As I’ve noted before, liberals love to evoke the collective ‘we’ when writing editorials and op-eds. The Winston-Salem Journal follows suit in this editorial on the housing authority’s proposed $275 million plan to transform the city’s east side (emphasis mine):

The track record of ambitious projects over the years designed to transform low-income, deteriorating neighborhoods is not good, the recession notwithstanding. We’ve seen several ambitious projects in the area stall, including Goler and the Liberty Street corridor. And it’s not always for lack of money. We commend HAWS for its vision, but before we set residents up for more disappointment, it may be time to look at the root causes of our inability to restore once-vibrant inner-city neighborhoods and build safe, attractive places to live, work and play.

…..We don’t purport to know all the answers for putting together a successful plan to restore eastern Winston-Salem to the vibrancy it once enjoyed. But an overarching issue may be that as one community — if that is what we are or aspire to be — we do not consider the conditions there a communitywide problem. Maybe that’s where we begin.

Evoking the ‘collective we’ is liberals’ way of projecting the failures of government onto the community at large. And there is no bigger failure than government’s entry into the housing industry.