Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

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I can’t help feeling sorry for Kellyanne Conway, the new campaign manager who signed on to save Donald Trump in his current predicament. This is the very definition of “mission impossible.”

After all, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

HUGH CLEAR, MIAMI

Note from KBJ: Hugh Clear is going to be very surprised on 8 November.

Ingénue (1992). That voice!

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Deutscher, Lenin, Trotsky and Marx all staked their claims on the belief that socialism would produce abundance and freedom. A horrifying history has shown irrefutably that it doesn’t. Socialism is really a theory of economic theft, and what it produces is poverty. Socialist systems are unable to foster the technological development necessary to sustain a modern economy. And they are fundamentally incompatible with human liberty. None of these four revolutionaries still admired by the left had a clue as to the critical importance of private property in making political liberty possible. None of them understood the necessity of a capitalist economy to technological progress and economic wellbeing. In the last half of the 20th century, vast masses of humanity—hundreds of millions in fact—were lifted out of subsistence poverty in those countries that protected and supported private property and free markets. This liberation by capitalist economics of poor working people so they are able to achieve lives of relative dignity and modest luxury represents a revolution unprecedented in the 5,000-year history of mankind.

(David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz, vol. II, Progressives [Los Angeles: Second Thoughts Books, 2013], 252)

To the Editor:

Charles M. Blow is right on target in “Why Blacks Loathe Trump” (nytimes.com, Aug. 17). Donald Trump, in his typical fashion, has doubled down on his outrageous, delusional and baseless claims about how he will get the support of black voters this fall.

Mr. Trump has stated that black Americans should abandon the Democratic Party because it has not changed material conditions for the overwhelming majority of us. He says we have “nothing to lose.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Blacks have seen versions of his racism before. Our support for Democratic Party candidates in this and past elections is not because we expect them to perform a miracle. It is because we hope that they will simply not make matters worse. In this respect, blacks have a more realistic view of the limits of politics than most Americans.

FRED McKINNEY

Hanover, N.H.

The writer is managing director of the Minority Business Program at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Note from KBJ: Donald Trump should ask a simple question of blacks: "Are you better off today than you were eight years ago?" He might also ask blacks to look at the cities of this country, which have been run by Democrats for decades.

This is one of many street musicians we encountered while walking the streets of Glasgow. I gave most of them money. Click to enlarge.

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