Sowell's Ethnic America: Chinese, Japanese

After learning about the European immigrants from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the East Asians.

The Chinese

Chinese people started migrating away from China during the decline of the Ming dynasty. Migration to the US started with the discovery of gold in 1849. But nearly all the migrants were from one province, Kwantung, and even one area, Toishan. The immigrants worked as contract laborers in agriculture, railroad building, and worked in gangs under the supervision of a fellow Chinese. But they worked so hard, and for so little wages, that they provoked the fear and hatred of white workers. As in attacks and murders. 

Things got so bad that the US passed a Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This created great hardship for the mostly single male workers, because they could not bring wives over -- especially given how family-centric Chinese culture is. There were special fees and taxes placed upon Chinese businesses like laundries. Because of these impositions, the Chinese kept themselves apart in "Chinatowns" and did not use the legal system to resolve disputes. So local Chinese leaders and the secret society "tongs" kept the peace.

The Chinatowns became notorious as centers of vice: prostitution, drugs, and gambling, and that attracted white "ruffians and hoodlums." But eventually they developed into tourist attractions and needed to keep the vice down to a dull roar.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was not relaxed until 1945, when a predominantly female immigration allowed husbands and wives to be reunited and provide partners to a predominantly male community. Many of the new wives were selected by matchmakers.

Although the economic rise of Chinese Americans was mostly in Chinatown business -- financed by Chinese credit associations -- by World War II there was a labor shortage and Chinese were able to move into the general economy. It didn't hurt that Americans felt sorry for China being invaded by Japan.

In education, Chinese American children did well, whether in segregated schools or not. And the Chinese sent their children to college, so the Chinese moved into the professions. By 1959 the average income of Chinese Americans was above that of other Americans.

After the Maoist revolution, the Toishan Chinese in America were invaded by refugees from Communism that came through Hong Kong. They did not speak the Chinese dialect spoken by the Toishaners, but neither did they speak much English. On the other hand the new immigrants had been partially westernized in Hong Kong and did not have the strict family culture of the Toishaners. Conflict ensued.

Today Chinese Americans have higher incomes than the average and "higher occupational status." A quarter of Chinese Americans work in "scientific and professional fields." But mostly their prosperity issues from the fact that Chinese Americans work more than the average American.

The Japanese

Migration from Japan to the US began after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, in a culture that admired the US. The first migrants were contract laborers to Hawaii and did not work out. But later migrants, as sugarcane workers in Hawaii and mainland US laborers "on railroad and in mines, lumber mills, canneries, meat-packing plants," were so efficient that they were "feared and hated by American workers and American labor unions." As they moved up from agricultural laborers to tenant farmers they provoked hostility from white farmers. Thus the Alien Land Law of 1913 that forbade California land ownership by aliens -- Asians in general and Japanese in particular.

But, because of the rise of Japan, there was no Exclusion Act. Only the "Gentlemen's Agreement of 1908."

Under the terms of this agreement, Japan itself severely limited the number of immigrants to the United States, and the American government allowed the wives of of existing Japanese in the United States to join their husbands and for parents and children to be reunited here. 

Thus the extreme sex imbalance of Chinese immigrants was avoided. And the immigrants and their children became Japanese Americans.

The first generation of immigrants, the Issei, had been selected by the Japanese government "for their health, character, and willingness to work." They were predisposed to "accept and emulate the American way of life."

The second generation, the Nisei, were significantly different. They spoke English, and very little Japanese, and the values they learned from school and American culture were in conflict with the values of the Issei.

But then came World War II and the internment of the Japanese Americans. Rising hysteria against the Japanese encouraged President Roosevelt, by Executive Order, to remove Japanese Americans from "military areas" into internment camps in the middle of nowhere. The impact of the mass internment was devastating, as the victims had to liquidate their property in hasty sales -- to the tune of $400 million in 1942 prices. And also devastating culturally, as the family-oriented Japanese Americans were forced to live in military-style barracks.

But the US needed labor. So in the spring of 1942 "some seasonal agricultural laborers were allowed furloughs to help ease farm labor shortages" and the furloughs were eventually changed to "permanent relocations." Then it was hundreds of railroad workers, then 4,000 Nisei college students -- to safe Eastern and Midwestern colleges. And in January 1943, the US started to recruit Nisei into the armed forces. Despite their bitterness, many Japanese American youth "seized the opportunity to prove their loyalty in combat." Then there were the Nisei in every military formation translating often un-coded Japanese military communications into English.

