("Can Liberals Survive Progressivism?")
Can anybody say Willie Horton, broken windows and the war on drugs? Mr. Stephens calls upon the ghosts of Christmas past in his piece.
We have seen the impact of incarcerating a generation of minorities, of families without hope. We have seen drugs proliferate, the war against their use, useless. These policies were, it is now abundantly clear, failures.
We do not eradicate the problems this nation faces by sticking them in a penitentiary, by having countless numbers languish in jail awaiting trial on petty offenses, their lives forever changed, forever stained.
These are tough days, the pandemic having been the catalyst for exacerbating many of our gravest concerns.
But there are better answers out there that take hard work, not hard time.
I would rather Mr. Stephens get on his soapbox about our obsession with guns, our second Amendment pretzel twisting that led to Kyle Rittenhouse and his AR-15.
But that would not fit neatly into the tidy box in which he would bury the Democrats. And so, it gets buried behind an oped that is a generation out of date and sadly out of touch.
2 comments:
When the liberal--woke--progressive polymaths got themselves into power, they made a conscious decision to ignore quality of life crimes and to abolish the 'broken windows' policy because it was too closely linked to stop & frisk (which was an abuse of police power). You would have thought that these politicians learned their lessons, but they never lived through the 1970s as I did trying to navigate the subways, streets and parks in a city that was infected with muggers, drugs, blight and graffiti. So today in NYC, the inmates have taken over Rikers Island's jail; San Francisco is unlivable due to homeless people who live and shit in the street; Chicago has more guns than when Eliot Ness was after Al Capone; Miami is a guaranteed mugging; and, Kansas City has more drugs on the streets than Perdue Pharma. The warnings of Brett Stevens hit too close to home because they are all too accurate.
Stephens' piece ignores the fact that Republicans are more to blame as Democrats for the surge in quality of life crimes. He has turned a blind eye to the fact that Wall Street (predominantly Republican) was only too happy to export entire industries over the past several decades to China and other parts of the world to save a buck, causing a massive loss of jobs to the lower and middle class in this country, .not to mention the ensuing mortgage crisis. The result as been a sociologic catastrophe. The old adage of the 1950's "I can always get a factory job" to fall back on no longer applies in this country. Into this job void, selling drugs becomes an attractive business enterprise for the desperate, of which there are many. What Mr. Stephens should be writing about is that there are no politicians on either side courageous enough or intellectually capable enough of explaining how we got into this mess and how we get ourselves out. The best description for that fix-it person? Progressive.--RE
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