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.
Are you an actual Democrat such that you would be able to explain the positions and why they make sense when held together? It seems like a good learning opportunity, if you know such things, or have a specific thing I might learn in mind. It is often hard to tell if any given person one speaks to in daily life is an actual Democrat as opposed to the alternative.
Talking to Democrats is impossible. Listening to them, unfortunately, is unavoidable. Middle class ones talk incessantly to reassure each other in their delusions, but there's nothing to learn from them that I couldn't get from CNN or NPR. Lower-income minority ones live in the real world and are not on board about crime and, particularly, about the rainbow flag. Many probably wouldn't be Democrats if there was an alternative besides being Republican. In 20 years, half of them will be Republicans, or whatever replaces the Republicans, unless the Democrats succeed in making disagreeing with them illegal and send all of the current Republicans to Gitmo.
> 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
I'm not sure it is? Since we're not talking about particular people's beliefs, just a sort of amalgam - racism is seen as the cause for the limited economic opportunities afforded to black people, which results in both the crime, and the need for social programs. Your position here is that the social programs are the overwhelming cause of the crime; I personally doubt it, but haven't seen any serious exploration of that one way or another. Racism as reified through systemic oppression seems like an entirely plausible cause to people, so there's really nothing for them to need to explain away.
I am kind of talking about particular people, specifically the thought leaders of the Democratic party. It is a fairly amorphous amalgam there, since I couldn't really point out exactly who that was, and probably no two people would point to exactly the same people. Still, there is definitely a group that picks and chooses the official party line.
There is still the question of how racism reified through systemic oppression seems to still be entirely to blame in cities run by Democrats. Even if other benighted places still have problems with systemic oppression, cities that are made up of overwhelmingly registered Democrat voters, with city administrations run by Democrats for decades in many cases, with school systems heavily skewed Democratic (which is true pretty much everywhere, not just cities)... well those cities should have minority students performing right at the national level of all other students. There shouldn't be limited economic opportunities for them, because cities are themselves highly concentrated economic opportunities, and the city they live in has been run by Democrats for a really long time, voted into office by majority Democrat voters. The stories of police brutality should be coming out of backwaters in Florida or Texas, not major cities like New York, Baltimore, Minneapolis or Los Angeles. Democrat run cities should be teaming with opportunity and a better life for poor oppressed minorities, which sadly does not seem to be the case.
In other words, either in general the chosen policies of Democrats don't work, or else Democrats are just as racist as everyone else and can't help oppressing minorities even in the cities where their ability to enact their policy choices within a closed system is immense. If the latter is the case, one then has to wonder if Democrats are racist enough to not care if their policies even are better for minorities, or perhaps even choose some based on what is bad for minorities.
In both cases, you are probably right that "systemic racism, just not from us" is almost certainly their preferred explanation, and will probably continue to be so until enough minorities peel off due to dissatisfaction with the outcomes of that policy. However, I definitely think there IS something Democrats need to explain away.
Here in Minneapolis, the BLM and Antifa anarchists tore the city apart last year.
They weren’t protesting Donald Trump or conservative/libertarian ideology.
They’ve been governed for nearly 50 years under single party rule and the protests were a direct confrontation with that single ideological orthodoxy that coddles criminals and patronizes people in these communities who still require the strong institutions that provide moral authority in this city.
This is a problem largely borne of white well educated liberal elected leaders patronizing the member of their community that their progressive ideas are what’s best...when 50% of those BIPOC residents have an ideology significantly more rational than this “reducing policing helps the community” . They live the life and they’re not protected by private security.
This is a wake up call that we need to promote Critical Diversity Theory in our cities and our schools and our lives. What you think and what you believe in 100x more important than the melanin levels in your skin or the testosterone levels in your blood. Minneapolis LOOKS diverse, but it is the least diverse group of city leaders you could ever conceive of. And trust me on this...white progressives seriously take advantage of it to the disadvantage of under-policed minority communities.
We all need to start judging people for what they think instead of what they look like.
We no longer should judge a book by its cover.
Content of character and ideological diversity is what Nature demands...or nature fails.
I am with you, although I would rephrase "We all need to start judging people for what they think instead of what they look like," to "We all need to start judging people for what they do instead of what they look like." Judging people for what they think is rather difficult, even compared to judging people for what they do. To wit, the Minneapolis government thinks lots of things, claims to think a lot of other things, some or all of which might be "good" in terms of being what people like to hear, but seem to be dead awful when it comes to actually improving things.
I want to push back a little bit about the targets of the protests, however. I was in St Paul during the first have of 2020, and my impression was that the protestors were blaming the police, capitalism, the American right, and then sort of a general "to hell with everything" other category for the problems. It wasn't obvious to me that they were calling out the mayors or governors for being racist and promoting systems of oppression. Much less for refusing to police and punish the criminals that prey upon others, especially those in poor neighborhoods. It seemed that when protestors responded to the burning and looting of businesses, often minority owned, it was to prevent the police from stopping the looting, not stopping the looters.
