Progressive Mythography

[Geee]

National Review:

As Ferguson burned this week, the law books got a workout. Suddenly, grand-jury procedure was all the rage. Commentators better known for parroting the bromide that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich went berserk when the sandwich on offer was a white cop and the grand jury refused to bite.

 

As it turns out, there was no need to thumb the legal treatises of Blackstone or Joseph Story. If you were going to hit the books, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism would have served you better. Brilliantly illustrating modern liberalism’s roots in 20th-century progressivism — a movement as comfortable marching lockstep with Stalin as it was borrowing copiously from Mussolini — Jonah homes in on the centrality of myth. It is irrelevant whether an idea around which the Left’s avant-garde rouse the rabble is true; the point is the idea’s power to mold consciousness and rally the troops.

 

For the American Left, a bedrock myth is that white cops kill black kids. It derives from the overarching myth that casts racism as our indelible national sin. As Heather Mac Donald explains, citing exhaustive criminology studies, it flows seamlessly from the quackery that dismisses the disproportionately high incidence of violent crime in African-American communities as an illusion — as the product of police racism and the consequent hyper-targeting of black boys and men, rather than of racial differences in patterns of defending.