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July 12, 2023

As with many semantic corruptions, the left started it.  They trivialized the term “denialism” by applying it not to the denial of a real tragedy, but to skepticism about an imagined climate doomsday.  I would like to rehabilitate the phrase a little bit, if I could, by applying it to the denial of an historic phenomenon as real as the Holocaust and potentially as tragic.

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I refer here to the havoc wrought by the 1960s.  Havoc came in many forms: the zeitgeist shift that undermined personal responsibility, the programs that undermined the family, and the social upheaval that glorified casual sex and single parenthood.

Only by denying the fallout from the 1960s did Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson make even the illusion of sense in their recent dissents on the affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court.  After a year of research for my new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, I know all too well the audacity of that denial.

To be fair to the ’60s, the effects of this progressive mind virus had begun to surface in the previous decade.  As early as 1957, for instance, Stephen Sondheim was satirizing it in his lyrics to West Side Story’s “Gee, Officer Krupke.”  The psychiatrists, social workers, and judges who believe that “society” has played the young gang-bangers “a terrible trick” all come in for a deserved ribbing.

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But there was nothing funny about what was to come.  Almost unnoticed, a labyrinth of soul-crushing social programs was taking root and would soon be institutionalized by the Lyndon Johnson administration under the rubric of “The Great Society.”

At the time, the only person brave enough — or crazy enough — to call attention to the damage done by these programs was Johnson’s undersecretary of labor (and later U.S. senator), Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  In his remarkably prescient report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Moynihan sounded the alarm in 1965, the same year the Great Society was launched. 

“The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling,” Moynihan warned.  Causing the dissolution were the sundry social programs that promised women financial security on the real but rarely spoken condition that there be no married father in the household.

Until about 1960, the income gap between backs and whites was narrowing.  After 1960, with the surge in single-parent households, it began to reverse itself.  The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Moynihan believed, would only increase frustration.

As a result of the “full recognition of their civil rights,” blacks were expecting that equal opportunities would “produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups,” but, added Moynihan, “This is not going to happen.”

The civil rights movement was designed to combat institutional white racism.  With that battle won, movement leaders had to pretend the battle was still raging.  To preserve that illusion, they pressured Johnson to silence Moynihan.  Not wanting to alienate a voting bloc whose loyalties he had hoped to purchase, Johnson exiled Moynihan and deep-sixed his report.