The internments proved a turning point for Japanese Americans.

Never had a group so proved their loyalty under impossible conditions.

In 1946 in California, an anti-Japanese initiative was defeated overwhelmingly by the voters. 

After the war, the Issei returned to their former lives and tried to rebuild their businesses. But the Nisei, educated and English speaking, were able to enter the mainstream. Their college degrees enabled them to build careers in "engineering, optometry, or business administration." By 1980 Japanese Americans were earning 11 percent more than ordinary Americans.  

Japanese American success is partly because they work more, and partly because they are educated more. But the Issei generation got its start in occupations with little education: "farming, contract gardening, small-business ownership." The new generation is assimilating, and intermarrying, reaching 50 percent in Los Angeles County in 1970. However, among the youth, grade point averages are declining towards the norm, and social problems are on the rise.

Next: The Blacks

Sowell's Ethnic America: Jews, Italians

After learning about the Irish and the Germans from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the Jews.

The Jews

Three kinds of Jews migrated to the US. First the Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal; then the German Jews; then the Eastern European Jews after 1880.

Sephardic Jews were doing OK in Spain/Portugal until they were expelled in 1492. Many arrived penniless in colonial North America but soon recovered their wealth. There were about 2,000 Jews in the colonies at the time of the Revolution. But they looked down on the Ashkenazi Jews.

Ashkenazi Jews from Germany began as a trickle but ended up at half a million by 1880. They spread out throughout the nation, "working as small tradesmen and professionals". Many started out as peddlers on foot, then graduated to horse and buggy and finally opening local stores. The Guggenheims and Gimbels started out as peddlers. By 1880 40 percent of German Jewish families had at least one servant. Less than one percent were still peddlers or laborers.

Eastern European Jews came from the Russian Pale of Settlement that suffered pogroms after the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. These Jews had settled in Eastern Europe with the encouragement of Polish royalty in the 13th and 14th centuries. But then Catherine the Great confined them in the Pale of Settlement in eastern Poland and western Russia.  Fleeing from persecutions over one third of he Jews in eastern Europe fled to the United States in the four decades after 1880.

The eastern European Jews arrived penniless, but about 50 percent were literate. The "uptown"German Jews in New York looked down upon them, the "downtown" Jews, that worked in the needle trades in the Lower East Side. But the uptowners still gave the newcomers the benefit of the dense network of Jewish philanthropic institutions.

Because of their distinctive appearance and limited language skills and strict religious rules, the eastern European Jews could not spread out, but had to work among Jews. So they worked in the "sweatshops" of the garment trade of the Lower East Side in incredibly crowded tenements using Isaac Singer's new sewing machines. The garment factories were mostly owned by German Jews; a generation later eastern European Jews owned the factories and Italians were the workers.

The sweatshop today is a scandal, but they enabled women to work in the home without leaving children unattended. But the workers managed to save from their earnings to help the rise of themselves and their children. The children worked in the sweatshops, but seldom full-time, because their parents wanted them to go to school. But they didn't all go to college. Not in the first generation.

The spectacular rise of the Jews -- to top of the income rankings by 1980 -- is a testament to the experience of Jews over the centuries. They knew about barriers but knew how to circumvent them. And they largely created the clothing production industry and the movie industry. Plus many of them already had centuries of experience with urban life and commercial activity.

The Italians

Immigrants from Italy are primarily from southern Italy, mostly peasants and agricultural laborers. The culture they brought to the US reflects the culture of their homeland. Southern Italy is all wrong for prosperous agriculture. The growing season is dry; the rain comes in torrents; the agricultural land is malarial; people live in the hills; the landowners are beasts. So southern Italians trusted no-one except direct family; they did not experience a culture of law and policing. They have learned that individual initiative is dangerous, and right wrongs with the old system of vengeance. They opposed the education system imposed on them from the north, and weren't that keen on the Catholic Church.

There is a big difference between northern and southern Italian immigrants. Around 1900 12 percent of northerners were illiterate, but 54 percent of southerner. The northerners liked to pass for Americans and separate from the embarrassing southerners.

