Excellent post. I often wonder how much the bizarre (for lack of a better word) Democrat position on crime and prisons is due to trying to explain away the results of their other policies. When your party is A) in control of all but one or two major cities, B) has a death grip on education K-College, C) Needs the votes of older minorities living in those dysfunctional major cities, and D) your party is heavily funded by public employee unions... well, you've got a really awkward needle to thread. You have to blame something for crime and related social ills but all the proximate and plausible causes are your own programs and institutions. It is rather amazing that the Democratic coalition has held together as long as it has, all things considered.
Wesley, in your previous post ("The New Abolitionism") you wrote:
'Contemporary abolitionism shares a basic affective profile with the "general category of political vision" of its predecessor movement and shares it with a broad range of other contemporary movements that seek to alert the public to great moral emergencies ongoing in our midst... This "general category of political vision" does not, of course, coalesce into a Successor Ideology until it is married to another conceptual element, to which we will turn in the next post.'
Did you address that "[additional] conceptual element" here? Are you suggesting that it is the "Rigorous adherence to truth rather than expedient myth"? Or is it the the ongoing negotiation elites must navigate between ideas that "[grow] explosively... within [the] ranks" and their "fundamental unworkability" as practical political aims? Am I missing your point entirely? Or is it that you will address later the "conceptual element" to which you referred in the final sentence of the previous post?
“An entirely intuitive finding that few ordinary people would even think to pose as a question worthy of empirical study could only cause discomfort in a discursive community in which the made up claim to the contrary has attained the status of dogma through sheer repetition.”
🔥🔥🔥
One of the most insightful sentences I’ve read in a long time.
Hi Wesley. Your prose is amazing and your arguments solid. I'm curious whether the interval (generally speaking) between your last two articles re: "Some aspects of the Successor Ideology" is what a paying subscriber can expect of Year Zero as the wokepocalypse continues.
Asking for a friend since your writing is worthy of remuneration.
As someone who was around during the crack cocaine wars in the 80s, I continue to find it amusing that the very same people who led the charge to treat crack cocaine as more "dangerous" than powder cocaine are now complaining that blacks are unjustly punished for preferring crack cocaine to powder cocaine.
Yes. It is. You *insisted* on it. Yet not a word of admission about how they were wrong then.
"liberal institutions moved as one" is pretty disengenous when your two links are to particular columns (one by a guest opinion writer rather than a regular contributor) at two publications dedicated to publishing a wide range of opinions.
The thing is, the VAST majority of the people who were most stridently and sanctimoniously shrieking about police/prison abolition in 2020 were:
1. Middle and upper middle class white teenage girls
2. Nerdy, upper-middle-class by upbringing over-educated academic and journalist types
3. Moms, sisters, and girlfriends of imprisoned black men
4. Nerdy young white men with libertarian anarchist fantasies
That was 90% of the protestors and people making noise on social media. What is perfectly obvious is that categories 1, 2, and 4 are made up of people who for the most part have never lived in dangerous neighborhoods or been exposed to any real danger or violence in their life, and are simply totally clueless about crime, criminals, or violence because to them it's an abstract thing from TV and movies. They have zero fear in their own homes and neighborhoods. Category 3 clearly represents a group with understandable personal interests and biases in the matter. And honestly I'm not sure why anyone would ever put much stock into what the mother of a criminal has to say....moms will notoriously overlook and make excuses for their sons no matter what.
So the real question in my mind is why anyone else would take any of these categories even remotely seriously. And why this society has now seemingly become afraid of teenaged girls.
Thank you Wesley. This is probably one of the better explications of the contrast between what the ideologues and race theorists say versus what the actual communities, Black communities in this case, favor. I lived in DC in the 1980s and 90s and saw the turn things took. I lived "east of the Park" as they say, and saw corners turn from just plain street corners, to dice corners, then crack corners, into shooting/murder corners. It happened in many places, places that were already politically controlled generally by Black democrats (who I'd usually vote for). Bill and Hillary Clinton, who've been recently vilified by the "Successors" were correct that the onslaught of shootings was very concentrated to some neighborhoods and perpetrators. I paraphrase him, but Bill Clinton said in defense of the 1994 Crime bill, "this is what black preachers and leaders were asking us for". He is right. Things are still that way. It amazes me that someone, even an old warhorse like James Carville, can have a better read on public sentiment than 90% of journalists and academics, and he has expressed views that wokeness and CRT will badly undermine the power of the Democratic party. No bail, no jail? No police? That is not what sane people want, people with lived experience. I know of a handful (more than 5) of people murdered in cities on the east coast, formerly lived siblings, parents, spouses and so forth in my circle killed since the 1970s. Does my "lived experience" not count? I personally have been mugged and know, again, more than three people robbed at gunpoint or even shot at. I know anecdote is not data (nut neither is rhetoric), but I know cities like Raleigh, Atlanta, DC, NYC pretty well and know quite well what has played out in the last 40 years. The people who still live there also know it.
I do think it is worth reminding people that Progressives do not have a complete stranglehold on the Democratic Party. Joe Biden ran on increasing funding for police officers, and putting more police on the streets.
Patrick Starkey, “more cops less crime”, “pacing and leading” - back to reality is my language. We live in a stupid era. I wonder if there are analogues in history and where those people ended up; Kristallnacht, that sort of thing I suspect.
