In a twist on the usual "root causes" argument, the
Sultan of Knish argues that the left's welfare state and the right's police state are both attempts to treat symptoms rather than diseases:
The police escalation that shows up on countless videos exists because the people demanded it. And the people demanded it because liberal social policies made entire cities unlivable. The militarized police forces out of cities like Los Angeles filtered down to the suburbs and the rural areas as the same policies and populations that made cities unlivable began spreading outward.
The police state, associated with the right, worked in tandem with the social policies of the left, to dull the pain of those policies. That "dulling" has become the new role of conservative politicians in America who manage the disaster instead of rolling it back. The left realized that without the police state, its policies faced a much broader level of rejection so it learned to tolerate the pigs and the man.
4 comments:
There's a kind of plausibility to that, but it's not clear to me that we have identified the cause of all this trouble. As Cass and YAG point out, divorce rates have been rising since the 19th century -- so if the collapse of the family is responsible, and the Left's policies by implication for how they have speeded that collapse, we're still seeking the actual 'root cause.' The Left's policies were trying to mitigate a problem that was already there; they just happened to make it much worse instead. But even if you fix the Left, you still have the original problem.
Which is what? Industrialism? Urbanization? Something else?
As Cass and YAG point out, divorce rates have been rising since the 19th century -- so if the collapse of the family is responsible, and the Left's policies by implication for how they have speeded that collapse, we're still seeking the actual 'root cause.'
How about human nature? Some minority of people will never obey the law no matter what the policy. Culture and l/e can affect the margins, but they can't ever shift the mass of folks determined to prey on others. Law isn't there to prevent crime, but to give decent people some recourse when it occurs.
The idea that cops throughout history have been a kindler, gentler force who never abused their authority in deeply scary ways is, I think, naive at best.
Overall, I think police are a good thing. I'm very proud of my police officer son because I trust him to know right from wrong and not to abuse his power.
I also think police been given immense power and must be watched (I think this of the military too - that's why I always remind people why the military are held to higher standards than the rest of us).
FWIW, Eric's latest post got no pushback from me because I mostly agree with him. Incidents like that ARE damaging to public trust.
And they SHOULD be investigated. You'll never find me claiming otherwise.
Grim, you seem to keep suggesting that the past was a wonderful place that things like this didn't happen but I see no real evidence of that. If anything, I suspect ordinary people were preyed upon more by criminals and had less recourse when the police abused their power. I'm really mystified as to why you think the past was better?
We hear more about abuses today because of technology and 24/7 instantaneous media coverage. We're even finding out about horrific crimes that went undetected in the past. No one was there to help those poor people - not even the cops.
If anything, I suspect ordinary people were preyed upon more by criminals and had less recourse when the police abused their power. I'm really mystified as to why you think the past was better?
Here I am not arguing that the past was "better," but just that it was different. In the context of this discussion, I'm just inquiring after causes for changes we've observed.
The author of the piece Tex linked suggests that the vastly expanded police state apparatus (including a prison population that grew from less than 100,000 nationwide in the 70s to 2.5 million today) is being caused by the need to respond to social changes created by the Great Society.
My suggestion is that this isn't utterly implausible, but that the obvious mechanism for Great Society programs to cause crime would be the acceleration of the destruction of the family and its allied social institutions (i.e., churches, which you usually join by being born into a family that attends it regularly). But this was already ongoing, for quite some time.
So we need another real 'root cause,' which the Great Society only exacerbated. The real cause has to be something else.
But it can't be 'human nature' simply, because there has been this vast change. We do have a much larger and more powerful security state than we used to have, and we do imprison vastly more people, etc. Human nature doesn't change much if at all over a few generations; and this hasn't even been 'a few generations,' it's been within the space of one.
Now human nature has to be part of the answer, but it can't be a complete answer. We need an account that explains why human nature has led to a vastly different expression.
Now as to the question of whether the past was better, you'd need to give an account of what was good. That's a very long discussion on its own, although we began to discuss it just the other day at your place -- that business about what it is to lead the best kind of life.
I think it's the life of virtue, of which the capstone virtue is magnanimity. Virtues are capacities, and capacities are developed by training -- by friction, as it were. Courage is the capacity to do the right thing in the face of fear of danger. You develop this capacity by practicing it -- by actually coming up against fearful situations, and making yourself do what is right in spite of the presence of fear and danger. Strength is developed by lifting progressively heavy weights. Temperance is developed by practicing resisting temptations, a little at a time, until you can do right.
So one reason to think that the past is better is that people had more difficult lives. Today you can easily dodge responsibility, danger, hardship -- the things that provide the friction. The ease provided by technology and the welfare state ('Freedom from work!' the administration promises) means that you don't need to develop your character.
That doesn't require human nature to change, but it does explain different expressions. It's the kind of explanation I think we need.
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