To the Editor:

American slavery was rationalized using convictions of racial inferiority. Southern defeat did not free Southerners from need of such rationalizations, and the fear of the victimizer becoming victimized expressed itself in mechanisms like the KKK. In 2000, William Lind shed light on the origins of a now 70-year-old Leftist “agenda,” which imagined minorities, women and gays aligned against white males in a “Long Walk Through the Institutions” (including marriage) to destroy the middle class and bring on a communist revolution. American introspection that began with Archie Bunker soon moved to the Neanderthal “Tim the Tool Man” and Homer Simpson who, like black slaves, were dehumanized to justify “political correctness.” By 2016, John Kasich could run for president, bragging that he had set up a $500,000 “grant fund” for any woman or minority IT start-up that would come to Ohio. Or as they say in liberal land, “No white male need apply.”

Trump’s election threatens to emancipate “uppity” white males, Christians and stay-at-home moms from the stereotypes of inferiority the church of “political correctness” has placed upon them, and the Left now fears victimization from people they have been berating, when that is not what Trump was selling. I say, before you ascribe sainthood to Congressman John Lewis for fighting for his own rights (which would come to include a place at the front of the Affirmative Action line), you might want to acknowledge all those maligned “deplorables” who stood up for him against their own race in the ’60s and then moved to the back of the line trying to right that old wrong. Tucker Carlson mentioned some liberal blogger whose white male plumber spoke with a Southern accent, causing the blogger to wonder if the plumber had voted for Trump, and that possibility made him uncomfortable, even afraid. He blogged that his life would never be the same. What the liberal was describing was what we call “bigotry” and “prejudice.” Without a Greenback-wielding, Lincoln-style leader, there can be no Reconstruction, no reconciliation that will not be thwarted by “carpetbaggers” (The Money Masters).

Russ Denton

Prairie City