Well, who ya gonna believe me or your own eyes?

Chicolini (Chico Marx), in the 1933 movie, Duck Soup

There is a peculiar paradox in contemporary race relations: the more government struggles to achieve equality, the more it fails, and with mounting failures comes yet more coercion to repress those who tell the truth. This makes little logical sense. After all, silencing skeptics and twisting reality might have been necessary in the 1950s and early 1960s when resistance to the civil rights agenda was widespread, but why today then pursuing racial equality is sacrosanct?

There is, however, an explanation for this paradox. Namely, despite all the trillions and the draconian legal measures to impose racial engineering, it has failed. Matters may even have grown worse, Nevertheless, too much has been invested to acknowledge this defeat, so repression and lying serve as an alternative to confessing the truth. We are thus soldiering on, going from one disaster to the next.

Silencing racial heretics was not always the norm. In the mid-1950s, outside of civil rights activists, few cared if Southern public schools were forced to admit blacks. The clash in Little Rock, AK over school integration in 1957, for example, might as well transpired on Mars as far as most Americans were concerned, With a public oblivious to this racial engineering, why lie or intimidate doubters? Easy to ignore all the angry crackers, too. Unfortunately, as one failed draconian measure after another was imposed, and Washington (particularly federal judges) doubled down on the pressure, failure soon spread nationwide.

Today, however, thanks to thousands of government programs and dictates, everybody knows the awkward truth—it didn’t work. Even fervent defenders of the quest can see it in how government has mismanaged the revitalization of countless black-run cities like Baltimore or Detroit or fallen short in its economic policies to eliminate black poverty or boosting black wealth, or otherwise transforming American society into a racial paradise. And thanks to dozens of useless massively expensive educational reforms such as Head Start and No Child Left Behind, millions now recognizes the largely intractable intellectual gaps between blacks and whites.

The Soviet Union offers a rough parallel prior to its breakup. To condense a long story, the post-1917 Revolution Soviet Union was an economic disaster for decades after its creation to be followed by a world-wide depression, World War II, and then post-war scarcity. Until the 1960s the gulf between the communist economy and the West, though large, was not gigantic and, critically, the Workers’ Paradise was, plausibly, just around the corner.

By the 1970s, however, the gap between East and West was widening and the promised closing doubtful. Soviet citizens had paid a terrible human price for communist rule but the truth about the disasters imposed by Marxist ideology could not be hidden. Strangers in Moscow or Leningrad now badgered Western tourists to buy their used Levi jeans while many glimpsed the prosperous West via TV or foreign movies. The contrast was now inescapable.

The Marxist economy had failed, and no amount of denial could obscure reality and nearly everybody, including elites, now knew it. So, what was the Soviet elite to do? Abandon Marxism? Hardly. Gradually introduce free markets? Unthinkable. The only practical option was to ramp up internal propaganda and tighten the screws, a policy pursued despite the minuscule odds of armed insurrection. The mirage had to be maintained, and at all costs.

Comedians had to clear all jokes a year in advance with the Ministry of Culture and improvisations were absolutely verboten. Nothing even vaguely anti-communist was permitted. Predictably, state-approved jokes were not funny and performers who violated party dictates risked being fired or sent to prison.

Dissenters were sent to psychiatric wards or shipped to gulags. Prominent writers such as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn were arrested, stripped of citizenship, and deported. Best sellers readily available in the West such as Dr. Zhivago were smuggled in and secretly distributed only to trusted friends. Prominent critics were convicted in show trials and brutally treated. To repeat, the crushing of dissent did not reflect any real internal threat to the regime. These draconian measures would not have been necessary had the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution delivered as promised.

The US is different—consumer products are abundant, cheap and perform as advertised, but parallels exist in managing repeated massive policy failures. We lack political commissars, but universities have Diversity, Inclusion and Equity bureaucracies. As in the Soviet Union, language is politically consequential, so America now awash with efforts to purge the English language from anything that hint privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion, so saying “slave” instead of “enslaved person” is a punishable offense. Soviet era children ratted on their parents while American students report “dangerous” professors. Our party line apparatchiki reside in Departments of Human Resources, not the Kremlin. Millions now dread committing “micro-aggressions” against thin-skinned blacks. Woe to a US comedian who pokes fun at intellectually challenged black mayors.

