August 27, 2013

Douthat Can't Say It, But I Can

By Christopher Chantrill
It would be easy to critique Ross Douthat's column "A Different Kind of Division" as lily-livered RINOism. He is gently, ever so gently telling his liberal audience that, fifty years after Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech, today's Obama race wars do not divide the country like Bull Connor's dogs and water hoses in 1963. And really, he waffles, there are good ideas for reform from both sides of the aisle. Get this: Meanwhile, in the broader socioeconomic landscape, the big story of the last generation in American life is that problems that were seen as specifically "black problems" in the 1970s and 1980s -- persistent unemployment, especially for men, family breakdown and social disarray -- are now problems affecting the pan-ethnic working class. Do you see what he is doing? He is referring to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report on "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" and to Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. Moynihan is...(Read Full Article)