MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry is convinced that America never embraced her socialistic values because we’re all a bunch or racists. To Harris-Perry, and leftists everywhere, this hateful country was founded and built on pure racism. This racism has held back the full-blown socialism which she desperately desires, the same socialism which has completely wrecked so many countries – Greece as the most recent example.
On Saturday morning, the Bernie Sanders-worshiping host asked her panel a seemingly rhetorical question. The answer she desired was already implanted into one of the stuttering, brainwashed panelists, whom she turned to on cue for the requisite answer. The question at hand was basically, why has America always been dead-set against socialism?
What followed was sheer ridiculousness:
KAI WRIGHT, THE NATION MAGAZINE: Let me see. Could it be race?
HARRIS-PERRY: Could it be? I mean that becomes the kind of standard story, right, is that in this country, race and racial privilege has trumped class identity as a way of organizing our politics.
WRIGHT: Well, I mean so we could go way back, right, I mean the whole — if we`re talking about capitalism in the first instance. The whole system globally was built on slavery. The modern economy was built – the cotton was built on cotton which was built on financing, financing slaves. And so from that moment forward, we`ve been in a discussion about capitalism in the United States that has, in fact, sorted people by race. And you can’t — and so when we get back to sort of the public investments that we make in people and that part of democratic socialism that has been challenged and difficult particularly in modern times because, coming out of the Great Society, coming out of the mid-20th century, we have had a politics that makes those public investments giveaways to black people.
There you have it-clear unadulterated racism.
” … in this country, race and racial privilege has trumped class identity as a way of organizing our politics.
Melissa Harris-Perry
According to Harris-Perry and Wright, “race and racial privilege” organize our politics while our capitalism sorts people by race. These ideas, not liberty, individualism and freedom, have kept socialism at bay for the United States.
Then the only panelist with any sense jumped in and spoke to the values of individual freedom and liberty as the real deterrent of socialism. The very Enlightenment ideals of individualism and freedom which sparked the colonists to revolt in the first place were the same ideals that promoted capitalism (not socialism) and led to the eventual toppling of slavery.
MATT WELCH: I want to say something: the history and race is a huge part of the history of this country and sustained on everything. But capitalism didn`t just proceed from a bunch of people sitting around and saying how can I be the most racist?…But it also proceeded from a notion of individual rights and individual liberty. And some of the people who helped topple those racist structures that came or were put upon it were animated just as much by that notion of individual [liberty].
Although correct and historically accurate, the argument was a lost cause on Harris-Perry. But what else would you expect from an MSNBC host?