Franciso Franco, Donald Trump and the Future of Fascism

The Socialist party in Spain is taking power and it appears that high on its agenda is to interrupt the eternal slumber of General Francisco Franco in his gothic mausoleum, Valle de los Caidos. With the shifting tectonic plates of Spanish politics his posthumous eviction appears to be on the near horizon, a savory morsel of venganza for the Spanish left over the Franquistas.

Forty-three years after his death and the restoration of the Spanish monarchy and almost eighty years since his civil war victory over the Spanish Republicans the hatred of the Spanish left for the dead Caudillo continues unabated. In the long run Franco abjectly failed in Spain to stem the modern, secularizing tides of change that were washing over the rest of Europe. Unforgettable and unforgiveable, however, is that he was on the wrong side of history, opposed by the “progressives” of his time, and thus, not supposed to win in 1939. That he did with the help of Hitler and Mussolini makes his memory an unrelenting abomination.

Whenever progressives lose they think and act as if they stand on the brink of an apocalypse, as was in stark evidence recently in the reaction of the American left to the improbable defeat of Hillary Clinton who sneered at Trump as a Fascist of sorts whose supporters were “irredeemable.” Trump, like Franco, was declared to be on the wrong side of history and not supposed to win. For the progeny of the communists, socialists and anarchists who succumbed to Franco’s Nationalists, his victory and subsequent dictatorship must be rendered a political and moral cataclysm fit only for execration.  Revenge is to be vented symbolically upon his tomb and his memory.    

A recent article in the New York Times on the planned demolition of Franco’s crypt quotes Paul Preston, who has written prolifically on Franco and the Spanish Civil War.

“Paul Preston, a British historian and biographer of Franco, said that Spain was an anomaly in Europe in keeping a ‘place of pilgrimage for its fascist dictator’ — there are no monuments to Adolf Hitler in Germany or in Austria, nor to Benito Mussolini in Italy. Among the more than 250,000 visitors to the Valle de los Caídos each year, Mr. Preston said, many are devotees of Franco ‘brought up to believe that he was a benefactor for Spain.’”

Preston does not bother to speculate as to what sort of considerations might move these misguided “devotees” of the Generalissimo. Certainly, they would be nothing that would make any sense to the normal, rational sorts of people who read the New York Times and reflect thoughtfully on all matters of politics. You see, Preston, while nominally a historian, is really a high functioning, sophisticated member of that school of moralists whose theorizing is firmly anchored to the ghost of Adolf Hitler, the ne plus ultra of wickedness and depravity who seems to be always busy reincarnating himself as Trump, Putin, Bush II or whoever is the current menace of right-thinking people said to be “strangling democracy” somewhere. For moralizing purposes, this “Hitlerizing” approach works very well leaving no moral ambiguity to contend with; those who are good and those who are evil are clearly distinguishable. Those who are evil are supremely and unequivocally so, which by contrast makes those who are good paragons of virtue and moral rectitude. When a brand new Hitler comes to town, no need for further conversation, debate or compromise; taking to the streets, brandishing anti-Fascist bona fides, and active resistance is the only moral option. Franco, for Preston, was just an Iberian cutout of the Austrian Corporal, and so anyone who might even attempt to offer an attenuating perspective on his life and career, would have to be castigated as a Brownshirt apologist, drooling away on the fringes. (See: Fosterspeak: Santiago Carrillo, the Last Stalinist)

For historical understanding, however, Preston’s work will not be especially helpful. He remains invincibly oblivious to the reasons that explain why, unlike the absence of monuments for Hitler and Mussolini in contemporary Germany and Italy, there were and are monuments to Franco in Spain. Franco died of natural causes in his old age having prudently kept his country out of World War II (refusing Hitler’s entreaties to draw Spain into an alliance) and having prepared for a peaceful succession of power to a constitutional order. This was in stark contrast to the dramatic, violent exits of Hitler and Mussolini that capped the epic destruction and ruin that their reigns brought to large portions of the planet. The Germans after Hitler’s demise got the Nuremberg Trials; Spain upon Franco’s death got King Juan Carlos, a decent and benevolent man. Spain was never occupied by conquering foreign armies (no Spanish women by the tens of thousands raped and murdered by Red Army soldiers), its citizens never forced or bribed to behave in ways deemed “appropriate” by their Soviet, British, French and American occupiers. Finally, Spanish Catholics might well consider Franco a “benefactor” of sorts given the fate of religious people in communist governed lands throughout the twentieth century. Catholics fared better in mid-twentieth century Spain, then they did in, let us say, Poland.

