Well, I hope not. But one has to worry. Images of New York, Portland, Minneapolis, and Kenosha burning can have a strong impact on the “I’m no racist, but” crowd, who are not charmed by Trump’s general boorishness but don’t like riots.
Smart phones are bringing home the ubiquity of racism in police departments across the country. The spectacle of Kenosha police passing out water bottles and praise to white militia—would they have done the same for “black militia”?—a practice defended by the Kenosha County sheriff, is pretty good evidence for what one might call “systemic racism”.
But systemic racism hardly justifies looting and rioting. Liberal mayors and prosecutors in big cities from San Francisco to New York are confronted with crime rates that are rising for the first time in a generation, and no amount of “woke” lecturing can disguise that fact.1 After recent rioting in Philadelphia, city district attorney Larry Krasner “explained” that “Prosecution alone will achieve nothing close to justice—not when power imbalances and lack of accountability make it possible for government actors including police or prosecutors to regularly take life or liberty unjustly and face no criminal or career penalty.” Just what the white, middle-class Philadelphian wants to hear.
Poster boy for urban dysfunction is, of course, New York City Mayor William de Blasio, easily hateable for his ludicrous ego alone—out-sized even by Big Apple standards—but his record is unattractive as well. The first Democratic mayor since David Dinkins in the early 1990s leaves behind him an embarrassing record indeed.2
The intelligent, largely bi-partisan reaction to over-criminalization—stepping down the unwinnable and deeply corrupting “war on drugs” in particular—is in real danger of being swamped by this new outbreak of urban violence. It is a hard task indeed to bring meaningful discipline to urban police forces who have used their political clout to turn themselves into a Praetorian Guard who must be bought off with lavish perks and pay just to do their jobs and insist on their “right” to both commit and conceal a wide variety of crimes of their own as they do so. When mayors and prosecutors are more interested in brandishing their devotion to the oppressed than maintaining the public peace, it becomes almost impossible.
Afterwords
Does this mean that Donald Trump is a “viable alternative” to Uncle Joe and the Democrats? Absolutely not! For at least the past two decades, the Republican Party has been engaged in a relentless effort to reduce the size of the Democratic electorate. (Talk about “systemic racism”!) Trump, with his blind and all-consuming ego, has simply ripped the mask from this hypocrisy, declaring that any election he does not win is ipso facto a fraud. Trump’s supporters prattle of tax cuts and judges, pretending they do not know—and pretending that they are not glad—that he is destroying democracy on their behalf.
1. One can discount at least half of the foam-flecked prose and heavy-handed anti-Semitic inuendoes in this piece from the American Conservative (which could really do a better job with its editing) by Pat Nolan, Beware Of George Soros’ Trojan Horse Prosecutors (I told you the anti-Semitic inuendoes were heavy-handed), and still be unnerved by statements from the “new breed” of woke prosecutors.
