Ever since Rousseau in the 18th century and Karl Marx in the 19th it has been the dream of the statists on the left to eradicate both the family and the church. People are much more loyal to both than they are to the state and thus the left's dream of total dependency and fealty to the state will never be realized as long as those other loyalties persist.
Indeed, every legislative and social initiative of the last fifty years that erodes the strength of either of these institutions has been promoted by liberals. From no-fault divorce, the decoupling of sex and procreation from marriage, the welfare state, radical feminism, same-sex marriage, the hypersexualization of the culture - all of these, whatever one thinks of their individual merits, tend to exert a centrifugal force on the nuclear family. Similar pressures have been placed on the church, though perhaps more by the culture than by legislatures and courts.
I say all this by way of a prelude to commenting upon the epidemic of interracial violence we're witnessing in our cities in which groups of black men, some as old as thirty, are picking out random victims to assault by sucker-punching them, knocking them unconscious. It's called the "knockout game," but it's not a game. Several people have died as a result of this savagery, and the people who do it are apparently, like psychopaths, void of human sympathy.
The perpetrators are usually black and Hispanic, but I don't believe that their race is the reason why they do such horrible things. Rather, I'm willing to bet that what the perpetrators have in common, the factor that accounts most for their barbarism, is fatherlessness.
The knockout "game" is the fruit of the modern liberal assault on the family, the alienation of fathers from home, church, and community, and the complete anomie of the young men they spawn and subsequently abandon. For fifty years we've been taught by our liberal culture that men are superfluous, that marriage is oppressive, and that fathers are usually either boobs or abusive. We've turned poor children into wards of the state, we've created a culture of dependency that neither encourages two-parent families nor teaches virtue, indeed, discourages both, and then, when these children turn out to be psychopaths, we wonder why.
When young men grow up without a strong male presence in their lives and without a church to supplement the father's efforts their values are instilled in them by the street. Their role models are thugs, pushers, and pimps. They're molded and shaped by the "gangsta'" culture that permeates their music and entertainment. Violence is a way of life and a badge of honor, in fact, it's often the only source of honor available to a young man, and the approval and respect of their peers is the only source of affirmation many of them ever receive.
The dysfunction is especially pronounced in minority communities because fatherlessness is especially pronounced in minority communities, but these are the canary in the coal mine. As the culture increasingly disdains traditional family structure fatherlessness will continue to spread in white communities as well. Where minorities are today everyone else will be tomorrow.
Somewhere Marx and all his leftist comrades are rubbing their hands in glee.