John Podhoretz:
PERHAPS the gravest weakness of contemporary liberalism is its tendency toward preening vanity — the regrettable undercurrent that suggests the views liberals espouse demonstrate just how much better, kinder, more thoughtful, more large-hearted and more caring they are than those who might think differently about policy.On no subject is this preening vanity more evident than when it comes to race, and the preening has been especially pronounced in the past week.
It is now generally accepted in liberal-left circles that the federal government's response to the New Orleans horror was not rapid enough because the majority of the victims were poor — and especially because they were black.
This is just about as incendiary and horrible a thing to say as can be imagined under these circumstances, and given the circumstances one might have thought a little bit of evidence would be required to offer some support for it. There has been none offered, save for a couple of captions on a couple of photographs released by news agencies that seemed to suggest white looters were just helping themselves to necessities while black looters were committing crimes.
But those captions weren't written by the Bush administration, to put it mildly.
...
The motive force behind such disgusting ideas is the paternalistic idea that black people in America exist in a state of fixed victimization from which they can and will only emerge when white people "care" enough about them to raise them up and make them whole. The fact is that the victims of Katrina were victims of nature, as human be ings have been since the dawn of time.
But why affix responsibility to the rising waters when you can simply apply your one-size-fits-all urban ideology to an unprecedented American calamity — something beyond awful that has never happened before in this country, an entire city engulfed by water?
People used to joke about "white liberal guilt" when it came to race. But there's no guilt here. White liberals feel righteous because they believe they are faultless here — that they and only they care about suffering. They are instead assigning blame to other white people, white people who disagree with their ideology of victimization.
And so they use the basest slander at a time of tragedy to make themselves feel just peachy about their enlightened, loving and deeply moral beliefs. Well, isn't that special.
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