The mistake of crying racism is especially tempting to upscale, influential liberals who, no less than protesters on the right, are ducking the true causes of dispossession, fear and rage: the premises and practices of financial capital, predatory consumer marketing and a national-security state boondoggling.

Liberals who’ve done well by those practices aren’t always serious about redressing their inequities and disruptions. But they can’t bring themselves to defend them very wholeheartedly, either. So they grasp at symbolic gestures against racism that short-circuit political currents for necessary change as surely as Rush does.

Remember the moralistic passion plays over the dubious black church “arson epidemic”? Or the supposed “ethnic cleansing” in congressional redistricting in which black incumbents actually won in majority-white districts? That politics of “anti-racist” paroxysm eclipsed the real challenges, which have only worsened since then.