The Progressives' Destruction of Large Cities

A Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged, either figuratively or literally mugged. And reality is starting to impinge on the Liberal/Progressive enclaves of the big cities. When the Crime Wave Hits Your Family

When surging crime impacts you where you live, you have to take notice, even if it hurts your Progressive Wokeness.

This is the story of a man whose neighborhood is falling apart due to violent crime. In particular the catalyst for his noticing is that the nanny his family was employing for day care decided it is time to get out of Oakland. And her justification for moving?

Our nanny is wonderful, and she lives just a few blocks from us. But a few weeks ago, someone walked up her street spraying bullets into random houses. One of the bullets found its way into her living room, as she and her family ducked for cover. At that moment, she and her husband decided they were moving their family out of Oakland.

The shooting didn’t even make the local news. Apparently, in the Bay Area right now, you can walk up a residential street firing your gun into houses, and you still won’t be able to compete for attention with all of the other sensational crimes.

But it isn't just a personal story. There are some hard facts, which I'm sure are painful for a Progressive to contemplate. Those facts are about how Progressives ruin cities

And progressives—I count myself as one of them—do ruin cities. Or, at least, they put in place policies that cause profound harm to the people living in them. An obvious case-in-point is the call to defund the police. It’s a slogan that fits nicely on a bumper sticker, but what are its consequences in practice?

After a summer of protests against police violence, progressive cities like New York, Seattle, Minneapolis, Austin, and Denver cut their police budgets in 2020 even during a national surge in violent crime. That surge has only continued into 2021, in some places by wide margins. The wave of murders in American cities has provoked political backlashes to the cuts, which have forced some local governments to backtrack from their defund agenda.

The author goes into the defund the police insanity in some detail. What happens when police stop interacting with the public, either by policy or choice, or because there are fewer police? Crime goes up. There is even a section that looks at Chicago after the death of Laquan McDonald in 2014.

Then the author takes aim at the result of Progressive solution to insane asylums, a policy from the 1960s and 1970s that saw the removal of institutionalization.

We live in the aftermath of the progressives’ triumph over institutionalization, and it looks like San Francisco’s Tenderloin District or L.A.’s Skid Row. Today, with few exceptions, there is no more involuntary treatment for serious mental disease or drug addiction. But nor is there a humane alternative. There is only jail or the streets.

There is more, and it is worth your time. Click thru.

Hat tip to The Other McCain: Waking Up From Wokeness.

One of the wonderful things about the Biden presidency is that, when things go wrong, Democrats can no longer blame Trump — and a whole lot of stuff is going wrong now. We are at the stage of events famously referenced by H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Robert Stacy McCain has more as well.