Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand Read Free Page B

collectivism are also always predictable. In the song, the maples start by complaining; accelerate their complaints to demands; and, in the end, settle upon force to obtain what they want. The “oppression” of the oaks is replaced by a regime of strict equality, enforced by “hatchet, axe, and saw.”
    The end of the song is chilling because it reveals the truth about progressivism. To begin with, it’s not really progressive. It’s not about helping anyone get ahead, but instead about holding some people back. What’s “progressive” about retarding some people’s achievements?
    Ayn Rand was not a Christian. She did not profess to believe in the Ten Commandments. Nonetheless, she understood that what is packaged as compassion is often really covetousness in disguise. We would do well to familiarize ourselves with her work in an age of “collective” historical amnesia.

LETTER 4
     
    Social Security and Racism
     
    Zach,
    In this letter I’m going to focus on the subject of racism, which is, and has been for quite some time, a hot-button issue in America. Having grown up in the South—I was born in Mississippi and raised in Texas—I have thought about the issue a lot over the years.
    One thing I’ve noticed is that the progressive worldview gets a lot of its moral authority from the issue of racism. Even if Marxism and moral relativism are discredited by history and logic, progressives still look like the good guys when the subject of race comes up, since racial equality obviously is the right answer.
    The problem is that the definition of racism has changed a great deal in recent years. Racism once referred to an ideology that was based on a belief in certain races’ inferiority. This general inferiority was presumed to flow from inferior intellectual ability, often ascribed to genetic inferiority.
    Genetic racism is a dangerous ideology. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it played a central role in America’s bloodiest war. In the twentieth century, it fueled the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. But, fortunately, in the twenty-first century, its popularity is waning.
    In recent decades, as old-fashioned racism based on genetics has become more and more discredited, new types of racism have been making their way into the national discourse on race. One of those alternative forms of racism is called “institutional racism.”
    Institutional racism is any form of racial disparity, whether created intentionally or not, that occurs within institutions. For example, if people of a given race are more likely to be imprisoned than those of other races, this would be considered a form of institutional racism—regardless of the reason for their incarceration, or the motives of the police officers and judges.
    To anyone interested in understanding why racism seems, counterintuitively, to be increasing in recent years, I recommend reading When Prophecy Fails: Ᾱ Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter.
    In this book, the authors found that a group who predicted that the world would end on a certain date did not disband after their predicted doomsday date passed and the prophecy failed to come true—as one would intuitively expect. Instead, they continued to set numerous new dates for the world to end, even as the world kept right on going each time.
    Festinger and his colleagues explained these results in terms of “effort justification,” a concept flowing from cognitive dissonance theory. The idea is simple—people who had invested a lot of effort in a cause could not handle the idea that their efforts were in vain. So instead of disbanding the group, they simply set another date for the end of the world—and then another, and another.
    Something similar has happened to civil rights organizations in America. After worthy goals such as school desegregation had been accomplished, civil rights groups