by Richard Schulman
Is what happened a surprise? It shouldn’t be. The governors of urban Democratic states created a lumpenproletariat by shutting down their states’ economies. They then condemned to the confines of their apartments the lumpen they had created, week after week, month upon month. When a police killing that was immediately and universally condemned throughout the nation gave a pretext for the emergence of small bands of that lumpen as rioters and looters, the Democratic mayors and governors stood aside, inviting the rioting and looting to ignite into a nationwide anarchy, fanned higher by Antifa and Black Lives Matter radicals (see here and here).
In the meanwhile, the looters and rioters were condoned as “protesters” by the progressive media. The New York Times, with its mendacious 1619 series that claimed the nation was built on slavery, not the liberty and equality of the 1776-1789 founding, has been a principal abettor of the black victimization trope and the ensuing looting.
When the governors of the affected states delayed mobilizing their national guards and deploying them effectively, President Trump correctly, as his responsibility, warned the governors that if they didn’t re-establish order he would do so with federal troops.
The institutionalized racism myth
Studies have repeatedly shown that there is no institutionalized racism in police forces — that it is a myth. There are indeed reforms that should be undertaken, but they are not simply racially motivated. They have come mainly from classical-liberal law firms and libertarian think tanks, not the progressive media — who promote black victimization to garner more Democratic votes.
The reforms proposed include the ending of qualified immunity, a questionable doctrine that shields government officials from consequences for wrongdoing; curtailment of “no-knock” warrants; radical reform of civil forfeiture and prosecutors’ abuse of plea bargaining; and substitution of treatment for criminal penalties in the cases of substance abuse.
Perverse incentives, creating dependency
Prior to the present riots, progressives prepared the ground for lumpenization of urban blacks by destroying the black family through Great Society welfare programs that created disincentives to both marriage and work. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal (June 4, 2020) notes that
“One in four low-wage workers,” according to a new study, “face lifetime marginal net tax rates above 70 percent, effectively locking them into poverty.” Incentives matter, and bad ones sap the motivation to climb the opportunity ladder.
Deliberately harmful policies
Far from learning a lesson from this disaster, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives recently insisted that unemployment insurance be set at a level that pays half the workers receiving it more than they would receive by going back to work. The Democrats clearly want to increase unemployment to prevent the return of the boom economy that preceded the Wuhan virus.
As the New York Post recently correctly asked, “If protesters can march, why can’t businesses open?”
Many minority businesses were devastated first by the lock-downs that Democratic governors and mayors unnecessarily prolonged, then by the looting the same politicians failed to stop and even condoned. Democratic leaders hypocritically enforced quarantine on everyone except demonstrators and looters. Radical district attorneys then put arrested rioters and looters back on the streets and let “other hardened criminals walk.”
Who are the real disuniters?
Democrats are predictably blaming President Trump for the violence they themselves bear principal responsibility for. President Trump has well-known failings. But he almost comes across as a figure of moderation when set against the anti-Trump rages of George Will, who blames him for George Floyd’s death.
Now General Jim Mattis, in personal score-settling reminiscent of John McCain, has piled on too, claiming that “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.”
What planet is General Mattis living on? The party that he and Mr. Will are all but nakedly endorsing, the Democrats, has for years been organizing mainly on the basis of identity politics — race, ethnicity, sexual category, class. That is truly divisive. So too the Democrats’ deliberately embittering partisan differences by refusing to accept as legitimate either the George W. Bush presidency or Donald Trump’s.
In an op-ed, “Liberal Mush from the Mad Dog,” Patrick Buchanan gives General Mattis a very well-deserved roasting. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has turned on a dime from non-stop COVID-19 coverage to non-stop George Floyd related coverage. We recommend a Kipling time-out:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
Hat tip: Eaglebeak. Minor corrections made on 6/6/2020.
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