions that are usually resolutely apolitical—raced to join in.

Then, nothing much happened.

Everything calmed down, and the progressive elite on MSNBC went back to praising transgender bathrooms and discussing whether so-and-so was a racist for saying “all lives matter.”

deBoer discusses why passionate movements like that one fail. He writes that in the digital age, social movements flare up but then lose steam since they lack tangible goals, the built-in moderating effects of our established institutions and political parties, and their failure to sustain the support of a broad swath of the American public.

deBoer summarizes the “elite capture” of the American left as a “drift from the material and the concrete to the immaterial and symbolic.” The Democratic Party’s complete submission to its “immaterial and symbolic” elites is the most salient development in American politics in the past half-century. The party has been transformed from a coalition of working-class whites, racial minorities, and former hippies into a party of hypereducated urbanites, well-paid activists, and expert-class virtue-signalers.

The left’s betrayal of what Marxist deBoer calls real “material and concrete” social justice for all is likewise regularly addressed by two conservative giants of the American scene, Thomas Sowell and Jason Riley.

Economist Sowell is the author of 14 books, all considered classics. His most recent is “Social Justice Fallacies.” In it, he exposes progressives’ continuing practice of implementing policies that serve their vision but do little to improve the circumstances of the needy.

While deBoer laments the ways in which his fellow leftists fixate on racial and gender identity issues, Sowell explains the real-world suffering caused by their fixation. His book documents, with fact after fact, the unintended but dire consequences of trying to make the world “equitable” by handing out benefits and punishments according to racial and sexual identities.

Sowell is amazed by “the extent to which people who present empirical evidence counter to prevailing [progressive social justice] beliefs are met with ad hominem denunciations and with efforts to suppress their evidence.”

Nationally-recognized columnist Jason Riley explains how progressives cover their failure to educate black children in public schools. Writing on MSN, he points out progressives’ hypocrisy when they make a great show in public debates by opposing book bans in public schools. He asks, “Who cares if kids have access to books by [black author] Toni Morrison or [progressive author] Jodi Picoult if most of them can’t comprehend the contents?”

He goes on to say, “Someone needs to keep pointing out that our national debate over which books to allow in classrooms, or how to teach slavery to middle-schoolers, is far less consequential than the continuing inability of most youngsters to read or do math at grade level.”

The progressive left’s response to dismal educational outcomes has been to wage war on the measurements themselves rather than improving the education process. To cover for their policy failures, progressives advocate eliminating gifted-and-talented middle-school programs, high-school entrance exams, and the use of the SAT in college admissions. The Portland, OR, school system is planning to introduce “equitable“ grading.

Bertrand Russell had a great line that can be applied to all this foolishness: “This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.”

Whether you’re a Marxist, a conservative economist, or an opinion columnist, the conclusion is self-evident: today’s progressives obsess over the trivial while ignoring real social justice, the programs and policies that can actually make a difference to minorities and the poor.

Progressives are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while the ship is sinking and taking with it the very people trapped below deck that they claim to be helping.

I frequently take progressives to task because their “immaterial and symbolic” policies just plain don’t work. In most cases, there are alternatives that actually have been shown to work in the real world. But supporting them is a problem for progressives: those policies are the ones promoted by conservatives like me.

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