When Is an Insurrection Not an Insurrection?

We are fast approaching the anniversary of what is now called January 6. We are preparing to see the media, led by Democratic politicians, flood the American mind with hysterical swill about how bad January 6, 2021 really was. They will talk about the loss of life, the damage to property and the threat to overturn the election result.

Keep in mind, people who spend four years doing everything in their power to delegitimize the Trump presidency, who engaged a campaign of non-stop judicial and legislative and public harassment, who were happy to invent facts and to lie in order to undermine the duly elected president of the United States-- these same people are up in arms about the horrors of what happened on January 6. 

They have branded it, and not themselves, a threat to democracy. In truth, if you would like to be fanciful, consider that the real issue is the threat to Democrats, to their power, to their control of major American institutions. Every time you hear someone start drooling over the wonders of liberal democracy, tell yourself that he is trying to influence you into thinking that the good guys are liberal democrats. It's subliminal influencing.

Moreover, as I have often noted, after three months of nonstop riotous insurrection in America’s blue cities, the notion that a protest on January 6 was the real problem is risible. That our media overlords have largely ignored what happened after the death of George Floyd, that they have no interest in prosecuting the BLM and Antifa terrorists tells you all you need to know about how American became divided against itself.

To those on the political left, the BLM riots were not of the same order as the January 6 protests because they were conducted for a righteous cause. They were the voice of the oppressed rising up to attack the rich and the powerful, their oppressors. They might have looked like common criminals but they were the vanguard of a revolution designed to overthrow the capitalist order, the white supremacist power elites and the patriarchy.

If you ask when a crime is not a crime or when an insurrection is not an insurrection, the answer is, when it is perpetrated by a member of an oppressed minority group rebelling against capitalist oppression.

They are obviously not living a dream, but they are living a radical leftist ideology. Unfortunately, they are not alone. The rise of the American radical left, its takeover of major American cities is a story that is ongoing, but that deserves mention. One Michael Shellenberger, a liberal progressive himself, has documented it in his new book San Fransicko. For our purposes, as a default for not having read the book, we will examine the review offered by one Michael Anton, someone whose name ought by now to be familiar.

Anton points out that the decline and fall of American cities was not inevitable. Things were quite different in 1990s:

The great American political and policy story of the 1990s was the spectacular drop in crime and concomitant rise of urban order. Cities and neighborhoods long considered ungovernable came back to life. People moved in, businesses opened (or reopened), property values rose, and the streets were packed—with, I hasten to add, law-abiding folk going about their business.

As everyone knows by now, the people of New York elected an idiot leftist named Bill de Blasio mayor, and things started spiraling down. At first it was a slow movement. In time the decline picked up speed:

When Bill de Blasio became mayor, I predicted imminent mayhem. That turned out to be wrong. But one could sense subtle changes almost instantly. The police pulled back—either under orders, or intuiting that active enforcement would no longer be backed by City Hall. Order was upheld less, anti-social types took more liberties on the streets, and one began to anticipate, on the subways, that, sooner or later, “you were gonna have a problem.”

Naturally, de Blasio and other big city blue mayors hopped on the BLM protests. They were, effectively, protesting the Trump presidency and were taking action to overthrow it. 

The first big jolt came in the mid-teens, after the initial wave of Black Lives Matter protests. De Blasio took it upon himself to denounce all police as inveterate racists from whom his own children had to fear for their very lives. Two NYPD officers were assassinated in their patrol car by an assailant hell-bent on killing cops. Crime spiked. The mayor doubled down on his ideological posturing. Everything got worse. I left—for unrelated reasons but, in hindsight, in the nick of time.

Since the rioting served a political purpose, leftist elites were happy to embrace it. After all, they had been committing political violence against the Trump administration from the moment that it was elected, so why should they disparage those who were doing their bidding:

What did take me aback, however, was how eagerly and heedlessly America’s elites egged on the violence, arson, looting, and destruction. Hitherto, at least in this century, most “mostly peaceful protests” had been visited upon locales well outside the elite circuit: Baltimore, Oakland, Ferguson. Now, suddenly, it was Midtown Manhattan, the Chicago Loop, West L.A., and Lafayette Square in front of the White House being ransacked. These are the very citadels not just of American but of global power and wealth, home to multinational companies and billionaires from all over the world. Yet as they were being smashed, burned, and pillaged, the elites who spend tens of millions for the privilege of living and working in them couldn’t spare the slightest twang of their vocal cords to speak out against the destruction. Indeed, most of them actively encouraged it.