The Socialists in Spain have been in the Franco decommissioning mode for some time. In 2007 they passed the Law of Historical Memory (Yes, that is not a parody) and commenced the renaming of streets and buildings and the removal of monuments and statues having anything to do with Franco. The Valle de los Caidos has, of course, always been their grand prize. Historical “memory” in contemporary western Europe is a state monopolized enterprise and incorrect thinking about touchy subjects is subject to punishment. To make certain Hitler reigns historically supreme and unchallenged as the Avatar of Evil, historians who depart from the officially sanctioned narratives about German iniquities and culpability are labeled as “holocaust deniers,” their morally opprobrious opinions deemed sufficient to subject them to criminal prosecution. When the state resorts to the criminalizing of unpopular opinions, however, one has to wonder what defects or limitations there might be with the orthodox version that require persecution of the sceptics. Since the dissenters are so obviously deluded and/or ignorant that no normal person would pay them attention, why do they need to be threatened with prison?

The American left has no Franco statues upon which to vent their anti-Fascist fury, but the 2016 Presidential surprise election of Donald Trump was immediately followed by his predictable Hitlerization. Statues and monuments signaling “white supremacy” are now the targets of our very own antifas and Black Lives Matters gangs who seem to resemble the church-burning, priest-murdering, nun-raping, anti-Fascist Spanish anarchists of the 1930s. The attempted mass-murder last year by Bernie Sanders supporter, James Hodgkinson, of dozens of Republican Congressmen and the encouragement by national Democrat leaders for their supporters to engage in the harassment and physical intimidation of Trump administration officials portends an escalation to unprecedented levels of violent political conflict.   

Just recently, the NAACP called for the sandblasting away of Confederate carvings on Stone Mountain Georgia.  The north face of Stone Mountain depicts three Confederate figures — Confederacy President Jefferson Davis and generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Work on the carving began in 1923, according to the park’s website. It is 400 feet above ground and the entire carved surface covers about three acres. It is larger than Mount Rushmore.  A protest march on July 4^th included Black Panthers armed with AK-47s and AR-15s.

From the Democrat Candidate for Governor of Georgia:

“Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams called for the removal of the giant carving that depicts three Confederate war leaders on the face of state-owned Stone Mountain, saying it “remains a blight on our state and should be removed.’”

The left in Spain and the U.S are set on destroying the symbols of a past that make them feel bad. In Spain the memory of Franco seems to poison their waking moments even though he has been long dead and widely forgotten in most of the world. In the U.S. the memory of slavery and Jim Crow, though ancient history, continues to arouses their resentment.

Purging Franco from public spaces and tearing down Confederate statues, however, is not going to make the moralists on the left feel better because feeling bad (angry, resentful, vengeful) is the high octane emotional fuel that runs the engines of cultural Marxism. Left-wing ideologues and activists gain political traction by leveraging the grievances of victim classes, by churning up their anger and turning it against the oppressor classes. Victims who don’t realize that they are victims and feel bad about it are of no use, and without self-conscious, agitated victims, cultural Marxism is like a fast car with no wheels; it goes nowhere.

