Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day celebrating the legacy of a man who is famous in the United States for saying that we ought to judge people based on the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin.
The story of the Civil Rights Act is one of Southern Democrats largely opposing the Civil Rights Movement.
Ever since then, Democrats have been searching for the next Civil Rights Movement. We’ve seen many iterations of this over the course of the subsequent decades. We saw a quasi-civil rights movement pushed by the Left with regard to gender and sexuality, the idea that women had to be freed from the predations of the patriarchy, similar to the way that black people required freeing from the predations of Jim Crow.
That, of course, was a bad analogy.
Then we heard the same thing with regard to LGBTQ+-, that this was the new civil rights movement.
But now, Democrats seem to have hit upon the idea that the new civil rights movement is illegal immigration.
They believe illegal immigrants must be allowed to stay in the United States, and enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration is itself a form of white supremacy.
The Democrats are stretching on this one because they’re running out of examples of true policy-driven widespread American racism. The demand is higher than the supply.
Here’s one example: Eric Holder, the former attorney general of the United States, suggested on Monday that the Voting Rights Act is under a serious and abiding threat. Not only that, he suggested that there was the threat that America was about to be resegregated by the Trump administration, saying, “We are experiencing unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering attempts designed to disproportionately disenfranchise black and brown voters. As the president desperately clings to power like an insecure dictator, there is a concerted effort to resegregate America.”
There is not a “concerted effort to segregate America.” No one who is sentient in America believes that there is. No one is worried that black Americans are now going to be forced to drink out of different water fountains, or be forced to go to different schools, or that we are going to resegregate restaurants or anything like that.
This is a wild overstatement. The reality is that the story of the post-Jim Crow racial situation in America was one of increasing good relations between the races.
That was true all the way up to 2013, according to the polling data. A vast majority of both black Americans and white Americans, up until roughly 2013, thought that American race relations were improving steadily, and that they had improved markedly since the 1960s.
Then we slipped into the BLM era and the late stages of the Obama presidency. That sank Americans’ perceptions of race relations.
But that does not mean that black Americans are being held underfoot by white Americans, that white supremacy rules the roost these days.
Thus, Democrats are looking for their new civil rights movement. They need another excuse for why they ought to be in charge, why they have the moral high ground.
That’s a hard case to make. The Democratic Party has lost the moral high ground on a wide variety of issues: It has become not only the abortion-on-demand party, but the Celebrate Your Abortion party. The Democratic Party has become a party that cannot explain to you why a woman isn’t a man and a man isn’t a woman. It has become the party of full-scale open borders, and so now they are going to attempt to cram the illegal immigration issue into the civil rights discussion.
And it won’t work.