So I am a little skeptical that the protestors were calling out the entire city government, but I would agree that there was a lot of different political goals and targets of blame among all he protestors. There were a lot of people with a lot of different complaints going at it, and of course quite a large contingent who just wanted to steal things and watch the city burn.
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.
I felt badly...I mean my friend felt badly about posing the question since high quality, thoughtful, well-researched writing is not a transactional commodity and I...I mean he doesn't treat it as such.
Plus, my thoughts are almost entirely unoriginal so I'm certain others will be curious about the same question and we've now done the hard part on their behalf with our exchange. I'll be rooting for and participating in your Substack's success.
It's a reasonable concern. I lost some subscribers because of the long lag between the first couple posts. I plan to earn them back and attract new ones with regular posting.
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.
The real question you are asking is this Woke-ism transitory or is it part of something larger at work? Is media (mostly social)driving this coupled with a largely God-less America that still yearns for something to believe in bigger than themselves? Who’s driving this bus?
I work for a Woke Capitalist company and we have lost a # of Asian, Indian and Latino employees by the company bending over backwards with financial contributions to BLM at a time last summer when smart leaders took a pause...and waited before pulling the trigger on donations aimed at one racial group.
If France does have an advantage, it’s rooted in the fact that it is illegal to segment and provide any data about racial groups in France.
You’re either French or you’re not. Period. end of Sentence.
That’s how we are supposed to be. It’s why FDR was opposed to hyphenated America. Where does it end? How does that ever unite us?
Companies incorporated in Delaware are subject to a law that states companies are only legally allowed to serve shareholder interests. How many companies have blatantly broken that law in the last 12 months? Dozens. Stakeholder capitalism is woke capitalism and when a CEO can decide to use shareholder money to invest $100’s of millions of company funds into Green New Deal campaigns or politics or BLM advocacy....this is not good for our Republic...or democracy. Who among us can afford to go up against Apple, Google or Amazon if their CEO decides to fund a pet project that is not in the shareholder interest or democratically debated among the 330,000,000 of us?
We’ve lost our commitment and faith to our True North.
Criminals are criminals and we have a legal system that provides justice for the criminal and their victims.
We have these rules codified in ordinances and statutes so the rest of us can go to work and baseball practice and PTA meetings and not have to navigate these new landmines popping up in our path every day. It’s exhausting having to choose your words and burying any opinion you may have that doesnt’ dovetail into the conventional orthodoxy.
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.
Progressives are your problem - that is Wesley’s point. Progressive dogma, cultivated obedience and strict control over allowable debate make a frightening cocktail, elicited by the Trump phenomenon and perpetuated by an abiding fear of his Neanderthal followers (like me). Progressives are hate filled - it has changed - convictions have sharpened and hardened, giving licence to their lies, they pursue what’s right.
Populists on the Left and Populists on the right collectively hold 60% power in the United STates against the 40% held by the Establishment.
The goal of the Establishment is to use the media to continually pit the Populist Left and Right against each other and call their ideas abnormal...silly..destructive, etc.. all designed to keep a fog over low information voters until Election Day.
Any natural ecosystem has a hierarchy, even humans. Even Congress. Even the House.
Republican created a Natural Law rule in their caucus by adopting term limits for Committee Chairs. This gives someone 6 years at the helm before being required to step down and cede power to someone new. This allows fresh ideas and fresh blood to have a taste of real power.
This natural laws doesn’t exist under the Authoritarian Tyrannical rule of Nancy Pelosi who has surrounded herself with 80 year sycophants. The Squad and Progressive Left just want access to some power. They just want bills to be debated and amended on the floor of House; all of which Pelosi denies.
Thus...as a conservative...I don’t see progressives as the problem. The problem resides with the Establishment Hierarchy for not finding a path to allow these upstarts to have a real voice. This is when revolutions start, such as what you saw all last summer in almost all Democrat run cities.
Thanks. I have a guy I work with but not on every single post. I'm still adjusting to being a blogger and trying to develop the ability to post without editorial intervention. It's a process that will take a bit of work to complete the transition and get the kinks out.
Whatever you are doing, keep doing it. I was a happy supporter via Patreon and was excited when you developed this substack and announced the corresponding project around the successor ideology. Your essays at Tablet are fantastic and are where I initially discovered your writing.
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.
You should try talking to actual Democrats some time, you might learn something.
Are you an actual Democrat such that you would be able to explain the positions and why they make sense when held together? It seems like a good learning opportunity, if you know such things, or have a specific thing I might learn in mind. It is often hard to tell if any given person one speaks to in daily life is an actual Democrat as opposed to the alternative.