What helps to keep the bad feelings fresh, invigorating and thus efficacious for members of the victim class is a demonizing vocabulary at their disposal that enables them to portray the oppressors as malignant cretins who have no place in a modern, progressive society. Which is why “Fascist” remains one of the favorites in the left’s lexicon of abuse and why Hitler keeps reappearing whenever progressives experience some resistance to their planned march to perfect equality. The logic is obvious and primitive. “Hitler would be against ‘x’ (‘x’ being the latest progressive fashion); therefore, your opposition to ‘x’ means you must be like Hitler.”  “Fascism” has the ideal, goose-stepping imagery and historical connotations from the 1930s that make it the perfect, all-purpose smear – the Gestapo, concentration camps, racial persecution, cult-worship of the leader. 

Real flesh and blood Fascists were extinguished by WWII Allied armies, and those few today who imitate the originals occupy the only the far reaches of the social fringe. Thus, the curious irony: while neo-Nazis and Klansmen are few and far between, and while no one in their right mind today wants to be connected with anything resembling Fascism, for the left, it seems, a sizeable portion of the U.S. is made up of them, including our President. The overreach should seem silly and obvious to all but the most deranged fringe of the left. But the smear will persist widely because the left needs Fascists to affirm their own virtue and rationalize their escalating assaults on free speech, religious freedom and historical symbols that offend them. Without the specters of Hitler, Franco, the Klan, sandblasting monuments and renaming streets might seem like a waste of time and effort.

From Ted Kennedy to Harvey Weinstein, or, How the Lecher became the Lion

 

Let us cut to the chase. Edward “Teddy” Kennedy was one miserable, contemptible excuse for a human being. But dead he has been for eight years, so why bother now sifting through the sordid details, the mountainous offal strewn in the wake of his long and epically degenerate life? Two words: Harvey Weinstein. The recent outing of this bloated, debauched full-time Hollywood kingpin and moneybags man for Democrat politicians like Hillary and Obama and part time rapist raises the obvious question: how do they get away with it? The libertine, John Kennedy, splashing in the White House pool with prostitutes and shagging mob molls, still occupies his station in Camelot; yes, and Bill Clinton, a serial womanizer, sexual predator and suspected rapist who liked to fly on the“Lolita Express” with his “good buddy,” convicted, child rapist, Jeffrey Epstein.  Bill’s wife, who covered for him and attacked his victims (“slut”  and “looney tunes”), then gets rewarded with a carpet bag Senate seat, the 2016 Democrat Presidential nomination, and 66 million votes. 

So, while the left now is on a cultural rampage with our public spaces – the statuary, monuments, the names of buildings, schools, streets, etc.  – purged of any historical references, symbols or imagery that might offend the delicate sensibilities of social justice warriors, the assault and abuse of women by big shot men of the left, both living and dead, get written off as “weakness”and “addiction.”They are  quick to be forgiven because, as principal players in the ruling cult-Marx decadence of American culture, what they actually do is secondary to what they pretend to be – everything is the opposite of what it is said to be. The reality of Hollywood’s pretend superior virtue is the rampaging sodomizer of actresses, Harvey Weinstein; the reality of the Democrat’s pretend abhorrence of hatred and violence is Bernie Sanders supporter, James Hodgkinson, trying to gun down Republican congressmen.
   
How then does the defunct Teddy, “the Lion of the Senate” Kennedy fit into this scene of ruinous hypocrisy where real victims get displaced by abstract ones? Ted Kennedy was the national standard bearer over a generation for left-wing profligates, a man who managed to set the bar lower than anyone could imagine. But this answer leads to a more complicated and fundamental question. How did he pull it off? How was this arch hypocrite, a man so intellectually mediocre, so personally dissolute and debauched able to rise to this pinnacle of political power, eulogized at his death as a champion of the disadvantaged and downtrodden, officially “lionized” as a great Senate statesman?  

Chappaquiddick was for Edward Kennedy his defining moment both as a man and as a politician. The decades that followed were merely exposition and commentary on this shameful episode of moral immolation. As a man? A coward, a libertine, a liar, a fraud, complicit in manslaughter from one of his countless alcohol fueled, philandering escapades. He abandoned a young woman in his submerged Oldsmobile he had driven off of a bridge, then fled the scene and sobered up. She could have been rescued, but the Senator was busy huddling with his handlers and the more important task of concocting a story to evade the law and to salvage his political career, letting his girlfriend of the moment slowly drowned. As a politician? He used the wealth and influence of his family and the power of his office to suborn the local authorities, buy off the Kopechne family and ultimately to evade responsibility for actions that would have sent any other man to prison.

