Quote of the Day:

[D]espite all the books sold by Thomas Piketty, the paths forward for progressive economic policy are mostly blocked — and not only by a well-entrenched Republican Party, but by liberalism’s ongoing inability to raise the taxes required to pay for the welfare state we already have. Since a long, slow, grinding battle over how to pay for those commitments is unlikely to fire anyone’s imagination, it’s not surprising that cultural causes — race, sex, identity — suddenly seem vastly more appealing.

–Ross Doughat, New York Times

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat had a provocative take yestrday why the left has become so loud and assertive (I would use the word virulent) lately on social issues such as Ferguson or campus rape. The column is today’s must-read.  

Douthat boils down the left’s new furiousness about social issues to this: the left is up against it when it comes to collecting more taxes to pay for their programs. On issues other than social issues, the left seems to be stuck. Occupy Wall Street, which was based on anger about economic matters, has, as Douthat notes, gone the way of the Yippies, while the anti-war left has lost focus.

But on social issues the left it is finding that it can score big victories. Part of their success on social ssues comes from  demonizing the other side, who in the left’s telling become pathological and bigots. Douthat writes:

[D]espite all the books sold by Thomas Piketty, the paths forward for progressive economic policy are mostly blocked — and not only by a well-entrenched Republican Party, but by liberalism’s ongoing inability to raise the taxes required to pay for the welfare state we already have. Since a long, slow, grinding battle over how to pay for those commitments is unlikely to fire anyone’s imagination, it’s not surprising that cultural causes — race, sex, identity — suddenly seem vastly more appealing.

The second source of the left’s angry attention to social issues is disappointment in the wake of the historic election of the first African American president:

The second wellspring is a more specific sort of disillusionment. Call it post-post-racialism: a hangover after the heady experience of electing America’s first black president; a frustration with the persistence of racial divides, even in an age of elite African-American achievement; and a sense of outrage over particular tragedies (Trayvon Martin, Ferguson) that seem to lay injustice bare.

Post-post-racial sentiment is connected to economic disappointments, because minorities have fared particularly poorly in the Great Recession’s aftermath. And this sentiment’s rejection of respectability politics — that is, the idea that the fate of black Americans rests mostly in their own hands — seems to point naturally toward a kind of redistributionism. (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent Atlantic essay “The Case For Reparations” made this argument explicitly.)

But again, because the paths to economic redistribution are mostly blocked, the more plausible way to put post-post-racialism into practice is social activism: a renewed protest politics of the kind we’ve seen since Ferguson, and a wider effort to police the culture for hidden forms of racism, which don’t require tax increases to root out.

The left has a potent weapon when it roots out hidden racism—it becomes irrelevant that the invisible racism may actually dig up "instances" of racism that are more imaginary than merely invisible. The charge of hidden racism, because of the protean nature of this racism, only makes it easier for the left to see it as all-pervasive. People who don't see it are simply too bigoted to see it.

Douthat thinks that this cultural-issues left could divide the Democratic coalition, essential to elect Hillary Clinton president. I would add that the rise of the virulent cultural left also means a goodly portion of the left is now animated by hatred over cultural issues that, while presented as rooted in idealism, are in reality valuable political tools. The propensity for creating a society that is so divided that we can scarcely talk to people on the other side is enormous. It is hard to have civil debate when the left's essential argument boils down to this: You are a hateful bigot.