Normalized to Death

John Derbyshire explains what ails the Republic, and may already have slain it: racial quotas, social engineering and the prideful destruction of a previously stellar public education system.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, having got rid of unjust laws, we were patiently waiting for things to equal out via education and the workings of the meritocracy. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, baffled that things were not equaling out, we devoted ourselves to cooking up theories about why this was so, and what might be done about it. From the mid-2000s onward, confronted at last with the emptiness of all the theories, and with our inability to move any of the needles even a millimeter on their dials, we gave up. We still clapped along to the happy-face rhetoric, like "social churchgoers," but in our hearts we no longer believed any of it...yet were still stuck with all that accumulated jurisprudence, the husks and dried shells of false hopes and abandoned theories. That's the law we live with today.

Like an inverted Midas, everything the liberals touch turns to dung -- not least the Democratic Party.