He was never completely able to escape the shadows and shame of Chappaquiddick, but the voters of Massachusetts had to have a Kennedy in Washington, perhaps to keep the women in the Bay State safe, and with the passage of time and the crafting of a fashionable leftish championing-the-underdog image, his abandonment of Mary Jo to die became a mere peccadillo, collateral damage of the sort happily overlooked so as to keep a playboy with a magic name in a high place. Here then is the beginning of the answer to the question posed above: how did the lecher become the lion?
 
With gusto Kennedy positioned himself firmly on the left embracing its antinomian trends and leading the charge of American identity politics. Rewarded with the unconditional support of its pandered-to beneficiaries, he was thus in large part able to immunize himself from the sharper edges of the contempt he deserved. Teddy never came to endure what should have been an outpouring of disgust and repudiation for a man with the moral fiber of a bunko artist and the life-style of Caligula.

The easy life of a protected, rich wastrel and reprobate was, however, not enough for Teddy. He was, after all, a Kennedy, committed to what he liked to call “public service” a laughable, crude piece of unintended irony for someone wholly self-indulgent in his gross personal conduct and self-serving in his public role. A life devoted to beakers of Johnny Walker and whoring was not going to, as they say, “make a difference.” Kennedy needed to inflict himself on the nation. And so he did … make quite a difference. Two of his signature pieces of mischief, that pushed the country toward its current state of misery, deserve mention here.  First, his support and active selling of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 which produced the opposite of what he promised.

From the Center for Immigration Studies
 Although the 1965 bill was intended only to end discrimination, some people feared a major increase in immigration and a change in the source countries of immigrants. Supporters of the measure assured doubters that this would not happen. Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with the following:
“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset ... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia ... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.” [emphasis added]

In the “final analysis,” we are talking about the word of Teddy Kennedy. Most apropos is a single phase – Kennedy “reassured his colleagues and the nation,” the same sort of reassurance, perhaps, he gave Ms. Kopechne in watery bowels of his Oldsmobile – “don’t worry, honey, I’ll get you out of here.” He lied with the verve of a true Bolshevik – “everything is the opposite of what I say it is.” The country was “flooded with millions of immigrants” who dramatically changed “the ethnic mix of this country.” America, thanks in large part to his man, has been transformed, ethnically, culturally, economically by this law. California, once a competitive and healthy two-party state is now because of the immigration influx unleashed after 1965 entirely controlled by a single party. Hillary Clinton’s margin of nearly three million votes over Donald Trump in the 2016 election came out of California, Democrat clients of Kennedy’s creation. Her plan, upon election, was to turn the rest of the country, politically, into California.
Catering to a burgeoning, resentment-laden set of victim classes and importing lots of needy people into the country along with the extraction and redistribution of resources from its largely middle-class citizens to support them creates a cultural and political backlash that threatens the power structure and its overseers. Thus, the second piece of the Teddy Kennedy’s nefarious legacy: “hate” legislation.  From a peroration in the Senate in 2007, “Standing Against Hate.” 

I'd like to speak … regarding the Hate Crimes Amendment -- at a time when our ideals are under attack by terrorists in other lands, it is more important than ever to demonstrate that we practice what we preach, and that we are doing all we can to root out the bigotry and prejudice in our own country that leads to violence here at home. Now more than ever, we need to act against hate crimes and send a strong message here at home and around the world that we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate…..  Since the September 11th attacks, we've seen a shameful increase in the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims, Sikhs, and Americans of Middle Eastern descent…..  Hate crimes are a form of domestic terrorism…. Like other acts of terrorism, hate crimes have an impact far greater than the impact on the individual victims. They are crimes against entire communities, against the whole nation, and against the fundamental ideals on which America was founded. [emphasis added]

