Hillary Rodham Clinton, also known as The Most Qualified Person Ever to Run for President of the United States (and Lose), deserves to be clobbered by every brickbat that’s hurled at her. Even by comparison with the ridiculous Joe Biden, HRC stands tall as a testament to the moral and intellectual corruption of America’s political class. Mediocrity, mendacity, lack of charm, sociopathic arrogance—those are the signature attributes of The Pants-Suited One.
But to give this devil her due, there was one instance in which she was right, or partly right. That was when she informed America that “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child.” Now, this is a truism with which no one can argue. The problem with Clinton’s take on it was the composition of her village: a progressive fantasy land run by postmodern intellectuals, government bureaucrats, the teachers’ unions and, of course, President Hillary Rodham Clinton.
On the streets of HRC’s enchanted village, all would be sunshine, lollypops, and unicorns. In particular, that progressive bugbear, privilege, would be sponged away.
Privilege, indeed, is prominent in the demonology of progressivism. The narrative goes like this. Race, class, gender, etc. & so forth, conspire to elevate some children at the expense of other children. Hence the progressive obsession with equity; that is, equal outcomes regardless of the cost.
The variant of privilege most reviled by progressivism is white privilege, which is held to be the product of white supremacy and systemic racism. It will be seen that the deeper one delves into this ideology of privilege, the more it resembles Mr. Orwell’s Ingsoc: a Theory of Everything rooted in radical relativism and paranoid conspiracy mongering.
“Whiteness,” like “colour” and “Blackness,” are essentially social constructs applied to human beings rather than veritable truths that have universal validity. The power of Whiteness, however, is manifested by the ways in which racialized Whiteness becomes transformed into social, political, economic, and cultural behaviour. White culture, norms, and values in all these areas become normative natural. They become the standard against which all other cultures, groups, and individuals are measured and usually found to be inferior.”
This, from Duquesne University’s Critical Whiteness Studies Research Guide, is a fair summation of the theory, and the attentive reader will have noted the dubiety of its assumptions, e.g. that there exist such things as “White culture, norms, and values.” What can these be? Opinions vary, but the White traits most often cited center around academic achievement and the so-called Protestant work ethic. This is a bit awkward, implying as it does that academic achievement and hard work are alien to non-White cultures. And it has parlous real-world consequences, when for instance academically gifted black students are reviled by their peers for “acting White.” Critics who venture to point this out are usually tagged as racists and commanded to shut up.
Such is the dogma that would regulate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s child-rearing village. And over the past few years, alas, it’s been cropping up in American education, both public and private. Last year, the Fairfax [Virginia] Public Schools District adopted a policy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exceptions,” effectively abandoning the concepts of merit and achievement. Well, how else can equal outcomes be guaranteed? Dumbing things down is the only practical option.
William F. Buckley, Jr., once quipped that “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.” This is why. The concept of Whiteness, like Marxism, is a pure intellectual product, divorced from reality. The notion that a gigantic cohort of human beings who happen to have the same skin tone exhibits specific “social, political, economic, and cultural behaviour” is, in a word, lunacy. And from this observation it follows that all related notions, such as “Blackness,” are equally loony.
True, generalizations are often necessary: Without them, intellectual discourse would be impossible. But thanks to the infinite variety of human nature, bold generalizations about large human populations tend to be puerile or just plain wrong.
But here’s one such generalization that’s been empirically tested and found valid. Unfortunately for progressives, however, it fails to align with their Theory of Everything. In her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, economist Melissa S. Kearney argues that the two-parent family is by far “the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children.”
That sound you hear is reality-checked progressives ascending to a three-foot hover of hysterical outrage.
In 2020, Black Lives Matter proclaimed its commitment to the abolition of the two-parent family: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” There was nothing novel in this; the demonization of traditional family values is one of the staples of postmodern progressivism. But Kearney’s data-supported analysis refutes such windy theorizing. Growing up in a stable two-parent family is the most reliable predictor of success in later life. Period.
Kearney notes that in 2019, “77% of white children and 88% of Asian children lived with married parents. The share among Hispanic children was 62%. Only 38% of black children lived with married parents.” Most if not all of the inequities that afflict black Americans as a group are embodied in these statistics. What can be done to remedy the situation? We could start by restoring marriage to the position of honor it once occupied in this country. We could, as Kearney does, point out its many practical benefits. We could adopt public policies that promote and support marriage. We could reject the anti-family propaganda that comes from radical feminists and the rest of the usual suspects.
Or, on the principle of “equal outcomes,” we could commission Hillary Clinton’s village people to disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement, so that all American children labor under the grim disadvantage that afflicts black American children. I think I know which choice progressives would make…