Shelby Steele had an op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal that discussed the reasons for today’s Left being consumed with hate.  He was generally correct until the end of his piece.

And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused—welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on.

I was with Mr Steele until this point. Far from failures, however, these programs have been the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s greatest successes.  These are how the Left and the Party have kept blacks—and far too many women—trapped in the Party-built welfare cages, trapped in perpetual victimhood.

This victimhood is and always has been the font of the Left’s political power.  Keep in mind, after all, that it was the Progressive-Democrat Woodrow Wilson who resegregated the Federal government after Republicans had spent the post-Civil War years working to bring blacks into the governing fold.  It was the Progressive-Democrats who insisted that blacks needed the protection of segregation because they were inherently incapable of competing.  It’s the Progressive-Democrats who built on that segregationist “protection” with their soft bigotry of low expectations in making race and gender necessary deciding criteria for admission to any of their welfare programs—even to higher education.  It’s the Progressive-Democrats who built the welfare cliff into their programs in order to keep welfare recipients trapped in dependency on the largesse of those same Progressive-Democrats.