What a vapid collection of useless abstractions and non-sequiturs from a man who ceaselessly preached but never practiced. “At a time when our ideals are under attack from by terrorists in other lands”? Terrorists do not attack “ideals”: they attack and kill defenseless people, which is what makes them so terrible. Not clear as well is why terrorists would be attacking our ideals in other lands, but this is Ted Kennedy talking, oblivious to minimal standards of evidence and coherence. Why, a rational person might ask, do we need to send this “message” to the world that “we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate”?  Since there was absolutely no evidence that we did tolerate such crimes, why was he talking like this? To distract people from the obvious fact that so much of the terrorism going on around the world was being done by people of “Middle Eastern descent,” and to hope people might not wonder why politicians like Kennedy were so eager to put more of them in their neighborhoods. No one in the political establishment from President Bush after 9-11 on down was speaking of Islam as anything other than the “religion of peace.”

One has also to ponder: how America had managed to stave off collapse until 2007 by ignoring these crimes, now morphed into “domestic terrorism” against, first, “entire communities,” then, “the whole nation” and then, yikes! America’s foundational “fundamental ideals.” Once again, we are supposed be traumatized by terrorists attacking those wonderful “ideals” – what specific ideals he doesn’t bother to say, but the more nebulous and vague the abstractions, the easier it was to keep his multicultural scam going. And the scam?  Import millions of third world people, many of whom are resistant to assimilation, some of whom are hostile to American norms. Then, stigmatize the resentment of the American hosts who bear the cultural, financial burden as “bigotry and prejudice.” Gotcha! Welcome to twenty-first century America where lechers are lions and where the politicians have christened half of the citizens as “irredeemable” racists, xenophobes and bigots because many of them believe that it is not a good idea to let anyone and everyone into the U.S. who simply wants to come.

The mumbo-jumbo of “Standing Against Hate,” late in a career of pretending to be a statesman was one of Teddy’s many signature incoherent episodes of Senate oratory. Since his death in 2009 it can be said in fairness to him that he did leave his mark; he did make a difference: to the American people he did figuratively what he did literally to Mary Jo Kopechne fifty years earlier.
 
Teddy was also a pioneer in the field of career advancement for left-wing politicians and “socially conscious” Hollywood celebrities who now so eagerly excoriate Trump and his bigoted supporters. The winning formula: affect a self-righteous persona that exudes compassion, pander to the right victim groups for support and adulation while smearing the opposition as racist, sexist, or, as Hillary Clinton whined, “you name it.” Lots of choices. Then … enjoy your escapades. No restraints should apply to those voices of the voiceless, and no one will give much thought or sympathy to the casualties of their making. They are merely collateral damage, just not the right sort of victims.  

Against Anti-Racism and the Hemeneutics of Hatred

Fighting racism requires knowing what it is – not an easy task….  [R]acism is a Schimfort: a term with pejorative connotations, whose very use inevitably tends to be more instrumental than descriptive. To call someone a racist, even if the charge is intellectually dishonest, can be a useful tactic, either in successfully paralyzing or in casting enough suspicion as to curtail credibility.  
                                            Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?”

A proposal: to make the charge of “racism” an automatic libelous offense if made by a private citizen, an impeachable act with the loss of government pension if made by a public official.  Punishment falls on the accuser unless the charge could be substantiated and confirmed by empirically verifiable evidence based on a single, legally promulgated definition of “racism” with clear, operational terms. What about free speech, you counter? Well, what about it?  Free speech has done a disappearing act in Canada where the Canadian Senate recently passed Bill C-16 which puts yet another hate crime on the books, this one making it a hate crime, are you ready? -- to refer to a transgendered person who has become a “he” as a “she” and vice versa. “Transphobia” is born joining its morally defective cousins, homophobia and Islamophobia, phobias that will put the possessor in the cross hairs of the local prosecutor.  Also, free speech in western Europe has given way to government regulated speech where any criticism of a member of a designated protected class is prosecutable, again, as hate speech. Here in the U.S.? Try going to any university and college campus and see how far free speech takes you before some social justice warrior throws a plastic bag of feces at you because you are deemed a “hateful” person, or some self-designated “anti-fascist” starts punching you because disagreeing with him makes you a fascist.

