Policy Has Consequences

I often remind my philosophy students that ideas have consequences in the real world. Victor Davis Hanson reminds us in his latest column that public policy also has consequences, and the consequences of a lot of the policies enacted by federal, state and local authorities today are calamitous.

In his lede he comments on a video of shoplifters in Portland confronted by a man who urges them to return their purloined merchandise:

Recently there were some remarkable online videos of a Portland, Oregon good Samaritan confronting shoplifters and forcing them to dump loads of their pilfered goods.

More stunning, however, was the sheer outrage — of the thieves!

They pouted. They screamed. They resisted. How dare anyone stop them from stealing anything they wished.

The criminals entertained no fear of any consequences for walking out with bags of things that were not theirs.

They had no care that mainstreaming their habits would undermine the entire fabric of society.

What is common to the pandemic of smash-and-grab, carjacking, fighting on airliners while in flight, and deadly Saturday night shoot-outs is this same apparent assurance there will be no consequences.

Hanson argues that the failure of authorities to prosecute crime is a contagion spreading across the urban landscape of our nation.

That expectation of exemption is why the Antifa thugs in Atlanta were so bold in their latest violent attacks on the police.

And why not, after the 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, and assault in the summer of 2020 which resulted in few Antifa indictments, fewer convictions, and almost no imprisonments?

But it's not just the urban underclass who know that their behavior will not be prosecuted. Our elites know it, too:

Former FBI Director Andrew McCabe admittedly lied on four occasions to federal investigators, apparently with the prescient expectation he would never be prosecuted.

The same hubris was true of former CIA Director John Brennan, who admittedly lied under oath to Congress — twice — with absolute impunity.

The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper not only lied under oath to Congress, but crowed that he gave the “least untruthful” answer. He too faced zero consequences.

Read his column. There's much more in it and it's quite good.

Liberal/Progressives who dominate both our federal Department of Justice as well as city council members and District Attorney's offices in most of our major municipalities seem to be under the impression that the best way to reduce crime is to decline to punish it.

They're apparently guided by the deeply counterintuitive notion that if criminals know they won't be held accountable for their crimes then, by golly, they won't commit them.

The possibility that this delusion is rampant among progressives charged with enforcing the law is one explanation for what we see happening, but it's not, in my opinion, the most plausible explanation. These people, after all, are not stupid. They know what they're doing.

A more plausible explanation is that a significant number of progressives are Marxists or heavily influenced by Marxist theory. They would rarely acknowledge it publicly, but many of them hate this country as it's currently constituted.

They see the United States as irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic. They despise capitalism and the freedoms granted in the Bill of Rights, especially in the first two amendments.

They'd love to reconstruct the nation along Marxist lines through the ballot box, but that seems too difficult to accomplish given the inherent conservatism of the American people, so the only way to "fundamentally transform" the nation - to quote Barack Obama - is to overload the structures and institutions of society to the point of collapse.

If crime is rampant, if people are living in fear, if the institutions that serve as glue holding society together - government, police, schools, hospitals - are so overburdened that they cannot function, then the people will be ripe for revolution - preferably peaceful (liberals) but violent if necessary (leftists).

The Marxist model is to disarm the populace (repeal the 2nd amendment), control and manipulate the public discourse (cancel culture and the Twitter files), emasculate the church and destroy the nuclear family.

Marxists strive to reduce people to atomized individuals who believe themselves to be solitary voices standing in the path of an ideological behemoth and helpless to resist it. Once the left has secured their political hegemony they'll be able to impose their will on society, just as they did in the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba and numerous lesser states.

Then the flame of freedom will flicker and go out and the hapless ciphers who comprise the citizenry will find themselves inhabiting a bleak totalitarian dystopia.

That's the implicit consequence of the policies of the contemporary left. They will not admit this, of course, and many perhaps would not even admit it to themselves, but the policies they enact are leading ineluctably in this direction, whether they're willing to acknowledge it or not.