The Condescension Complex
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
On October 5, 1979, I joined over a million of the faithful in Chicago’s Grant Park to attend a Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II. The most Polish city in the world outside of Poland celebrated with him.
All of Chicago rejoiced. Police later reported that peace had reigned throughout the Windy City that day.
Those days are over.
“Be not afraid,” Pope John Paul told us.
Now everybody is afraid.
Last Saturday, a mob swept through that same Grant Park, attacking, rioting, and destroying, assaulting pedestrians, smashing cars, and trapping the passengers inside.
Enter Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s newly elected mayor who assumes office next month.
Johnson ran for office as a high-tax, high-crime candidate owned by the school unions. Those unions have failed Chicago’s children, and Johnson has already failed the people of Chicago.
“In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend,” he said Sunday. “It is unacceptable and has no place in our city. However, it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
Rampant crime has been wracking Chicago for several years now, and Johnson been reluctant to address it. Violence “speaks to a level of desperation,” he told interviewers in 2020, when he was a county commissioner. When asked if he was condoning the looting gangs that have routinely targeted luxury stores along Chicago’s Miracle Mile, he responded, “I’m saying that people are acting out of desperation. We don’t want a society that is acting out of desperation, but you have to pay attention to the cries that people have.”
The interviewer (good for her!) pressed him on the question: “You’re not condoning looting?”
Johnson replied, “There’s no way to try to embrace that. What I’m saying is you can’t condone the looting that corporations continue to do every single day.”
“Property is theft,” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote in 1840. And Proudhon’s mandate lives on in Chicago, where the “desperate” are free to take whatever they want.
Grow up and behave? They’re just not up to it, the poor desperados.
Condescension Can Be
A Concentration Camp
Johnson’s attitude is hardly unique: Among the elites there abounds a secret, or maybe not so secret, condescension for those who are somehow inferior to them. We cannot require that these lesser sorts — call them “desperate,” “deprived,” exploited” — follow the law like the rest of us. That’s just asking too much.
In like fashion, these same masses, when considered as a voting bloc, are expected to return the favor by supporting the Mayor Johnsons of the world simply because these elites do so much for them — done mostly in the manner of stealing money from productive people to pass out to the desperados, while letting them loose to loot as part of the bargain.
The elites forbid that the masses lose their “class consciousness” and actually start to think. If that happens, they might realize that their secular saviors are the cause of their desperation.
So far be it from Mr. Johnson to demand that violent children behave or that lazy teachers teach. That’s just asking too much.
Mr. Johnson’s school unions have made sure that their captive pupils stay untaught. Two years ago, when parents were demanding that schools reopen, the union tweeted that the demands were “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.
Parents are racists, and the productive population that earned Chicago’s nickname as “The City That Works” are now looters.
Mr. Johnson now brings that spirit to City Hall.
Is It Condescension?
Or Contempt?
Sometimes it’s a mixed bag. Mr. Johnson sympathizes with the desperate rampaging youth, but he doesn’t expect them to change. He is a Marxist, and when it comes to the Class Struggle, you’re stuck with your Class Consciousness: You couldn’t change it if you tried.
Now for Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and company, the concept of the proletariat was useful, but individual proles were expendable indeed, by the tens of millions.
And so are the desperate proles. They are kept poor, prodded to resent, envy, and hate the rich and pour gas in the tank of the revolution.
Unfortunately, this notion of “class struggle” has seeped into today’s USCCB. A uniquely secular ideology has penetrated there, to an unfortunate degree.
Take the bishops’ support of two of Joe Biden’s top priorities: illegal immigration and racism. Curiously, they’re about the only two political issues that all of our bishops agree on. Even though, apart from abortion, they strongly support the rest of Biden’s domestic agenda, these two issues come out on top year after year.
Last Friday El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz wrote Congress in the name of the USCCB to request tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to continue funding dozens of Joe Biden’s disastrous immigration programs, many of which generously fund the USCCB’s NGOs.
Bishop Seitz, undoubtedly the conference’s most zealous advocate of illegal immigration, represents a consummate example of the hierarchy’s Condescension-Contempt complex.
He shepherds thousands of illegals over the border, and champions millions more. But he never demands publicly that illegal aliens follow the law — or the Ten Commandments, for that matter, regarding basics like “don’t lie for welfare,” or “don’t steal Social Security numbers.”
That would be asking too much. Instead, he condescends, and they return the favor, disappearing by the millions, aided by Catholic NGOs that secretly deliver them by night throughout America’s heartland.
Bishop Seitz has only contempt for the Americans whose unsuspecting communities are inundated. But he cheerfully welcomes Kamala Harris in El Paso while he spitefully brands state officials who defend the rule of law as “hypocrites” and “Pharisees.”
Flattery and condescension for Madame Prime Minister of Abortion, contempt for Americans and their elected, pro-life officials who enforce the law.
And racism?
The USCCB has outreach programs for Hispanics, African Americans, Inuits, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans, but none for whites. Whites, we are given to understand, bear the eternal brand of racism, “Americas’ Second Original Sin,” and are thus permanently inferior, and guilty as well: Our bourgeois class is condemned with a blend of contempt (“Racist!”) mingled with condescension (“Pray, Pay, and Obey!”).
So goes life in this Age of the Laity.
This unlovely but ubiquitous tendency was reflected in the hierarchy’s responses in the wake of two recent events.
When a Minneapolis policeman killed George Floyd three years ago, over eighty bishops made public statements commemorating Floyd’s death. Bishop Seitz posed for a picture as he knelt before a placard from Black Lives Matter, and the subsequent riots killed dozens and ruined thousands of lives, many forever.
When a black racist terrorist killed six and injured dozens more in Waukesha eighteen months later, the media blamed the SUV, no pastoral letters were issued, and no riots ensued. When Darrell Brooks received six life sentences for the murders, the news was gone in 24 hours.
These tendencies occur repeatedly. When whites kill, it’s “racism.” When blacks kill, it’s “guns.”
Mayor Johnson’s condescension toward “desperate” blacks in Chicago seems to have a counterpart in the mind of America’s Catholic hierarchy. Johnson is a Marxist, but most of our bishops are not. Do they owe us an explanation?