Essentially, the governments in the western world have clearly shifted away from the long-held high priority of liberal, democratic polities for freedom of expression to the suppression of “hatred” selectively and arbitrarily interpreted and enforced by high placed ideologues who get to determine whose hatred gets punished and whose is justified. This turns the business of legislating, of making readily understandable rules that everyone is expected to follow, into a contorted hermeneutics of hatred where the subjectivity of moralizing displaces the objectivity of law and the intended universality of its application. The ideologues who operate the abstruse moral machinery that is designed to suppress hatred have theorized individuals into distinct groups, the oppressed and the oppressors, the later who exploit and, of course, hate the former. The social world the ideologues envision is a deeply morally fractured one populated by helpless, blameless victims who need protection from the malevolent, menacing bigots who fail to recognize the humanity of those they oppress. The moral and legal order of such a world then must be structured to protect the oppressed and punish the oppressors, and so the moral and legal standards and expectations necessarily differ depending on whether you are an oppressor or one of the oppressed.  The mad scramble then commences. You join, if you can, the community of the oppressed, articulate your grievances, agitate for revenge, and demand the assistance and protection of the state.  Failing that, retreat, submit, be quiet and hope the political police will leave you in peace.  Whatever one might wish to call this kind of social-political order, a “democracy” is not what firsts jumps to mind.

But a swift and resolute implementation of the above proposal would have many immediate and enormously salubrious effects. Below are just a few. To begin with, it would liberate public discourse from the fetters imposed by the preening moralists and scolds in so many places who wait to pounce on any and every deviation from the script of political correctness.  Some of the scolds are even highly paid to do so. In the workplace, at cocktail parties, in schools, churches, labor unions, political assemblies, and, even as unimaginable as it might now seem, university classrooms, people could speak their minds, express their concerns without the threatening, censorious race commissars launching protests and coercing apologies, Chinese Cultural Revolution style.  Fewer lobotomized college students would be assaulting campus speakers who might hurt their feelings. No more time wasted on deciphering “racist dog whistles.” No longer would we have to endure the hypocritical, disingenuous calls from the likes of Barack Obama, fresh from consorting with a scurrilous race-hustler like Al Sharpton, for a “national conversation about race” because it would actually be possible to have real one, or rather, many, without a threat to your career, reputation, even your physical safety.

The enacted proposal would reduce the current mass hysteria most recently manifest with the election of Donald Trump, christened during his campaign by Hillary Clinton and the MSM as an “unredeemable” racist along with the sixty-two million people that voted for him. There would be fewer reincarnated Hilters and Mussolinis, Bull Connors and George Wallaces to fear, agonize over and scare small children.  The Ku Klux Klan would be the laughable fringe-guys in pointy hats numbering of a couple of thousand nationwide, not, once again, all the Trump voters from Hillary’s “basket of deplorables.”  It would be less likely that another disillusioned Democrat like James Hodgkinson would take target practice at Republican congressmen.  The Southern Poverty Law Center, unable to smear any conservative individual or organization it took a fancy to, would have to close up shop.

This proposal enacted would also mute the multitudes of charlatans and extortionists who populate the “diversity” industry.  Unable to affix “racist” to every conceivable thought, gesture, word, and institution that strikes their fancy, the vast “victim” community under their care, one which they now relentlessly endeavor to expand, would begin to shrink.  The elaborate taxonomy of racism, now in a growth mode – “overt racism,” “covert racism,” economic “racism,” “systemic racism,” “institutional racism,” “environmental racism,” “legacy racism,” and many more – would be duly recognized as mysterious and incomprehensible mumbo jumbo and thus sink happily into oblivion, a subject matter for anthropologists sometime in the far future to ponder as a practice of post-modern superstition or witchcraft.  With many fewer individuals and institutions certified as “racist,” there would be a substantial decline in micro-aggressions which, like a reduction in crime, would make everyone happy. Especially pleased would be university presidents who could relax a bit and not worry about whether they must grovel and apologize every time they hear of one on campus and whether they will be fired for being too lenient on the micro-aggressors.
 
