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The Rolling Stone cover glamorizing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should not have surprised.
The cultural left was born hating American power and blaming it for the poverty and oppression of indigenous, darker-skinned Third Worlders who naturally and justifiably hate us. Expressing admiration for violent anti-Americans has for a long time been a way for the disaffected to exclaim how much they are not like the white imperialists they live among, how - unlike us - they are noble souls, standing with the oppressed.
In his masterful book, "Bobos in Paradise," New York Times columnist David Brooks explained how therapeutic this sort of thing can be for middle-class youth who find themselves living off the wealth of their parents, and Western capitalism in general - a wealth they sense is undeserved, a wealth they feel traps them in an immorally privileged corner.
We should have some sympathy: It is a good thing that our children, swathed in affluence unknown to the common man just decades ago, feel moral twinges when they see the lives of Third Worlders.The problem is that the children of the West have been misled about how wealth is created. Historians know that specific cultural attributes combined with specific economic policies to create the West's cornucopia. Today's children are not taught that "the Protestant work ethic" and free markets lifted the West out of age-old poverty, or that hard work, deferred gratification, investment, and free trade are part of an interconnected system that cant help but produce massive wealth. Yes, the same capitalism that lifted all boats did not bestow its gifts equally. And yes, raw capitalism produces hardships that can and should be alleviated through safety nets.
But the simpler lesson taught by the left - whose "long march" through our cultural intuitions won the day - is that our wealth is to blame for others' poverty. In the '60s, the young victims of leftist fallacies cried out against their "white-skin privilege," tried to join the Black Panthers, and cheered the Viet Cong. This has old, known and even pre-political roots. Ever since Jean Jacques Rousseau cursed the emerging, artificially sophisticated, modern city...