By Mark C. Ross

Are reparations proposals meant to keep blacks who might be thinking of straying from the Democratic party on board? From Mark C. Ross at americanthinker.com:

The absurdity of the concept of reparations for slavery, an institution that ended several generations ago, is beyond mind-boggling.  But there’s a blatantly cynical reason for the sudden lurch in that direction: formerly reliable Black voters are now slipping away from the Democrats.  This also explains Biden’s recently expressed profuse generosity toward the nations of sub-Saharan Africa.

What is also painfully obvious is the lame, demagogic pandering that is the Democrats’ knee-jerk response, especially to a defecting constituency: just throw money at them, and that’ll keep ’em on the reservation.  Never mind the exposure to ridicule attached to redistributing money from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves, since the despicable practice was abolished over 150 years ago.  “Oh, the wealth and education gap that plagues the inner cities is the enduring legacy of slavery.”  Even if this were true, just throwing money at the problem is of particularly dubious benefit.

The dystopic nature of our inner cities cannot be traced back to slavery.  Modern-day political machines are the culprits.  Paying women to have fatherless children; running schools that avoid imparting basic math and literacy skills while lowering the standards for achievement; suppressing police responses to avoid bad optics and litigation…all add up to imposed squalor.  And none of this can be traced back to slavery or any of its aftereffects.

You may call it the “Trump Effect” or whatever — “working-class” voters have been shifting to the Republican Party.  This includes Black folks and other “minorities.”  Nowadays, progressive Democrats are mostly appealing to trust-fund-baby treehuggers and other guilty, virtue-signaling middle-class liberals.  This is what’s happening.  And Trump didn’t even start it.  Some years ago, Pat Caddell, political adviser to Bill Clinton, bemoaned his perception that the Democrat party had been taken over by an “elite gentry.”  Trump did, however, accelerate the process of blue-collar defection by allowing the economy to fiercely expand and thus embrace many of those stuck on its bottom rungs.

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