As in the old Soviet Union, failed policies and the lies that accompany these fantasies are hardly believable. Being able to pretend is now a vital political skill. Did anyone believe that President Obama’s Race to the Top educational reform would transform inner-city kids unable to read into serious scholars? The mass media does “get with the program,” but reality still seeps out when a picture of the rapist eventually emerges. Thanks to iPhones and the Internet, millions can witness black mayhem in McDonalds, cruise ships or the Miami airport. Despite being intimidated into silence, people know that the slogan, “Diversity is Our Strength” is about as credible as “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

Indeed, fresh failures only inspire yet more unbelievable “explanations” for our racial Great Leap Forward, and even those sympathetic to the crusade now harbor doubts. Recall the “credibility gap” from the Vietnam War era. Today we have the racial version. Discussions of race are surrealistic: everything is racist while black shortcomings are glibly explained by an invisible, all-pervasive “systemic racism.” It is one thing to blame under-funded segregated schools for dismal outcomes, quite another to attribute black illiteracy to the unconscious bias of black teachers. As rhetoric grows divorced from reality, agnosticism replaces faith and may soon become atheism.

Massive affirmative action steadily exposes race-related differences in intellectual ability. What was once only suspected, now becomes undeniable. White and Asian college students daily encounter academically struggling black classmates while attending lectures from incompetent black professors. Meanwhile corporate managers must tolerate but dare not fire black employees unable to do the work despite all the coaching, mentoring and lowered standards.

Racial differences in IQ across all occupations guarantees that ordinary Americans will regularly recognize that “diversity is our strength, we are all equally able” is a total lie. Charles Murray’s Facing Reality (p. 76) catalogues enormous racial differences in IQ across multiple professions, and blacks are always, on average, the less able.

These are the secretaries, teachers, janitors, retail clerks, nurses, among others, that ordinary Americans must encounter. A typical shopper in a city with a black population invariably will discover the harsh reality of imposed diversity and inclusion when dealing with a black store clerk who usually (but not always) performs poorly vis-à-vis her white counterparts. Clients dealings with black professionals will likewise be exposed to the unspeakable truth.

Will the silencing of those violating the race taboo ever end? Can we take comfort in the triumph of past scientific revolutions, for example, Darwinian evolution supplanting Biblical creationism? Is woke madness yet another crazy moment like real estate or tulip bubbles?

What about a “Sputnik Moment” when the entire edifice of “Diversity is Our Strength” comes crashing down? Such transformative moments do occasionally happen, particularly with unexpected military disasters, e.g., Napoleon’s rout of the Prussian army in 1806. Maybe a long-awaited United Airlines flight with a black women pilot and co-pilot become disoriented after leaving the San Francisco airport, and crashes into the Golden Gate Bridge. With 500+ dead bodies everywhere and the bridge gone, the cry may go out, “enough.”

An alternative might be Potemkin America where elites impose an all-encompassing fantasy world to replace a reality visible with one’s own eyes. AI and Virtual Reality will design a fictional Disneyworld of absolute racial equality. Or “reality” may become TV commercials, improbable sit-coms and woke films, unrealistic portrayals of blacks in the print media and K-12 textbooks. Security camera videos of black criminality might be electronically “whitened” while novels. films and museums are “disinfected” of “dangerous stereotypes.” The Broadway hit Hamilton is just a first step in “colorizing” of American history. Everybody will finally know that blacks, especially black women, are top scientists, courtesy of daily PBS NOVA documentaries. If reality cannot be changed, the portrayal of reality must suffice.

The story of Prohibition’s rise and fall may offer hope. The “dry” movement initially seemed all-powerful politically and was deeply entrenched in an older American culture. Its juggernaut enacted the 18^th Amendment, an accomplishment that required consent from three-quarters of all states. Yet after a little more than a decade, it collapsed for the simple reason that it did not work, and no amount of proselytizing on the evils of Demon Rum or incarcerating bootleggers could save it. Political movements may have a shelf-life.

The current DIE mania may disappear if America drifts into Third-World disorder. Woke infected businesses will go bankrupt leaving thousands of empty stores and unemployed workers, air force planes crash due to incompetent black pilots while more and more pleasant suburban cites come to resemble Selma, Alabama. But it will be a Golden Age for comedy thanks to hysterical riffs on dumb college DIE administrators. The dam will burst, and the once unspeakable will explode into public life.

Remember that hardly any CIA or university experts correctly predicted the Soviet Union’s sudden demise. Unlike the people who suffered the Marxist lies and stood in long lines for flimsy toilet paper, many American experts believed Soviet fabrications. For these “experts,” all those commissars and their security apparatus would rule forever. Regime opponents, said the outside experts, were just a rag-tag bunch of scruffy dissenters armed with typewriters and a few hidden copy machines.

What the outside professionals ignored, of course, is a crisis of faith, and what happens when the beliefs permitting an orthodoxy to rule lose credibility. The old USSR suffered the loss of the Mandate from Heaven, to use the Chinese term. or, in the language of Max Weber, the loss of legitimacy. The quest for racial equality, despite it being the current official orthodoxy and supported by universities and the mass media, like all belief systems resting on fantasy, grow vulnerable to disbelief, and when belief is gone, the system itself disappears. Those who despair over the current madness should take comfort in knowing that all once formidable cosmologies eventually fall into history’s scape heap.