Hi, MarkS,
My questions are sincere: What do you mean by "actual Democrats"? Are you distancing yourself from some who voted for the Democratic Candidate?
Why do you assume that Doctor Hammer hasn't talked to Democrats?
(I am honestly curious. 😊)
Talking to Democrats is impossible. Listening to them, unfortunately, is unavoidable. Middle class ones talk incessantly to reassure each other in their delusions, but there's nothing to learn from them that I couldn't get from CNN or NPR. Lower-income minority ones live in the real world and are not on board about crime and, particularly, about the rainbow flag. Many probably wouldn't be Democrats if there was an alternative besides being Republican. In 20 years, half of them will be Republicans, or whatever replaces the Republicans, unless the Democrats succeed in making disagreeing with them illegal and send all of the current Republicans to Gitmo.
"Democratic"--they're called adjectives.
> 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
I'm not sure it is? Since we're not talking about particular people's beliefs, just a sort of amalgam - racism is seen as the cause for the limited economic opportunities afforded to black people, which results in both the crime, and the need for social programs. Your position here is that the social programs are the overwhelming cause of the crime; I personally doubt it, but haven't seen any serious exploration of that one way or another. Racism as reified through systemic oppression seems like an entirely plausible cause to people, so there's really nothing for them to need to explain away.
I am kind of talking about particular people, specifically the thought leaders of the Democratic party. It is a fairly amorphous amalgam there, since I couldn't really point out exactly who that was, and probably no two people would point to exactly the same people. Still, there is definitely a group that picks and chooses the official party line.
There is still the question of how racism reified through systemic oppression seems to still be entirely to blame in cities run by Democrats. Even if other benighted places still have problems with systemic oppression, cities that are made up of overwhelmingly registered Democrat voters, with city administrations run by Democrats for decades in many cases, with school systems heavily skewed Democratic (which is true pretty much everywhere, not just cities)... well those cities should have minority students performing right at the national level of all other students. There shouldn't be limited economic opportunities for them, because cities are themselves highly concentrated economic opportunities, and the city they live in has been run by Democrats for a really long time, voted into office by majority Democrat voters. The stories of police brutality should be coming out of backwaters in Florida or Texas, not major cities like New York, Baltimore, Minneapolis or Los Angeles. Democrat run cities should be teaming with opportunity and a better life for poor oppressed minorities, which sadly does not seem to be the case.
In other words, either in general the chosen policies of Democrats don't work, or else Democrats are just as racist as everyone else and can't help oppressing minorities even in the cities where their ability to enact their policy choices within a closed system is immense. If the latter is the case, one then has to wonder if Democrats are racist enough to not care if their policies even are better for minorities, or perhaps even choose some based on what is bad for minorities.
In both cases, you are probably right that "systemic racism, just not from us" is almost certainly their preferred explanation, and will probably continue to be so until enough minorities peel off due to dissatisfaction with the outcomes of that policy. However, I definitely think there IS something Democrats need to explain away.
Here in Minneapolis, the BLM and Antifa anarchists tore the city apart last year.
They weren’t protesting Donald Trump or conservative/libertarian ideology.
They’ve been governed for nearly 50 years under single party rule and the protests were a direct confrontation with that single ideological orthodoxy that coddles criminals and patronizes people in these communities who still require the strong institutions that provide moral authority in this city.
This is a problem largely borne of white well educated liberal elected leaders patronizing the member of their community that their progressive ideas are what’s best...when 50% of those BIPOC residents have an ideology significantly more rational than this “reducing policing helps the community” . They live the life and they’re not protected by private security.
This is a wake up call that we need to promote Critical Diversity Theory in our cities and our schools and our lives. What you think and what you believe in 100x more important than the melanin levels in your skin or the testosterone levels in your blood. Minneapolis LOOKS diverse, but it is the least diverse group of city leaders you could ever conceive of. And trust me on this...white progressives seriously take advantage of it to the disadvantage of under-policed minority communities.
We all need to start judging people for what they think instead of what they look like.
We no longer should judge a book by its cover.
Content of character and ideological diversity is what Nature demands...or nature fails.
I am with you, although I would rephrase "We all need to start judging people for what they think instead of what they look like," to "We all need to start judging people for what they do instead of what they look like." Judging people for what they think is rather difficult, even compared to judging people for what they do. To wit, the Minneapolis government thinks lots of things, claims to think a lot of other things, some or all of which might be "good" in terms of being what people like to hear, but seem to be dead awful when it comes to actually improving things.
I want to push back a little bit about the targets of the protests, however. I was in St Paul during the first have of 2020, and my impression was that the protestors were blaming the police, capitalism, the American right, and then sort of a general "to hell with everything" other category for the problems. It wasn't obvious to me that they were calling out the mayors or governors for being racist and promoting systems of oppression. Much less for refusing to police and punish the criminals that prey upon others, especially those in poor neighborhoods. It seemed that when protestors responded to the burning and looting of businesses, often minority owned, it was to prevent the police from stopping the looting, not stopping the looters.
