"A Racial Revolution?" -- another brilliant essay from Thomas Sowell

By Thomas Sowell

5/19/2012

Even if Republicans can siphon off
enough votes from groups that normally vote for Democrats to keep the
two-party system alive, the preservation of the Republican Party is a
trivial issue compared to the preservation of American society.

If
Republican politicians save themselves by becoming Democrats under a
different label -- and appeal to minorities as minorities, rather than
as Americans -- the same policies and attitudes will have the same
destructive effect on the American economy and society.

Refusing
to cut back on entitlement spending, for example, means that the current
generation can continue to enjoy government-subsidized amenities, at
the expense of future generations who can be left to struggle to get
necessities, after the money runs out and government's promises can no
longer be kept.

The growth of ever bigger and even more intrusive
government means that the freedom, for which generations of Americans
have fought and died on battlefields, around the world can be slowly but
steadily lost within our own country.

Painful as such outcomes
can be the dangers do not end there. A continuation of the current
political tendency to take away the money required for national defense,
and spend it instead on handouts that will win votes, means that our
enemies around the world will have golden opportunities at our expense.

Again,
the dangers may not be immediate. But they can be catastrophic when
they catch up with us -- and catch us unprepared. We recovered from
Pearl Harbor at enormous cost, including the needless deaths of American
soldiers, fighting for their lives with obsolete military equipment
against enemies with state of the art weapons.

But even such sacrifices which brought us time to catch up during the Second World War, may not even be enough in a nuclear age.

What
can be done now, to head off the many dangers in our current political
policies and attitudes? There is not much we can do about demographic
trends. But the changing composition of the American population is not,
in itself, the fundamental danger. After all, vast millions of
immigrants crossed the Atlantic for generations on end, and began the
process of becoming Americans. Millions of black people likewise began
that process after being set free.

Demography is not destiny. But
the history of Balkanized and polarized societies in the 20th century is
a history of horrors that we dare not ignore.

We are not at that
terrible point yet. But that is the direction in which we are headed,
under the spell of magic words like "multiculturalism" and "diversity,"
which have become substitutes for thoughts, even among those who pride
themselves on being "thinking people."

Our whole educational
system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is permeated
with ideologies of group grievances and resentments, painting each group
into the corner of its own separate subculture, instead of drawing them
into the mainstream of the American culture that made this the greatest
nation on earth.

Unless the fashionable Balkanization is stopped, demography can become destiny -- and a tragedy for all.

Thomas Sowell