Left’s latest radical demand: race-based reparations

Having embraced “Medicare-for-all,” free college tuition and a Green New Deal that would mandate an early end of all oil, gas and coalfired power plants, the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left rolls on.

Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren called last week for race-based reparations for slavery.

“Centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, legal discrimination and segregation, and discrimination that exist today have led to a systemic wealth gap between black and white Americans,” Harris told The New York Times. “I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities.”

Echoed Sen. Warren: “We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country.” This history has crippled “the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations.”

That black Americans are handicapped by their history in this country, and cannot accumulate wealth as easily, and require compensatory reparations for slavery and segregation, is more than a controversial assertion.

Are the Democrats going to say this in their national platform in 2020? And how much will be the rest of America be forced to pay, and for how long?

Warren says Native Americans, too, must be “part of the conversation.” Apparently, they suffer from a similar handicap and need the same reparations.

How far and fast has the Democratic Party lunged leftward? In 2016, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all rejected reparations.

The questions that instantly arise are: Who would qualify as a beneficiary of reparations, and who would pay the immense transfer sums involved?

Would all black Americans, even the middle class and affluent, be entitled to reparations? Do we, as Warren did to prove her Native American ancestry, conduct a DNA test? The past 50 years have seen many marriages between blacks and whites. Would the children of such marriages qualify for reparations?

Barack Obama, whose mother was a white teenager and father was a Kenyan, would not qualify. While a higher percentage of African-Americans than whites are poor, there are more white poor than black poor in the U.S. Does not endemic poverty produce the same negative consequence regardless of race?

What is the justice in excluding poor whites, or poor Asians and Hispanics, whose ancestors were not here when slavery existed before 1865?

If slavery and segregation explain the disparity in wealth between black and white in the U.S., what explains the equally wide disparity in wealth between Hispanics and Asians?

Politically, the party of slavery, secession and segregation was the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Wilson and FDR, who put a Klansman on the Supreme Court — the Democratic Party. It was the Republican Party that was formed to contain and end slavery, and did.

By pushing for compensatory reparations, Warren and Harris may be helping themselves, but they are further splitting their party along the lines of ethnicity and race and elevating an issue certain to divide their country more than it already is.