Italian immigrants from the same village tended to cluster near each other, and didn't trust people from other villages. They interacted fairly peaceably with the Jews, but not the Irish. They were dependable on the job, but lacked initiative and thus required close supervision. Typically they worked for an intermediary, a padrone, rather than an employer.

The employer paid the padrone, and the padrone paid the workers -- after deducting his fees, expenses, advances, rent, and credit charge.

Social reformers hated the padrone system and it eventually died out, as Italians became better adjusted to American life. 

Immigrant culture focused on the family, and the church did not earn their loyalty. In Italy they had not attended church much, and in America they didn't get on with the Irish that ran the church and the Catholic schools. They created mutual-aid societies, but they were fragmented according to village or provincial origins. Italian immigrants were active in labor unions, but created few organizations themselves. They had lower crime rates than other immigrant groups, but because they immediately responded to an insult or an attack with a knife people learned not to provoke them. The famous Italian Mafia didn't take off until Prohibition.

Italians were anti-education, and took a while to change their minds. This meant that the experts regarded Italians as mentally inferior. Even in 1980, college attendance by Italian Americans was below average. Still, the Italians did rise. In 1910 in Boston, two-thirds were manual laborers, but only 38 percent at the end of their working life.

Italian Americans caught up with the Irish occupationally. Even in 1909, 22 percent of Italians in Boston were in business compared to 5 percent of the Irish. But they made their way in ways that did not require formal education. They did not just work; they saved.

When they first arrived Italians had less hostility to blacks than other immigrant groups. But later the groups grew apart. Partly that is because Italians are less inclined to participate in "white flight" from lower-income neighborhoods. Italians get on much better with Chinese than with the Irish.

Next: Chinese, Japanese

Sowell's Ethnic America: Irish, Germans

I was reading a piece by Charles Murray on "The Immortal Sowell" and he mentioned Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America.

Sowell sees his books on race and ethnicity as the product of his obligation as a black scholar confronted with destructive racial policies.

Hmm, I thought. Did I ever read Ethnic America? So I went downstairs and found Ethnic America on my bookshelf. But I had never read it.

Wow. What a book. Right away, it answered a couple of questions I had about the Jews. As in, how did they get to be in Eastern Europe? And how does Yiddish appear?

But first. The key thing to understand about immigration is that before steamships, the migrants came in sailing ships that were really designed for cargo. For instance,

[T]he Irish came to America in vessels that carried lumber [to Ireland] from the northeastern United States, so that is where they landed when the ships returned.

Naturally, the living conditions in these sailing ships was vile, "without adequate ventilation, toilet facilities, or enough food or water." The migrants slept on shelves -- except that made women rather vulnerable, so many preferred to sleep on the floor in a sitting position.

The Irish

In Ireland, the Irish lived as a conquered people. Under the Penal Laws, Catholic Irish could not be educated nor could Catholic churches operate legally. The result was that 

Clandestine, grass-roots organizations of all sorts developed among the Irish to serve their religious, educational, and political needs... Not only did the Irish develop considerable organizing skills from having to provide themselves with a range of institutions normally provided by government; they developed skills to circumventing governmental institutions that they regarded as illegitimate oppressions.

So when the Irish came to the US in the 1840s potato famine in the holds of sailing ships they arrived in Boston and New York basically prostrate and without urban skills or money. So most of them worked as servants or day laborers. But they had experience in underground politics. That plus their charm and blarney got them into US urban politics. 

The Germans

German Americans are the largest group after those of British origin. They started coming in the 17th century as "Pennsylvania Dutch" that were actually deutsch. Many started as indentured servants, and went out to the frontier to farm because that was the cheapest land.

[T]he early German settlers quickly established a reputation for hard work, thoroughness, and thriftiness.

They tended to live in isolated German-speaking communities in a single religious denomination, but gradually learned English and contributed scrapple, chocolate cake, cole slaw, and sauerkraut to American cooking. On the frontier they often lived in communities next to the Protestant Scotch-Irish. The Germans were quiet, frugal and friendly to the Indians. The Scotch-Irish were quick-tempered, hard-drinking, and often in feuds with each other or the Indians.

Early German immigrants were predominantly farmers, but during the 19th century more and more had urban skills. For instance in 1849 there was a German optician named Bausch and a German businessman named Lomb: both immigrants. Then there was Roebling, the suspension bridge guy, plus Steinway, Weyerhauser, and Heinz. Not to mention Studebaker, Chrysler, Wanamaker, Rockefeller.

