The historian Christopher Caldwell, in his 2020 book “The Age of Entitlement,” asks what America actually bought with the massive national debt caused by LBJ’s War on Poverty and accelerated by the Reagan tax cuts. What did those trillions of dollars get us?
“Social peace,” Caldwell answers his own question. He elaborates: “The civil rights impulse [of the 1960s] hardened a transfer [of wealth] from whites to blacks of the resources necessary to make desegregation viable.”
Desegregation was never going to come cheaply. It would require hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in various forms of transfer payments to Black people. “Almost everyone who did not benefit from [desegregation] was going to be made poorer by it,” Caldwell points out. “Now, it was being presented to the public as the merest down payment on what Americans owed” to Black people.
Today, 60 years after The Great Society, we don’t speak of “desegregation” anymore, we talk about “social justice,” “equity,” and “reparations.” But these are just synonyms for the same thing: a redistribution of wealth in America based on race. Progressive activists claim that the “down payment on what Americans owed” was vastly insufficient to pay the debt in full, considering the costs of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and all the other sins they accuse White America of perpetuating against Black people. In fact, if you fully understand the theories of people like Cat Brooks and Carroll Fife, that debt can never be paid down. It is fundamentally infinite. Therefore, the transfer of wealth from White to Black must be “institutionalized,” i.e. eternalized, even as ever more creative means, such as Oakland’s obsession with “equity” requirements, must be devised to justify it.
When we look at Oakland, we see Caldwell’s argument unfold in all its pernicious squalor. No one actually knows how much of the taxpayers’ money is being transferred into Black communities, because no one wants to know. That number is radioactive; therefore, it must be kept secret. But we have to ask ourselves, as Caldwell asks about the national debt: “What did these billions of dollars actually buy us?”
It has not brought us social peace, that’s for sure. It may be that politicians agreed to invest tremendous sums of money into social programs invested in the Black community, because they realized that to not do so risked societal disintegration, in the form of riots, social unrest, and even a race war. A few tens of billions of dollars here and there seemed a reasonable price to pay for keeping American Blacks peaceful.
But today, we can’t even claim to be buying social peace with all our transfers of wealth to Black people. Oakland has no social peace. Quite the opposite: Black communities are seething with fury and violence. Too many Black youngsters are lured into gangs and drugs, and turn to criminality for money, instead of developing careers and raising stable families. As for us—Oakland citizens who just want a peaceful, prosperous city—we’re faced with an existential choice: Do we continue to give our hard-earned dollars to Black communities because our “debt” to them still hasn’t been paid? Or do we say, “Enough!”
It would be surprising if White (and Asian) people did not feel that they’re being “made poorer” by wealth transfers, and not getting anything from the deal. If Whites saw benefits from this redistribution of wealth by progressive government, they might grudgingly agree to keep it going for a while. But they look around and honestly cannot find anything worthwhile that all the spending has brought them, or to society in general. Little wonder, then, that we have this backlash—in Oakland, in California, in America—against racialized progressivism and especially against even more wealth transfers, including reparations. An historic line has been crossed: the clock is ticking on the transfer of wealth to the Black community. The era of desegregation, you might say, is over.
Steve Heimoff