The word “minority” represents one of those inversions of value (that typify socialist regimes. Derived, obviously, from the Latin minor (smaller or less in respect of size, importance, age, etc.), “minority” has been used in English to express both the immature years before adulthood and the losing side of a judicial opinion. Most significantly, it means—according to the Oxford English Dictionary—the “condition of being smaller, inferior, subordinate.”

Presumably, then, when we describe an individual as belonging to a minority, we are saying that we regard him as a loser, an inferior, a subordinate. The idea of a virtuous minority is romantic and whiggish. “Minorities are almost always in the right,” remarked the Rev. Sidney Smith, a professional contrarian, who almost always found himself on the side of the smug progressives at the Edinburgh Review. The political (and moral) minority celebrated by Sidney Smith would evolve over the years into the liberals, socialists, progressives, and leftists who are pretty much responsible for the shape the world is in today.

That minorities are special and privileged became a matter of cant. “Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities,” brayed Wendell Phillips in a speech given in Boston in 1860, only a year before his friends and followers plunged the nation into a war to destroy the political rights of the minority of American citizens living in the Southern states. Phillips condemned Lincoln for being too moderate and insisted that the African minority had to be given land, education, and privileges at the expense of the immoral majority. After over a hundred years of playing this same game, the American political class has brought the nation to the brink of a race war without substantially advancing the interests of its African-American subjects, who are incarcerated, robbed, murdered, and addicted to drugs at rates which the people of 1860 or 1960 would have found incredible.

Blacks constitute a “minority” (in round numbers, about 15 percent of the population); so do Hispanics (about ten percent), Asians (about five percent), homosexuals (less than five percent, but let’s be generous), and women (about 50 percent). Have I left anyone out? Oh, yes, the straight, white, European males who created civilization, established the American constitutional order, and pay the bulk of the taxes. At less than 35 percent, they represent the “majority,” because in a society where right—the term used formerly to express everything straight, true, correct, and favorable—is a term of political abuse, majority can only refer to the demonic oppressor. What will they do when the happy day predicted so exuberantly by Bill Clinton and the census boys arrives, when men and women of European extraction will be in the minority? I only hope they will be kind enough to find a tribal homeland for us somewhere out in Montana.

        —Humpty Dumpty