Much "innocent public family entertainment... music, picnics, dancing, card playing, swimming, bowling" was introduced to America by Germans.

Prior to Hitler, most German Jews identified as Germans rather than Jews, and some American-Jewish newspapers were prosecuted in World War I for being too pro-German.

Next: Jews and Italians.

Ukraine and Carl Schmitt's Enemy Thing

I was reading a frightening piece today, "The Architects of Our Present Disaster" by Benjamin Braddock, about how we coulda shoulda made peace with Russia after the Cold War. On 9/11, for instance, Condoleezza Rice spoke with Vladimir Putin:

[S]he called President Putin and told him our military would be going on high alert. He told her that he knew and that he had ordered his forces to stand down. Then he asked if there was anything he could do to help. Rice recounted that she had a moment of reflection: “The Cold War really is over.”

Wat! Vlady baby asked if he could do anything to help?

Only Rice and her successors didn't make peace; they didn't write a new Treaty of Westphalia. In fact, it is clear that, all along, Russia has been an opponent. And pretty clearly, Russia right now is an enemy. I've been reading articles in places like Quillette -- "Ukraine and the pro-Putin Right" -- that clearly show that the global ruling class regards conservatives that don't go full-on anti-Putin as traitors. 

Braddock goes on to detail all of the meddling we've been up to in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the post Cold War era. And what good has it done?

I would say the same about the domestic politics in the US since the end of the Cold War: what good has it done?

Let's make the problem bigger. What good has politics ever done?

Because politics is always about an enemy. Says Nazi Carl Schmitt. If there isn't an enemy, there isn't any politics.

So if you are a ruling class, what's the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" if you don't have an enemy?

You can see the enemy thing in the COVID experience. The Dem governors were all in on the war against COVID, ordering people around with mask mandates and vaccination mandates.

(I was to a vegetarian restaurant over the weekend -- after WA Gov. Inslee ended his mask mandate -- and the dears at the restaurant still had a mask mandate and still required proof of vaccination. It's funny, isn't it, how our liberal friends, who believe in Peace and all that, just love to be in charge and issuing orders. And following orders.) 

I don't think that the Dem Governors were consciously wanting to be little Hitlers. It's just that if you are a liberal you think that politics is the royal road to justice. And so you always think, like the generals in World War I, that one more Big Push should do it. Because once you have made an issue political, you have required that you have an enemy to fight. And once you have an enemy you have to continue the fight until the enemy is defeated. If there wasn't an enemy then you wouldn't need government force and a political life-or-death narrative.

That's why liberals are so into the pejorative thing, calling people racists, sexists, homophobes. If you make an issue political it is because you need to fight for it, and that means you need an enemy. And what is the first thing you so with an enemy? You call them a nasty name. By the way, what's with the liberal thing on Trump's Mean Tweets? Isn't that what you liberals are doing every day of the week? Isn't the slogan on every protest sign the peaceful protest equivalent of a Mean Tweet? You tell me.

Back to Ukraine. I don't like Putin. I don't like his invasion of Ukraine. I don't like all the NATO and EU saber rattling. I don't like the proposed NATO summit.

Why not? Because I think that all the players are fools and knaves, and whatever they do, chances are they will Make Things Worse.

Why do I think that? I've come to this notion gradually over the years, as my reading has given me what I consider to be a greater depth of understanding of human affairs than you get by ingesting the usual narrative.

Maybe it's all just a conceit on my part. But one thing that reading books does for you. It gives you a means of judging the world from a different position than the ruling-class narrative. If you only consume regular media then you will be signed onto one or another of the received wisdoms of the day.

And that's not good.

Do the Dems Think Strategically?

Paul Gottfried thinks that the Dems are thinking strategically with their Green Energy and their open borders. Both policies are designed to grow the base of Democratic voters.

[T]he administration is successfully catering to its base. Biden is doing exactly what his voters want, and he and his handlers have no intention of changing course. There is also the possibility of processing the millions of illegal aliens Democrats have shepherded into the country to full citizenship.

Says he:

Biden’s party is always thinking ahead, particularly when it cheats and/or acts destructively. 