So I am a little skeptical that the protestors were calling out the entire city government, but I would agree that there was a lot of different political goals and targets of blame among all he protestors. There were a lot of people with a lot of different complaints going at it, and of course quite a large contingent who just wanted to steal things and watch the city burn.
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?
No, I did not. That will go in one of the next two posts.
Ok thanks!
“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.
Yes I will be posting twice weekly at a minimum from here on out.
I felt badly...I mean my friend felt badly about posing the question since high quality, thoughtful, well-researched writing is not a transactional commodity and I...I mean he doesn't treat it as such.
Plus, my thoughts are almost entirely unoriginal so I'm certain others will be curious about the same question and we've now done the hard part on their behalf with our exchange. I'll be rooting for and participating in your Substack's success.
It's a reasonable concern. I lost some subscribers because of the long lag between the first couple posts. I plan to earn them back and attract new ones with regular posting.
Best of Serendipity, Sir. :)
TYTY. Can't wait!
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.
The real question you are asking is this Woke-ism transitory or is it part of something larger at work? Is media (mostly social)driving this coupled with a largely God-less America that still yearns for something to believe in bigger than themselves? Who’s driving this bus?
I work for a Woke Capitalist company and we have lost a # of Asian, Indian and Latino employees by the company bending over backwards with financial contributions to BLM at a time last summer when smart leaders took a pause...and waited before pulling the trigger on donations aimed at one racial group.
If France does have an advantage, it’s rooted in the fact that it is illegal to segment and provide any data about racial groups in France.
You’re either French or you’re not. Period. end of Sentence.
That’s how we are supposed to be. It’s why FDR was opposed to hyphenated America. Where does it end? How does that ever unite us?
Companies incorporated in Delaware are subject to a law that states companies are only legally allowed to serve shareholder interests. How many companies have blatantly broken that law in the last 12 months? Dozens. Stakeholder capitalism is woke capitalism and when a CEO can decide to use shareholder money to invest $100’s of millions of company funds into Green New Deal campaigns or politics or BLM advocacy....this is not good for our Republic...or democracy. Who among us can afford to go up against Apple, Google or Amazon if their CEO decides to fund a pet project that is not in the shareholder interest or democratically debated among the 330,000,000 of us?
We’ve lost our commitment and faith to our True North.
Criminals are criminals and we have a legal system that provides justice for the criminal and their victims.
We have these rules codified in ordinances and statutes so the rest of us can go to work and baseball practice and PTA meetings and not have to navigate these new landmines popping up in our path every day. It’s exhausting having to choose your words and burying any opinion you may have that doesnt’ dovetail into the conventional orthodoxy.
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.
Progressives are your problem - that is Wesley’s point. Progressive dogma, cultivated obedience and strict control over allowable debate make a frightening cocktail, elicited by the Trump phenomenon and perpetuated by an abiding fear of his Neanderthal followers (like me). Progressives are hate filled - it has changed - convictions have sharpened and hardened, giving licence to their lies, they pursue what’s right.
No..progressives are not the problem
Populists on the Left and Populists on the right collectively hold 60% power in the United STates against the 40% held by the Establishment.
The goal of the Establishment is to use the media to continually pit the Populist Left and Right against each other and call their ideas abnormal...silly..destructive, etc.. all designed to keep a fog over low information voters until Election Day.
Any natural ecosystem has a hierarchy, even humans. Even Congress. Even the House.
Republican created a Natural Law rule in their caucus by adopting term limits for Committee Chairs. This gives someone 6 years at the helm before being required to step down and cede power to someone new. This allows fresh ideas and fresh blood to have a taste of real power.
This natural laws doesn’t exist under the Authoritarian Tyrannical rule of Nancy Pelosi who has surrounded herself with 80 year sycophants. The Squad and Progressive Left just want access to some power. They just want bills to be debated and amended on the floor of House; all of which Pelosi denies.
Thus...as a conservative...I don’t see progressives as the problem. The problem resides with the Establishment Hierarchy for not finding a path to allow these upstarts to have a real voice. This is when revolutions start, such as what you saw all last summer in almost all Democrat run cities.
Fog over low information voters, I like that.
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.
Thanks. I have a guy I work with but not on every single post. I'm still adjusting to being a blogger and trying to develop the ability to post without editorial intervention. It's a process that will take a bit of work to complete the transition and get the kinks out.
Whatever you are doing, keep doing it. I was a happy supporter via Patreon and was excited when you developed this substack and announced the corresponding project around the successor ideology. Your essays at Tablet are fantastic and are where I initially discovered your writing.
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.