Excellent post. I often wonder how much the bizarre (for lack of a better word) Democrat position on crime and prisons is due to trying to explain away the results of their other policies. When your party is A) in control of all but one or two major cities, B) has a death grip on education K-College, C) Needs the votes of older minorities living in those dysfunctional major cities, and D) your party is heavily funded by public employee unions... well, you've got a really awkward needle to thread. You have to blame something for crime and related social ills but all the proximate and plausible causes are your own programs and institutions. It is rather amazing that the Democratic coalition has held together as long as it has, all things considered.
Wesley, in your previous post ("The New Abolitionism") you wrote:
'Contemporary abolitionism shares a basic affective profile with the "general category of political vision" of its predecessor movement and shares it with a broad range of other contemporary movements that seek to alert the public to great moral emergencies ongoing in our midst... This "general category of political vision" does not, of course, coalesce into a Successor Ideology until it is married to another conceptual element, to which we will turn in the next post.'
Did you address that "[additional] conceptual element" here? Are you suggesting that it is the "Rigorous adherence to truth rather than expedient myth"? Or is it the the ongoing negotiation elites must navigate between ideas that "[grow] explosively... within [the] ranks" and their "fundamental unworkability" as practical political aims? Am I missing your point entirely? Or is it that you will address later the "conceptual element" to which you referred in the final sentence of the previous post?
“An entirely intuitive finding that few ordinary people would even think to pose as a question worthy of empirical study could only cause discomfort in a discursive community in which the made up claim to the contrary has attained the status of dogma through sheer repetition.”
🔥🔥🔥
One of the most insightful sentences I’ve read in a long time.
Thank you.
Hi Wesley. Your prose is amazing and your arguments solid. I'm curious whether the interval (generally speaking) between your last two articles re: "Some aspects of the Successor Ideology" is what a paying subscriber can expect of Year Zero as the wokepocalypse continues.
Asking for a friend since your writing is worthy of remuneration.
As someone who was around during the crack cocaine wars in the 80s, I continue to find it amusing that the very same people who led the charge to treat crack cocaine as more "dangerous" than powder cocaine are now complaining that blacks are unjustly punished for preferring crack cocaine to powder cocaine.
Yes. It is. You *insisted* on it. Yet not a word of admission about how they were wrong then.
"liberal institutions moved as one" is pretty disengenous when your two links are to particular columns (one by a guest opinion writer rather than a regular contributor) at two publications dedicated to publishing a wide range of opinions.
The thing is, the VAST majority of the people who were most stridently and sanctimoniously shrieking about police/prison abolition in 2020 were:
1. Middle and upper middle class white teenage girls
2. Nerdy, upper-middle-class by upbringing over-educated academic and journalist types
3. Moms, sisters, and girlfriends of imprisoned black men
4. Nerdy young white men with libertarian anarchist fantasies
That was 90% of the protestors and people making noise on social media. What is perfectly obvious is that categories 1, 2, and 4 are made up of people who for the most part have never lived in dangerous neighborhoods or been exposed to any real danger or violence in their life, and are simply totally clueless about crime, criminals, or violence because to them it's an abstract thing from TV and movies. They have zero fear in their own homes and neighborhoods. Category 3 clearly represents a group with understandable personal interests and biases in the matter. And honestly I'm not sure why anyone would ever put much stock into what the mother of a criminal has to say....moms will notoriously overlook and make excuses for their sons no matter what.
So the real question in my mind is why anyone else would take any of these categories even remotely seriously. And why this society has now seemingly become afraid of teenaged girls.
Thank you Wesley. This is probably one of the better explications of the contrast between what the ideologues and race theorists say versus what the actual communities, Black communities in this case, favor. I lived in DC in the 1980s and 90s and saw the turn things took. I lived "east of the Park" as they say, and saw corners turn from just plain street corners, to dice corners, then crack corners, into shooting/murder corners. It happened in many places, places that were already politically controlled generally by Black democrats (who I'd usually vote for). Bill and Hillary Clinton, who've been recently vilified by the "Successors" were correct that the onslaught of shootings was very concentrated to some neighborhoods and perpetrators. I paraphrase him, but Bill Clinton said in defense of the 1994 Crime bill, "this is what black preachers and leaders were asking us for". He is right. Things are still that way. It amazes me that someone, even an old warhorse like James Carville, can have a better read on public sentiment than 90% of journalists and academics, and he has expressed views that wokeness and CRT will badly undermine the power of the Democratic party. No bail, no jail? No police? That is not what sane people want, people with lived experience. I know of a handful (more than 5) of people murdered in cities on the east coast, formerly lived siblings, parents, spouses and so forth in my circle killed since the 1970s. Does my "lived experience" not count? I personally have been mugged and know, again, more than three people robbed at gunpoint or even shot at. I know anecdote is not data (nut neither is rhetoric), but I know cities like Raleigh, Atlanta, DC, NYC pretty well and know quite well what has played out in the last 40 years. The people who still live there also know it.
I do think it is worth reminding people that Progressives do not have a complete stranglehold on the Democratic Party. Joe Biden ran on increasing funding for police officers, and putting more police on the streets.
Wesley, you have emerged as our finest cultural critic. You have an elite mind and sharp rhetorical skills. Nonetheless, you also need an editor.
I offer you my services on a pro bono basis.
Patrick Starkey, “more cops less crime”, “pacing and leading” - back to reality is my language. We live in a stupid era. I wonder if there are analogues in history and where those people ended up; Kristallnacht, that sort of thing I suspect.