Police declare riot in Portland after protesters march on police union building
Protesters set barricades and start fires in an attempt to breach the police union building; William La Jeunesse reports.
There isn’t much to be said for those who loot and riot in the name of racial equality. But what do we say about the far larger number of young middle-class Americans who genuinely believe that America is a fundamentally racist project?
You probably know one or more educated 20-somethings who regard cops as cogs in an oppressive machine and who consider nearly everything in American life irredeemably racist—ordinary words and phrases, great works of literature, the flag, the mascots of sports teams, the names of buildings and cities. Why do they believe this?
Educational indoctrination plays a role but doesn’t explain it all. Today’s youthful radicals appear to despise precisely the consensus liberalism their education system was designed to advance.
Liberals find this hard to grasp. When statues of men who achieved great victories for racial equality were torn down by radical agitators—Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco, Frederick Douglass in Rochester, N.Y.—media reports treated the incidents as unthinking excesses or maybe retaliation by White supremacists. But these weren’t mistakes.
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Nobody who has spent time among politically attuned high school or college students over the last decade or two will find it difficult to believe that, in the minds of some young radicals, Grant and Douglass are representatives of a racist and xenophobic regime now at last getting the disrespect it deserves.
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These young Jacobins are the product of an assortment of social and economic forces—parental coddling, lassitude born of affluence, the need for some kind of righteousness in the absence of religion. But they have a point, and it’s not the one their sympathetic liberal interpreters think.
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