Many “professors” of English and sundry area studies programs would have to seek actual, useful employment. There would be little demand for professors of Post-Colonial Studies, even less for literature courses that are all about the racism in Shakespeare, Milton and Faulkner and every other dead white male in the literary canon. African American studies programs would wither since they are premised on discovery of “racism” as the core of the American experience.

Calling or labelling a person now a “racist” is an excellent way to do accomplish several things that enhance your self-esteem and elevate your status as a superior person.  Firsts, it shows how deeply you care about the disadvantaged, the magnanimous dimensions of your personality and your sensitivity to the suffering of others. As well it immediately separates you from that “racist” you have identified, who, of course, is your complete opposite. Thus the contrast dramatically demonstrates your vast moral superiority and justifies your self-righteous disdain.  It also bolsters your standing among friends and colleagues as a truth-to-power speaker even if that “racist’ you have called out is an unemployed mechanic from down the street whose house is in foreclosure. Best of all, you don’t have to do anything else to bolster your virtue credentials, like send your child to that rundown inner city school full of, well, you get the picture.  Sometimes it is even fun, especially when that “racist” gets really angry and flustered after you have outed him and you get to relish his discomfort as he stumbles through all of those futile protests to convince you otherwise.
 
However, this proposal if enacted would constitute a bold step toward making people more accountable and responsible for the language they use to assert their superior virtue, and it would impose a cost to what is now, cost-free moral preening.  Taking “racism” out of the compendium of popularly permissible slurs would mean that “racist,” as an accusation with all of its invidious comparisons would have to give way to an honest, “I don’t like you,” which is fine. No one is required to like anyone. But not liking someone only means just that, with no implications for your moral stature, no put-downs that testify to your own goodness. So, if you accuse someone of an offense that relegates them to, as Hillary Clinton so elegantly put it, “a basket of deplorables,” as “irredeemable,” you should be able to prove it and suffer some penalty if you cannot.

Most importantly, this proposal enacted would also greatly advance the possibility of making an honest consideration of what the implications are for the mass migrations from the third world that are currently assaulting the countries of the west.  In much of western Europe, native Europeans who question the inundation of refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Asia are shamed by the politicians, in collusion with the media moguls, as bigots and xenophobes.

Immigration is an enormously complex issue with incalculable cultural, political, economic and security implications. Millions of immigrants, many destitute and low-skilled, carry an enormous financial burden that falls mainly on the middle and working class natives. Many of those entering Europe are unable to speak the language of the host country.  Many come from societies with very different cultures, whose values are in conflict with those of western secular society. Not surprising then is that some of new comers are resentful of their hosts and inimical to their norms.  This means that cultural conflict is inevitable and that the sheer number of new-comers threatens the long-enjoyed stability of the host countries.  All of these concerns are real, pressing and legitimate, but the elites who have opened the gates remain crudely reductivist in their own defense, seemingly blind to the coming catastrophe and resolutely self-righteous in their condemnation of those who question them.  Those native, French, Germans, Swedes and Dutch who doubt the wisdom of the inundation and fear the destruction of their own culture get the reductio ad racista treatment so long successful in beating down legitimate dissent.  First, you de-moralize dissent and make it into bigotry; then you make into criminals those citizens you have turned into bigots, unable now in any way to participate in the decisions that affect their lives and those of their children.  That the likes of Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Stefan Löfven continue to call their soft tyrannies run by unelected bureaucrats who punish their citizens for speaking the truth “democracies” is one more expression of their treachery and dishonesty.
 

If the above proposal were enacted the social and political elites would have to begin to argue their case and relinquish the smear that has served so well for so long.