Since I’m not a sitting US Congressman, or a former vice presidential candidate, I can say things that are supposedly controversial that really aren’t, and get away with it. And since the fringe liberal left sees some things as “controversial” where normal people would not, and I’m not a politician, that also allows me to be honest rather than diplomatic, or craven, depending on how you look at it.

You may not have heard of this brouhaha, but Paul Ryan made some comments on Bill Bennett’s radio show about the problem of inner city, i.e. black male, unemployment (although he doesn’t use the word black or refer to race), and he was promptly excoriated by the fever swamp left as a certified racist. What was so “controversial” about his remarks? He blamed this intractable unemployment problem on culture, and them’s fightin’ words to race bating lefties.

Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC (I know, why waste my time, but it’s a teachable moment) wrote a nice letter to Representative Ryan, and I figured I’d write one back to him.

Dear Mr. Capehart,

It’s me, Mike.

Since you seem to completely have missed Mr. Ryan’s reference to Charles Murray, whom I am sure you have never bothered to read, you would know that the cultural problem of poverty is not exclusive to one race or another. As Mr. Murray points out in his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, the issue isn’t race but class, and there are powerful cultural forces that keep the very lower classes low.

But what I find so interesting about your letter isn’t that you completely miss Ryan’s point, which I would expect from someone who works for MSNBC, but that you blame the plight of inner city pathology on the “indirect result of government policies,” and then make the astounding claim that it will “take progressive government policies to solve them.” This would be comical if it wasn’t so sad.

We right wingers, Mr Capehart, also believe that government policies are in part to blame for the situation in inner cities, but we also understand that government policies don’t exist in a vacuum, that they exist in a culture you so blithely dismiss as irrelevant. We also don’t believe that correlation is necessarily causation, as you imply by your use of statistics. As you say education “is one of the most reliable indicators of future employment and income,” but why is it that so many black youth in the inner city drop out of school before they graduate? Do you really believe that the culture they live in, the values they learn from their mostly broken homes, the values they learn through rap music or on the street have no influence on what they do? You really believe this?

And I notice that you make no mention that the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the black community is 72%. In fact, you don’t mention family at all, typical of a progressive. Do you think that possibly, maybe black boys might be affected negatively growing up without a father? All the social science data point to the irrefutable fact that children raised by a married mother and father develop better by every measure than those without. Are you saying that the disintegration, and no better word could be used, of the black family has nothing to do with the pathology of chronic long-term joblessness?

You say that “black unemployment has consistently been more than double the rate of white Americans for nearly four decades.” If I do my math correctly that would be from the mid-1970s, which as you well know was 10 plus years after big government liberal president Lyndon Johnson declared “war on poverty.” That hasn’t exactly worked, now, has it. Some would even argue that all those trillions wasted on ridding the country of poverty have actually contributed to the breakdown of the black family, although no progressive worth his salt would ever admit there is any downside to government spending and programs.

And finally, you mock Ryan’s term “culture of work” as if the spirit of drive and discipline and determination and diligence, and the ability to overcome disappointments and setbacks has nothing to do with success in work and life. Where do people learn these things and develop the character that Martin Luther King talked about? I’m afraid to break it to you, Mr. Capehart, but it ain’t gonna happen by any government program so beloved by progressives. As Horatio Alger may have said 150 years ago, it isn’t circumstances that determine a man’s success in life, but “uncommon courage and moral fortitude.” And these attitudes can only be taught and developed in a family, in a community, in a culture that values them. Paul Ryan was right: it’s the culture, stupid.

UPDATE: Some good thoughts from the editors of National Review on this.