Good News, Bad News............

[Valin]

National Review:

George Weigel

November 10, 2016

 

The good news is that she lost.

 

The bad news is that he won.

 

(Snip)

As for more good news and bad news:

 

The good news is that some long-neglected issues — such as the condition of those who haven’t benefited from the economic dynamism of globalization and the transformations of economic life caused by the IT revolution — have been put on the national agenda as never before. The bad news is that no one, including Trump, has much of an idea of how to empower those who have fallen through the floorboards during globalization, and his promise of a trillion dollars of infrastructure spending doesn’t begin to address the question of those men who have willfully dropped out of the work force in what is one part of a larger moral-cultural crisis in America. Some serious, creative, innovative thinking is needed on this front, which is one where center-left and center-right might actually find some common ground.

 

(Snip)

The bad news on this front is that the American Left is now so beholden to identity politics that it’s not easy to see the Democratic party extricating itself from the coils of what I’ve come to think of as “ism-ism.” And the problem is not just feminist identity politics but racial identity politics. I flew out of Washington for a speaking engagement early Wednesday morning and was serenaded on the Beltway by the laments of an African-American novelist bemoaning on National Public Radio (of course!) the fact, or so she claimed, that the stunning results of the presidential election were a matter of “whitelash.” This does not bode well.

 

If, as seems likely, that will become the orthodoxy about 2016 in much of the African-American political leadership of the country, then there is little hope that there will be progress in our inner-urban areas. Rather, look for an intensification of agitations like Black Lives Matter, whose principal accomplishment to date, insofar as I can tell, has been to help create the circumstances in which even more innocent African Americans have been killed in our cities. There was a small glimmer of hope on this front in the scathing open letter to Mrs. Clinton organized by black Pentecostal ministers in the last weeks of the election cycle, which took a bold pro-life stand against her complicity in the abortion-driven decimation of the African-American community. Whether that bold initiative, energized by the Reverend Eugene Rivers and Dr. Jacqueline Rivers, has legs remains to be seen, but it certainly should.

 

(Snip)