political commentary

hy, in our supposedly post-racial era, do we seem to have more racial unrest now than ever? Why do liberals and conservatives always seem to be at each other's throats? Why, indeed, are there liberals and conservatives at all?

About the riots it's tempting to say “haters gonna hate”—it's those wacky urban Dems again—and go back to watching TV. And it's true, it's a Democrat-induced problem and they should fix it. But even our notoriously badly educated schoolchildren know that ignoring bad ideas will only make them more determined to visit themselves upon you.

The reason there's so much conflict is that the government has gotten involved in setting social policy. The government tells us who we must employ and who we must do business with. It doles out favors and hands out fines. It picks the winners and losers.

Government's job is to protect the country from attack, protect individuals from criminals, and enforce property rights. But governments always try to expand their power. At some point they decided to try to fix the root causes of crime, poverty, and injustice—a task they can only perform by getting involved in every aspect of our lives and diminishing our liberty.

There was an old Star Trek episode about an evil energy being who took over the Enterprise, sent it hurtling out of the galaxy, and set the humans and Klingons in a state of perpetual war against each other. The evil energy being took sustenance from their mutual hatred. The more the humans and Klingons fought, the bigger the energy being became. After losing a sizable number of redshirted crewmembers, Captain Kirk finally realized that the energy being, not the Klingons, was the true enemy.

Here on planet Earth, liberals and conservatives are being forced to fight each other while the government sits back and gets bigger. The monumental kerfuffle about baking cakes on the one side, and all this “Hands up” stuff on the other, are not the issue. Regardless of the merits of any individual grievance, the issue is not the issue. The issue is the government interfering in our culture, and threatening to do more, forcing people to fight each other to prevent the loss of what they hold dear.

The cultural spearhead is our SJWs (social justice warriors). They are today's Red Guards, with no sense of proportion and little sense of right and wrong—only a fanatical commitment to their cause. Like the Chinese Red Guards of the 1960s, our SJWs serve the cause of a collectivist big government. Complete with ritualized slogans and worship of their leader, Mao Zedong, the Red Guards engaged in violence, theatrics, repression of Christianity, and intimidation. In one case, infatuated with symbolism, they tried to change the traffic lights to make red mean ‘go.’ As in today's riot-torn America, the police were hesitant to intervene. Xie Fuzhi, the Chinese minister of security, famously said: “Should Red Guards who kill be punished? ... if people have died, they're dead ... it isn't our problem.”

Even Mao finally realized he had unleashed a monster and the PLA carried out mass executions of Red Guards in 1968. By 1969 the failure of the Cultural Revolution was obvious. The masses lost interest in politics. The young people, and the surviving Red Guards, became disenchanted and the movement died out.

If the New York Times admires China's dictatorship so much, they might wish to reflect on that. The Red Guards, like our SJWs, were just a by-product of the Chinese government's Cultural Revolution: an example of the toxic effect of politics on young minds. China eventually abandoned their Cultural Revolution, and historians regard it as the first sign that Chinese communism was running out of steam.

It is now becoming apparent that many of our laws and regulations are too intrusive. Our Red Guards—the SJWs—have revealed the potential of our laws for abuse. Government should remain aloof from social policies, even well intentioned ones, especially when they risk a loss of liberty. All our laws and policies need to be systematically investigated and, where potential for infringement of liberty exists, repealed, narrowed, or revised. Without the force of government backing them up, our social justice warriors will eventually lose interest and their movement will die out, forgotten and unlamented.