Hillary Clinton’s ‘implicit bias’

OPINION:

The world is changing at breakneck speed but that’s not fast enough for someone who demands instant perfection. There was a time when the disappointments that come to everyone were resolved by consulting with the better angels of a human’s nature, and getting on with making the best of it. Now the culture teaches to consult only to find better angles, and knock the devil out of whoever gets in the way.

Hillary Clinton told Americans in the first presidential debate that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police,” and offered a little sound advice. “I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other, and therefore, “I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, ’why am I feeling this way?’” But it was sound advice for her, too.

If “everyone” is guilty of prejudice, Hillary should spend more time before her mirror and recall her mean remark about Donald Trump and half his friends as “a basket of deplorables.” She might herself, “Why am I feeling this way?” She later offered the ritual regret for calling half of the Donald’s supporters “deplorable,” without saying what the proper fraction should be. If not half, perhaps only 40 percent? The theme of the waning political season is a growing impatience with elitists who lecture the common folk to be “nonjudgmental” about the liberal nostrums imposed on everybody who can’t jump into a black SUV and flee with armed guards to a secluded estate. It’s one of the reasons why 65 percent of Americans say the nation is on the wrong track.

The answer to racism in law enforcement, Hillary says, is to “retrain” (or is that “restrain”?) police, and she pledges to spend lots of money to pay for universal attitude adjustment. Re-educating the men and women on the thin blue line might resolve the sharp increase in crime. Or it might not. It might be that it’s the criminal class that needs re-education. The FBI reports that murder jumped nearly 11 percent in 2015, and violent crime of all categories climbed 4 percent. The disturbing numbers ended two years of falling rates and add substance to Donald Trump’s judgment that entrenched Democratic policies have victimized inner-city minorities most of all. “We need law and order,” the Donald says. “If we don’t have it, we’re not going to have a country. African Americans and Hispanics are living in hell.” Hyperbole, perhaps, but on point.

The crime trend is worse in sanctuary cities, where the police are often powerless to prosecute illegal immigrants. In Los Angeles, where illegals roam free from fear of deportation, violent crime rose 20 percent in 2015, including a 10 percent increase in murders. The high priests of secularism bore in on the ingrained prejudices of Americans of every color, and scorn as irrelevant the individual conscience as shaped by church, synagogue and mosque.

Pointing the finger at police and charging everyone with “implicit bias” relieves Hillary and her liberal brain trust of responsibility for generations of failed policies that reject personal responsibility as the guarantor of a stable and ordered society. Blame-shifting is not the answer. If Hillary Clinton really wants to understand what ails America she could begin by consulting “mirror, mirror on the wall.”