Storming the Winter Palace; storming the Bastille; revolutionary actions to overthrow an illegitimate administration.

Of course, Shellenberger is a liberal himself, so he proposes new policies to solve urban problems:

San Fransicko is Shellenberger’s attempt to persuade progressives like himself that they’ve gone too far, that they can combine compassion with sanity in ways that are neither heartless nor racist, and that this will be effective in both helping those who need it and in making cities more livable for everyone else. His basic formula is: Enforce the law, and expand services for addicts, the homeless, and the mentally ill. One may be tempted to cackle “Good luck!” and leave him and his fellow urban-progressives to their utopias, but anyone who’s ever enjoyed time in an American city at its best, or at least not at its worst, will wish the project every success.

And yet, the real problem is crime. It’s not just that politicians do not care. They seem actively to sympathize with the criminals. They feel the criminals’ pain and seem to believe that victim group members who commit crime are doing something righteous. Those who see things differently should get with the program. 

A more serious weakness of the book, in my opinion, is its reluctance to connect crime with the other forms of pathology Shellenberger analyzes. The first two-thirds of the book flow smoothly from homelessness to drugs to mental illness. The essential connectivity of the three is unmistakably established.

Once San Fransicko turns to crime, however, it feels like we’ve begun a different book, one less confident and more hesitant. It’s not just that Shellenberger hesitates to challenge orthodoxy on this most sensitive of topics. It’s that, at least in the book, he appears not to see how all these issues of public order are inseparable. Those old, reformist mayors, by contrast, knew that small crimes beget larger ones, unenforced laws breed contempt for the law, and unchecked disorder grows and spreads. This insight was the basis of arguably the most consequential magazine article of all time—“Broken Windows,” by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling—and the foundation of the restoration of public order in urban America from the 1990s up until our present progressive elites decided to chuck all that real progress into the gutter.

The crime wave that followed the riotous insurrection of the spring and summer of 2020 has hollowed out central business districts, making large parts of the city of San Francisco uninhabitable. One underscores the fact that the city’s mayor London Breed has announced a plan to put an end to the chaos, and that certain political figures, like the idiot prosecutor Chesa Boudin, have protested that her plan is an injustice.

Anton describes the downtown San Francisco business district:

The whole district is boarded up and deserted, all but abandoned, in part owing to large-scale flash-mob looting, but also because, until the mayor’s recent epiphany, official San Francisco’s refusal to do anything about “quality of life” crimes made downtown unbearable. Even when and where it isn’t dangerous, it’s dirty and disgusting. People are voting with their feet and staying away in droves.

Of course, good progressives do not believe in pragmatism. They do not accept that their policy ideas should be submitted to a reality test. So, there is no real way to persuade them that their approach is wrong. They are living an oppression narrative and nothing will convince them that they should abandon it:

Things don’t have to be as bad as they are now, but neither does there seem to be any realistic hope of convincing progressives that their convictions are delusional and their enthusiasms misguided. And that’s the true answer to the question posed above—why did the left not merely countenance but encourage the destruction of their citadels in summer 2020, and why are they still doing so now?

Because they believe. Because decades or even centuries of acid wash anti-intellectualism aimed at tearing down every rational argument for virtue, order, morality, decency, and sanity have finally metastasized to the point where progressives are unpersuadable. They utterly lack the mental immunities necessary to say “no” to behaviors long universally understood to be pathological. If you’re shooting up on the street, burning down a city, breaking into a car, beating a senior citizen, charging a pedestrian—add here any violent or antisocial behavior you want—so long as you can be classified as a “victim” or member of a “protected class” or “vulnerable” or “disadvantaged,” well, then saying “no” is absolutely unthinkable. Saying “yes,” by contrast, is a matter of religious fervor. As is attacking anyone who dares whisper “no.”

Anton ends on a pessimistic note:

But whatever position one takes on this question—fight for the cities or let them go—the right has zero leverage at this stage through which to mount an effective counter to entrenched progressive urban rule. Which means, in practice, that we’re stuck with the latter option. Therefore a better use of what capital we have, it seems to me, is to fortify the places where we’re still politically in the game against the coming progressive assault, lest San Fransicko end up describing not just a handful of blue dystopias but the entire nation.