The current scene keeps bringing back to mind the old saying attributed (incorrectly) to Mark Twain: history doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes. Right now the country seems to be repeating the cycle of the 1960s, when liberals in power gave us reckless spending that stoked inflation, social engineering like “model cities” and busing, degraded law enforcement with soft-on-crime policies contributing to a massive crime wave, and race riots that elicited ritual confessions of liberal guilt (i.e., the Kerner Commission report of 1968). By the time the cycle was done in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon piled up a 49-state landslide—a repudiation of liberalism that carried through Reagan’s landslides in the 1980s.
For example, the Biden’s Administration’s claim that “domestic violent extremism” (meaning conservatives) is the nation’s most serious security threat is a near-exact copy of the Kennedy Administration’s big public push to label “right-wing extremism” (they had in mind the John Birch Society) as a serious threat to the nation. This was no mere talking point. The Kennedy Administration contemplated schemes of censorship through Post Office regulations, had the FCC scowl at radio stations that carried conservative programming when their broadcast licenses were up for renewal, and had the Justice Department threaten anti-trust investigations of major companies that resisted JFK’s policies, such as General Electric. (It has long been rumored that GE canceled Ronald Reagan’s contract as host of GE theater in 1962 because of pressure from the Kennedy Justice Department, though there is no documentary evidence.) And let’s not forget how the left tried to put the blame for JFK’s assassination on a conservative “climate of hate” rather than on the Communist assassin himself.
The point is, government attacks on conservatives and conservative media today are hardly new.
Liberals were slow to perceive the rising backlash to their misgovernment as the 1960s wasted away their long-run political dominance. So it is fun to observe today’s New York Times:
A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amidst Rising Crime
Now, a year after Mr. Floyd’s death, Los Angeles and other American cities face a surge in violent crime amid pandemic despair and a flood of new guns onto the streets. The surge is prompting cities whose leaders embraced the values of the movement last year to reassess how far they are willing to go to reimagine public safety and divert money away from the police and toward social services. . .
A year after streets echoed with calls to “defund” law enforcement and city leaders embraced the message by agreeing to take $150 million away from the Los Angeles Police Department, or about 8 percent of the department’s budget, the city last week agreed to increase the police budget to allow the department to hire about 250 officers. The increase essentially restores the cuts that followed the protests. . .
It is a trend mirrored across the country, where crime is skyrocketing in many big cities, putting liberal leaders under pressure to balance the demands of activists against the concerns of some residents about rising violence. In New York, where homicides grew by nearly 45 percent last year, crime is dominating the discussion in the race for mayor.
Good to see the Fox Butterfield Effect is still alive and well at the Times. The Times wants to blame it on “more guns,” without considering that gun purchases might be soaring because liberals have given people reason to doubt that the police will protect them from crime.
Meanwhile, there are signs that the public is already reversing course in its esteem for Black Lives Matter, which includes second thoughts even among blacks (also reported by the New York Times) and especially hispanics:
The Times story adds:
The deterioration in support is noteworthy because we do not merely observe a return to pre-Floyd opinion levels. Rather, since last summer, Republicans and white people have actually become less supportive of Black Lives Matter than they were before the death of George Floyd — a trend that seems unlikely to reverse anytime soon.
Gee, I wonder why that might be? Maybe the categorical demonization of all white people and coerced confessions of collective white guilt might have something to do with it?
A few of the smarter progressives and unbiased journalists understand this. Take Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress:
From certain quarters the immediate interpretation will be that America is full of stone cold racists who refuse to Face The Truth about our white supremacist society, hence the failure of BLM popularity to hold up. But that leaves out other very salient developments such as the association of some BLM protests with violence and looting, the linkage of BLM with strenuously “anti-racist” ideology and above all the promulgation of the idea and slogan “defund the police” which is still embraced by many activists and supporters. It seems highly plausible that the much of the good will toward BLM generated by opposing flagrant acts of police violence has been squandered by these highly unpopular acts and ideas.
Movements either get broader and smarter over time or they lose momentum. BLM is unlikely to be an exception to this rule.
Last week Wall Street Journal reporter Gerald Seib observed:
Conversations with a variety of Democrats and public-opinion watchers suggest that Democrats are quite comfortable with the size and scope of their economic agenda, which they believe matches the public’s thirst for a new and vigorous start after the coronavirus pandemic. They are more worried on the cultural front, where their progressive wing is pushing the party to places on social issues where the loyalty of moderate voters will be strained.
Here’s the fun paragraph:
“I think we’ve won the argument with many Americans that we need more investment in the American people,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a leading member of the House Progressive Caucus, said in an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival last week. “Where the Democrats, candidly, I think, get into trouble is conveying that we believe in markets, conveying that we believe the American experiment is an extraordinary one, that we love our founding and our Constitution and that we have an aspirational vision of American patriotism, conveying that we do believe in borders (and) conveying that we believe in law enforcement.”
One reason Democrats “get into trouble” conveying their support for “the American experiment” is that a lot of Democrats don’t support it, not to mention the New York Times and college campuses where the founding (and especially the founders) and the Constitution are held in complete contempt. This statement reminds me of Irving Kristol’s comment way back in the 1950s about Joe McCarthy: “For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”
Seib concluded:
Cries on the left to defund the police, which in some cases have ratcheted into seeming calls to eliminate police departments; a “cancel culture” environment in which some progressives seek to bully into silence those who disagree with them; and dismissal of middle America’s concerns about a surge of migrants crossing the southern border—all are troublesome with moderate and independent voters.
Let’s vote.
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