Is America's Witch Hunt for Racism Ending?

MSNBC's cancellation of Joy Reid show signals the obsession with racism is fading.

The following chart plots America’s bizarre obsession with racism, which germinated around 2010, shortly after Barack Obama was elected POTUS. Note that this obsession became a social contagion long after racism ceased being a socially acceptable belief or sentiment.

This is reminiscent of Tocqueville’s observation that bourgeois hatred for the French Ancient Regime fanned into revolutionary fanaticism after the Ancient Regime began giving up its privileges and making concessions to the burgeoning urban middle class. As Tocqueville remarked, the trouble wasn’t lack of favorable change, but that change didn’t happen fast enough to meet growing expectations.

America’s unhinged obsession with racism since 2010 reminds me of an eyewitness account of the infamous Witch Trials in Trier, Germany in the 1580s 

In as much as it was popularly believed that the continued sterility of many years was caused by witches through the malice of the Devil, the whole country rose to exterminate the witches. This movement was promoted by many in office, who hoped for wealth from the persecution. And so, from court to court throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese, scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes and burning them in great numbers.

Scarcely any of those who were accused escaped punishment or were there spared even the leading men in the city of Trier. For the Judge, 2 with two Burgomasters, several Councilors and Associate Judges, canons of sundry collegiate churches, parish priests, rural deans, were swept away in this ruin. So far, at length, did the madness of the furious populace and of the courts go in this thirst for blood and booty that there was scarcely anybody who was not smirched some suspicion of this crime.

Note the observer’s remark that “this movement was promoted by many in office, who hoped for wealth from the persecution.”

As the economist Thomas Sowell has often pointed out over the years, the chief beneficiaries of America’s witch hunt for racism have been the self-anointed leaders of the black community who have promised to expunge racism from our society. The trouble is, just as the American military-industrial complex needs the Russian Bogeyman to stick around, leaders of the witch hunt against racism need racism to stick around. What would they do without it?

Perhaps MSNBC’s decision to cancel Joy Reid’s show signals the beginning of the end of the racism witch hunt.