But is he right? After all, he writes, "Democrats are not necessarily holding a bad hand if they can pull in more independents to help bring their numbers back up."

Let's start with independents. The point about independents, I think, is that they are not that engaged with politics. So, if the Dems show them helpless immigrants being whipped at the border, they are appalled. If Dems do non-stop propaganda on green energy and how we are going to fry the world unless we act now, they have to agree.

But when independents note that there seem to be a lot of Hispanic roofers taking all the roofing jobs away from good old American workers, then they wonder. If gasoline prices start exploding then they are angry and afraid.

So, the ruling class gets to set the agenda and make its narrative the default narrative. But when things go wrong, it all falls apart.

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Mellon, banker and financier, who was Treasury Secretary in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. In the 1920s the Republicans were the ruling party. But when the Crash of 1929 hit, and the Republicans didn't manage to right the economy, for three straight years from 1929 to 1932, well then the American people voted for the other guys.

The GOP lost 53 seats in the House in the 1930 midterms and 100 seats in the 1932 presidential election. Thy deserved to lose. Reading about Andrew Mellon in David Cannadine's Mellon: An American Life, it is clear that, for Mellon, the thousands of banks failing every year in 1930, 1931, 1932 were just the way things were. 

He and the GOP hadn't learned the lesson taught by Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street that the central bank is the lender of last resort, and its job is to keep the credit system from crashing on the rocks. If there was one thing that the New Dealers got right it was to stop the bank failures and restore the credit system in 1933.

But the New Dealers screwed up just about everything else.

The GOP lost another 29 seats in the 1934 and 1936 elections. And then gained 81 seats in the 1938 midterms. So, in 1938, the media was still all-in on FDR and the New Deal, but the voters had had enough.

Did the New Dealers have a strategy to rule forever? They thought they had, with all their National Industrial Recovery Acts and Civilian Conservation Corps and so on, but they were wrong. Those glorious policies, that my liberal friends still recall with a warm nostalgic glow, didn't work. Of course, the Dems went on to win the biggest war in human history against the most evil enemy in human history: gold stars for that!

When you start losing, on the battlefield or in the economy, then the soldiers and/or the voters start to desert the colors. It doesn't matter what glorious narrative you have, or how many voters you are bringing over the border, or how much money Mark Zuckerberg is putting into election offices in Democrat districts, when things turn South then people start to pay attention and they start to lose faith in the narrative and in the current leaders.

Now, of course, people react to bad news in different ways. Using my Three Peoples theory, we can say that for Subordinates they start to lose faith when their lord isn't sending the checks regularly. We can say that the Responsibles start to lose faith when they cannot go about their business every day without being harassed by government regulations or crazy price increases. We can say that the Creatives get antsy when the glorious vision of the prophet -- say, to save the world from CO2 pollution -- starts to crumble.

Right now, I'd say that all three of the Three Peoples are experiencing distress. For the Subordinates, their checks aren't covering their bills; for the Responsibles, the crazy mandates and restrictions are screwing up their lives; for the Creatives the glitch in the Matrix on climate change is raising questions -- even though they haven't yet even begun to think of questioning the divine prophecy of the climate gods.

Politics needs an enemy, and I'd say that right now, most Americans think that their rulers are the enemy.

And my feeling is that the Democrats really don't know what to do, except keep on keeping on.

And I say that when people start to cheat, it is a "tell" that they know they are losing.

Inflation is a Government Program

Oh well, another month of 10 percent inflation in the Consumer Price Index. And here's the point. The Fed hasn't started raising interest rates yet. Not until next week. And that means...

We've had a nice liberal guest around here, who keeps mentioning the availability of "affordable housing.," meaning, of course, government financed and assigned housing for approved poor people.

I just haven't had the heart to mention that the reason housing is so expensive -- and that housing prices here in Seattle are going through the roof -- is government.

Back in the day, before the Great Depression, all you could get was a 50 percent mortgage. And you had to refinance it after ten years. Do you see how that might keep house prices down? Because, you see, before you can borrow any money you have to pony up 50 percent of the home's value. In cash, in savings.

The federal government has been subsidizing mortgages since the invention of Fannie Mae in 1938. That set up government-backed 30-year fixed mortgages for homes. But, of course, no private lender can offer 30-year fixed rate loans. Not at 3 percent. Not with 2 percent inflation -- in a good year. So the gubmint does it. In the years since the total of such government-backed mortgages have gone to about 40 percent of GDP. So that's really an additional 40 percent on top of the existing federal government debt of over 100 percent of GDP.

