Maybe you don’t pay too much attention to politics or maybe you do pay attention but you focus on what’s lousy about both parties. I get it. I understand. I mean “fuck those people” and “who has the time?”
But, you know, maybe pay attention to this:
[Charles] Murray is probably best known for co-authoring 1994’s The Bell Curve, a quasi-eugenic tract which argued that black people are genetically disposed to be less intelligent than white people. Yet, while The Bell Curve “practically spawned an entire field of scholarship devoted to debunking it,” Murray remains one of the most influential conservative thinkers in America today.
Dr. Murray’s pre-Bell Curve work shaped the welfare reforms enacted in the 1990s. Former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan cited Murray in 2014 to claim that there is a culture of laziness “in our inner cities in particular.”
Okay, so Paul Ryan was part of the last election. What about the one that’s coming up?
Last April, when Jeb Bush was asked what he liked to read, he replied “I like Charles Murray books to be honest with you, which means I’m a total nerd I guess.”
Does liking quasi-eugenic books about how lazy black people are genetically inferior make you a nerd? Or does it make you something else?
So, maybe you’re thinking that Charles Murray is more complicated than that and he has something more to say than that white supremacy is a scientific fact. That’s probably true. He does have more to say. Mainly, he says that billionaires should pool their money to form a fund that can challenge every effort of the elected Congress and the executive branch to regulate any kind of business activity. With enough frivolous lawsuits to contend with, the regulatory agencies would be neutered.
This, he explains in his new book By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, is a better way than trying to win elections.
By The People, however, rejects outright the idea that Murray’s vision for a less generous and well-regulated society can be achieved through appeals to elected officials — or even through appeals to unelected judges. The government Murray seeks is “not going to happen by winning presidential elections and getting the right people appointed to the Supreme Court.” Rather, By The People, is a call for people sympathetic to Murray’s goals — and most importantly, for fantastically rich people sympathetic to those goals — to subvert the legitimate constitutional process entirely.
Also, he’s still whistling to the racist dogs:
The Supreme Court, Murray claims, “destroyed” constitutional “limits on the federal government’s spending authority” when it upheld Social Security in 1937. Since then, the federal government has violated a “tacit compact” establishing that it would not “unilaterally impose a position on the moral disputes that divided America” (Murray traces the voiding of this compact to 1964, the year that Congress banned whites-only lunch counters).
So, this is who Jeb Bush, the Republican establishment candidate listens to. If you think there’s no difference between the two parties, you need to pay some more attention to American politics.
