I don’t get it.
I honestly don’t. Call me an idiot; declare me obtuse. I can’t figure out the long game of the American left.
I’ve been struggling with the thought for a while. But the answer isn’t forthcoming. I don’t mean to insult. I’m genuinely asking for clues.
The progressive outlook seems negative. Everyone’s being cheated. Everything’s unfair. And offensive. Especially that.
I’ve lived in this country for 52 years. I never knew it was such a cynical place.
Instead of seeking ways to move the nation forward, spiritually and economically, the political left is on an inequity hunt. It wants to pave even, not build up.
It’s a good electoral tactic — convincing someone she’s being cheated is a great way to get her to the polls — but toward what ultimate goal are these identity plays? It’s a tactic without a strategy, as I see it. Maybe I need edification.
Even if the world, through some miracle of tinkering, were to be made fair for a millisecond, it would be back out of balance the next. Someone’s always going to be born smarter or prettier or more ambitious. Central planners can’t regulate nature.
The left has done well engineering a whack-a-mole national conversation on injustice. There’s one symbolic emergency after the next popping up that we need to drop everything to fix, while the real problems of the nation go ignored. (Inner-city academic failure, federal and state debt, illegal immigration and unfunded entitlements to name a few.)
The latest is the Confederate flag debate. The flag doesn’t only have to be yanked from the South Carolina State Capitol grounds — that’s fine with me — it needs to be eradicated. The Stars and Bars now must be seized from the U.S. Capitol rotunda. It needs to be banned in federal cemeteries where Confederate dead lie. It needs to be chiseled from tile work in the New York City subway system where it’s gone unnoticed for 100 years. Monuments to Southern Civil War officers need to be toppled. The Jefferson Memorial? It may have to go, too, if you listen to CNN’s Don Lemon. Washington, D.C., itself might need to be renamed, not just its NFL team.
Where does it end? Will America be more fair if we raze all traces of history that offend? Will kids start doing better in school? Will poor people be able to find better paying jobs? Will the Islamic State capitulate?
I supported same-sex marriage, but it’s unearthed a whole new set of grievances. The LGBTQ community is in overdrive pressing for its own special rights now. Transgender men — biological men who self identify as women — say they’re being discriminated against if they can’t go to the bathroom with my daughters. Starting this year, New York requires insurance companies to cover sex-change operations or other treatment to change a person’s gender. It’s considered a necessary therapeutic expense. Abortion into the ninth month of pregnancy has to be codified.
Anyone standing in the way of this Great Leap Forward in America is tagged as hateful or unenlightened. Same-sex marriage was barely a concept 20 years ago. Traditional marriage supporters are now social pariahs. It could be illegal not to make a wedding cake for a gay marriage if you’re in the wedding cake business.
I wish progressive leaders could clue us in on where they’re going next. Martin Luther tacked 95 Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg to spell out his qualms with the Catholic Church. Can we get something like that?
It would save a lot of time so that we could get back to the business of running the country.
William F. B. O’Reilly is a Republican consultant.