By the way, why in the world does anyone buy 30-year bonds from the US government, knowing that it can inflate the value away any time it likes?

On top of that, government encourages low-down-payment loans, sometimes pretty close to 100 percent of the home's value. Which isn't too smart around 2006 at the peak of the last real-estate bubble. And, of course, the more that people can bid for a house with borrowed money the higher the prices go.

On top of that, ever since the 70s, because feminism, mortgage sellers have to count both man and wife income in evaluating creditworthiness. Since a lot of people believe in borrowing the full amount that the lender will allow, that means that more people are competing for more homes with more borrowed money in their pockets. And that means higher prices, and that means less affordable housing.

Because you see, a healthy credit system relies on two things: faithful payment of loan payments by the borrower; and proper collaterization of loans, so that if the borrower defaults the lender can get his money back. If either or both go south -- as they did in the 2008 credit crisis -- then you got trouble, right here in River City.

That's not the whole of it, of course. There are building codes, which make houses more expensive. There are environmental regulations, that limit the land available for housing. Oh no, we can build any more houses because there might be a landslide. Oh no, we can't build any more houses because there might not be enough water.

All of these wise and educated policies subsidizing mortgages means that more people compete for loans, and the more people that compete, the higher go the prices.

And then nice liberal ladies think the answer is government "affordable housing."

And that's just houses. Then there is everything else that's going up in price because the government is printing money and is stopping the fossil-fuel industry in its tracks and is still not backing modular nuclear plants, and and and.

And the tragedy is that it is all going to cause untold suffering to ordinary people and especially to poor people in the lower classes.

Because the more you muck around with the economy, with wars and lockdowns, and money printing and Fannies and Freddies and subsidies and handouts and regulations and programs, the more you jerk the ordinary person around. And end up Making Things Worse.

Politics and Enemies

I was reading a piece on Britain's far Left when I came to this:

I sensed the anti-democratic tendencies of the far Left when I first met Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2015. It was obvious in the way they spoke about their enemies, which they define as anyone who has ever disagreed with them... The violence of their language offered a creeping kind of dehumanisation of the enemy who is also — crucially — a voter: someone to be seduced by a serious politician is, for them, only someone to be despised.

And so, of course, violence against the enemy is no problem.

Violence was always acceptable if it was against your enemy: the rhetoric itself made it necessary. I heard many far Left cheerleaders call the throwing of milkshakes and eggs acceptable if they landed on the wrong kind of politician, and what comes after that? Quite recently a far Left journalist celebrated a policewoman being knocked off her horse. I saw a journalist attacked at a far Left meeting last autumn; they applauded when the victim left the room. At the last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was physically attacked for carrying an anti-Corbyn banner.

Did I mention that Nazi Carl Schmitt wrote that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy? And that Curtis Yarvin writes that "there is no politics without an enemy?"

I am also around a liberal for a couple of days listening to ordinary by-the-ways about "affordable housing" and thinking to myself that, yeah, we have an affordable housing problem Because Liberals.

But the funny thing is that such people Have No Idea of the malevolence and the chaos that their Hundred Year reign has caused.

Because all problems are caused by the Other Guy, the racist-sexist-homophobes of which you've heard tell. We are the Good Guys.

Anyway, in the middle of the night I came up with two new maxims:

If you want more politics, you are really saying you want more enemies.

The more politics, the more enemies.

Am I right, or am I right? And that brings me back to Mircea Eliade:

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

And that is exactly how our lefty friends think of suffering. If the homeless are homeless or there is a shortage of affordable housing, then there must be a fault. And chances are the fault is the malevolence of racist-sexist-homophobes.

UPDATE: Here's some more on the enemies front. Reporting on the Battle of the Bouncy Castle up in Canada, Giles Hoffman notes how the Canadian regime needed enemies.

Every conflict now is largely an information war and a public relations battle. The regime has a well-oiled propaganda machine, and they curated footage with spurious themes. For the regime, it was insufficient to have opponents; they needed enemies, which is why so much effort was expended to portray the demonstrators as dangerous ultra-nationalists and racists. 

Hey, no problem. There is no politics without an enemy.