Climate of Hate

Thomas Sowell looks at the phenomenon of African-Americans in San Francisco who are beating up Chinese-Americans. (how ironic that the only immigrant basshing in America is happening in "progressive" San Francisco, rather than "hateful" Arizona). As Sowell notes, these attacks are as much a product of overheated political rhetoric, as the phantasmal "bigotry" of Tea Partiers or Border Security activists: Resenting Achievement More Than Wealth

Achievements are a reflection on others who may have had similar, and sometimes better, chances but who did not make the most of their chances. Achievements are like a slap across the face to those who are not achieving, and many people react with the same kind of anger that such an insult would provoke.

In our own times, especially, this is not just a spontaneous reaction. Many of our educators, our intelligentsia, and our media — not to mention our politicians — promote an attitude that other people’s achievements are grievances, rather than examples.

When black schoolchildren who are working hard in school and succeeding academically are attacked and beaten up by black classmates for “acting white,” why is it surprising that similar hostility is turned against Asian Americans, who are often achieving academically more so than whites?

This attitude is not peculiar to some in the black community or to the United States. The same phenomenon is found among lower-class whites in Britain, where academically achieving white students have been beaten up badly enough by their white classmates to require hospital treatment.

These are poisonous and self-destructive consequences of a steady drumbeat of ideological hype — differences are translated into “disparities” and “inequities,” provoking envy and resentments under the more prettied-up name of “social justice.”

The Left's political program is ultimately built on envy and resentment, both of wealth and success. It's appropriate that the party of government would breed such resentment, as government has always resented anyone with economic power that lies outside the purview of bureaucrats and monarchs. The people marching in the streets against The Rich and beating up old Chinese ladies on MUNI are their shock troops, but the Resentful are all around us, and they vote.