In an opinion piece Saturday, Townhall's Michael Schaus argued that the rallies, riots, and violence in Ferguson are not really about racism, police brutality or even the tragedy of Michael Brown’s death, “This story is about the failure of Liberalism.”

Citing the more than 400 African Americans killed in Chicago last year, Schaus said the rallies and riots in Ferguson are not actually about what civil rights activists and leftist pundits would have the American public believe:

The truth is, this story isn’t really about racism, police brutality, or even tragedy… This story is about the failure of Liberalism. It is an indictment of the liberal culture of victimhood, and oppression. The riots, the violence, and the anti-police actions of the Black Panthers, "Anonymous", and average thugs in Ferguson is the result of being told for years that victimhood is a permanent state of being; rather than a temporary state of mind.

Calling this victimhood oppression a half-century-old tactic of the Left, Schaus said that today’s Democratic Party ignores the abuses of its idealized leaders and, like a person suffering clinical denial, rages against the right for alleged racism while its policies keep an “undeniable stranglehold on black America”:

Today’s Party of Barack Obama and Eric Holder, willfully ignore FDR’s history of opposing anti-lynching laws. They ignore John F Kennedy’s vote, as a Senator, against the 1950’s era Civil Rights laws. They even ignore the egregious violence and lawlessness that plague some of America’s most Democrat cities. (Such as Detroit, Chicago, Washington DC and Los Angeles.)

In a raging display that resembles the clinical definition of “denial”, the American left claims that Republicans have abandoned their civil-rights-minded past.

Schaus also blames the “liberally-inclined” media for its perpetuation of the left’s distortions, using terms like “white-police-officer” in their “racially sensationalized” coverage of Ferguson, while ignoring the “war zone” in Chicago, where dozens of young African Americans are killed every week.

In the end, he argued, the Left’s “suffocation of empowerment” has not resulted in the hope and empowerment promised, but rather has “infected the African American community with a sense of hopelessness and despair.” What’s happening in Ferguson is exactly what should be expected from a people who have been stripped of “faith in the dream of American equality.”

The Left’s message that African Americans are incapable, hopeless, and persecuted – without a heavy-handed government of benevolent masters – is more than tragic… As we see in Ferguson, it’s also dangerous.