When you see something as facially absurd as San Francisco’s proposal to pay $5 million in reparations to every black person whether they were descendants of slaves or not, which is only a down payment since the proposal also calls for a guaranteed income of $97,000 per year thereafter, one question to ask is: What would Rush Limbaugh say about this? I think he’d say: conservatives should support San Francisco in this endeavor, and hope it spreads to every other liberal Democrat run city in the country.
The logic here is simple. Almost ten years ago, after Ta-Nehisi Coates floated reparartions at The Atlantic, I wrote here that if we are to consider reparations seriously, Democrats should be made to pay them. Here’s the relevant part of my argument from 2014:
The chief defender of slavery and its aftermath, the regime of Jim Crow segregation, was the Democratic Party. Democrats in large numbers opposed the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, then for decades disenfranchised blacks in defiance of the intent of the 15th Amendment, and contrived numerous ways to take the property of newly freed blacks and/or prevent them from acquiring property in the South. For decades Democrats blocked civil rights legislation, and federal anti-lynch laws that Republicans proposed in the early 20th century. And Democrats voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in much larger proportion than Republicans did—a fact many Republicans seem to forget. But for the determined opposition of the Democratic Party for more than a century, blacks today would likely have accumulated a larger share of national assets—there would be less of what Coates calls the “wealth gap”—and be closer to equality on all of the other measures held dear by the Left.
I think Rush would put the matter more simply: For over a century, Democrats were the party of slavery, secession, and segregation. And that since San Francisco is an overwhelmingly Democratic city—I think San Francisco Republicans meet in a phone booth (or would if the few remaining ones hadn’t been turned into latrines for the homeless)—it is only fitting that its Democratic citizens should pay up.
The time for cheap virtue signaling is over. It is long past time for Democrats to pay up, and San Francisco voters should learn a harsh lesson about what kind of government they keep voting for. As H.L. Mencken once said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Chaser: Over at Hot Air, David Strom passes along the delicious story of San Francisco supervisor Hillary Ronen, who led the “Defund the Police” charge in San Francisco in the full flush of George Floyd hysteria, but who is now desperate for increased police protection in her district because “crime is out of control.” Strom has the receipts from 2020:
Mission accomplished! The headcount of police officers in San Francisco is down sharply the last three years, and recruitment for new officers is abysmal. Gooder and harder.
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