A couple of mornings ago I happened to find an article on Rachel Maddow's Facebook page about a new voting law in North Carolina.  Now, it's easy to guess what her position was on the matter, because nearly every leftist says the same thing: she believes that the voting law was aimed at preventing minorities from voting, and the article was addressed particularly to the black community.  The truth about the law was, of course, that it was aimed at illegal immigrants in the Hispanic community – which is a perfectly reasonable law to pass when foreign nationals are threatening to upset an election.  But the most interesting thing about the complaints was that they had nothing to do with language tests or anything other than having a valid ID and being prepared to vote. 

It's worth mentioning that nobody is terrified about white men losing votes – worth mentioning because the only reason anyone could lose a vote in North Carolina is because he's completely incompetent, and leftists believe that white men are competent.  In fact, the only way to lose your vote is by losing your valid ID, being uninterested in registering, or waiting too long to register; which means that the only people who shouldn't be voting are the people who are incapable of tying their own shoelaces.  Rachel Maddow believes that this law is an insult to the black community, and it is.  But only because she is defending them.

There is a point to be made in all of this.  A leftist will argue in favor of euthanasia, but she doesn't understand the meaning of suicide.  For instance, a leftist will defend her pet minorities at the expense of a man's dignity: she'll change his name from illegal immigrant to undocumented immigrant, to circumvent the whole idea of good citizenry.  She'll go to war about the name "Redskins" or about Katy Perry wearing a kimono, never wondering whether good and reasonable people around the world are insulted about matters of character, and not descriptions of skin color or traditional clothing.  She'll turn Jews and Asians from knights in shining armor to damsels in distress by calling them minorities when they're two of the wealthiest and most culturally impressive groups in America – and if a black dunce isn't smart enough to go to school, she passes him through anyway with lowered standards and extra public funding.  To leave this list short – because it could be far, far longer – we'll simply have to say that by her own personal crusade, the leftist has declared minorities incompetent, irrationally sensitive, lazy, stupid, helpless, and incapable of following the laws of good sense and common citizenry.  A conservative will hold a man responsible because he is a man; a leftist will not hold a man responsible because the man happens to be black.

But there is another side to this coin.  Every condemnation of vice is a celebration of virtue, and for every minority made ridiculous, someone else is made respectable.  For there's really only one man the leftist holds responsible for the totality of a manly neighborliness – for keeping the law, for holding a job, for paying his bills, for keeping an ID, for being timely, for being intelligible, for understanding the difference between insult and description – and he's the same man she expects to fix things for everyone else, to be kind and chivalrous and heroic to everyone else, to play by a set of higher rules that nobody else has to follow, to be responsible for his own education, and to build the world that everyone else depends upon.  But we can't say who he is, because then we run the risk of saying the same things that leftists have been accidentally implying all along – and if there's anything insulting to a man of good sense and character, it is agreeing with leftist policy.

Jeremy Egerer is the editor of the philosophical websites Letters to Hannah and American Clarity.  American Clarity welcomes friend requests on Facebook.