We are told we should Defund the Police. Some say it in anger, but for others it’s an opportunity to partake in the great American grift as activists, journalists, or further varieties of opportunist. Politically, it mostly benefits the Democrats. While Biden is hiding, they’re riding a wave of outrage, avoiding questions about their historic liability and their present competence to govern.
Most of America’s metropolises are liberal. They are run like liberal fantasy lands. Behold the herds of young, aspiring liberals, unmarried and clueless about life. They’re supposedly happy, but they take out their unaccountable anger through radical politics. They enjoy all sorts of silly fantasies while they work for rich people who don’t even think of them as human beings. And then behold certain insufficiently gentrified areas of the same cities, where the poor who do the dirty work live. There, hell on earth is absolutely acceptable to liberals.
How is that vision supposed to be egalitarian, post-racial and futuristic? Every time liberals have absolute power over a city and it goes to hell, they claim the problems they’ve created are ‘systemic’. Liberals ask to be elected to save the world, but give them North Korean levels of political control, and then it’s as if nothing can be done. Show them liberal-controlled communities where horrific violence makes a mockery of our fundamental political guarantee, equal protection under the law, and they’ll blame ‘structural’ factors.
Liberal excuses for the ugly truth about Democratic-run cities go beyond cries of ‘systemic racism’ or ‘white supremacy’. Sophisticated liberals are so sophisticated that the mere mention of violence is a gaffe. You mentioned Chicago — how could you! Talking about hell is an embarrassment, but hell itself is fine, and administering it very heavenly. The most deeply liberal reaction of all is to defund the police. Sentimental, idealistic and thus flattering to the liberal who thinks it, this thought reveals the whole political theory of contemporary liberalism.
The therapeutic-pharmacological paradise
The liberal assumption is that violence is the result of miseducation or maladjustment. Good liberals are themselves above violence — they’re sweet-natured, almost Buddhist, very zen. As people are born without sin, nobody would be violent unless they were abused as a kid. That abuse is broadly of two kinds: either the deprivation caused by poverty and its attendant social pathologies, or being born white. White people, as the author of the NYT’s 1619 Project explained, are the devil.
This is the liberal’s dialectic of violence: white people oppress, exploit and humiliate the poor, forcing the tarnished and justifiably angry angels to commit bad deeds. Get rid of white people and you will get paradise, liberals say. But then it turns out that the worst places for poor people in America are all run by liberals, who are themselves the leading accusers in America’s racism games.
This contradiction can only be resolved by a radical attack on the American ideas that generated it. Change the subject through revolution, before the unbearable truth is noticed. In truth, liberals don’t care enough about the poor, minorities, or victims of racism to respect their rights as citizens. Liberals are prepared to let other people suffer for their faith. Indeed, their theology positively requires it. No fixing violence until the spiritual problem of racism is healed. That’s principled politics — or piety.
Liberals neither trust nor value law and order. They want to sleep safely at night, but justice, which is what law and order means, is for obsolete or devilish conservatives. What is the revolutionary alternative? Healing. Violent policemen will be replaced by caring social service workers. Diversity will be facilitated by diversity facilitators. It’s not just paradise, it’s also a jobs program.
In the liberal paradise, everyone would live in hospitals, to make sure they’re psychologically well-adjusted. No one would ever have duties or be responsible to anyone else, but everyone would be nice and do whatever they want to do. Social services at community level will supply the human right to therapy. That’s how we fix the race problem: crime isn’t a real problem faced by real people — it’s society’s fault, for making criminals in the first place.
Drugging people until they’re happy
Since liberals and conservatives dispute elections in America, we need a prudential decision on law and order that’s above the partisan struggle. Otherwise, we get what we now have. Liberals want to end the war on drugs and empty the prisons. But they don’t want to deal with the violence, which scares most people into electing conservatives. So liberals offer policing to the rich and, as I said, hell to the poor. Better that than agree with the conservatives on ending the violence.
In a way, the more hellish life is for the poor, the better it proves to liberals that they’re right to blame poverty and deprivation for all life’s misery. Indeed, much liberal misery is caused by the spectacle of the misery of poorer people. When you think about it, liberals are almost bodhisattvas, crying over the sins of this world. In their spiritual purity, they won’t lift a finger to stop the violence — it is, as the Disney Corporation advised in The Lion King, the circle of life. If liberals ever found poor people who are not violent, their whole theory of human nature would collapse. So they don’t look.
Drugs, of which the liberals are strenuously tolerant, end up as the center of liberal social control. The poor have to be on drugs to put up with their lives in liberal metropolises. So do the rich, after all, despite claims to happiness. They’re very liberal, but they pop pills in alarming quantities. This, like their hysteria, suggests that therapy doesn’t really work. If software fails you, try hardware. If talking about being well-adjusted fails, try adjustment through pharmacology. Poor and rich alike will be transformed into the kinds of creatures they should be once their neurochemistry is under control.
Despite all the outrage about police brutality or injustice, the big public policy idea for transforming America into paradise easily metamorphoses from ‘Defund the Police’ to ‘Drug the Poor’. Behold justice turn into social justice, social justice into social workers, and therapy into psychiatry — prescription pill-popping. This is no accident. It is the logical result of the only idea liberals have about society. The only concern is public health.
This is the liberal version of theodicy, that God’s justice sometimes uses evil to make something good. All the outrage about injustice will turn, once institutional politics, scientific expertise and the vast networks of philanthropic humanitarianism have their way, into everyone being artificially under mood-control, until society cannot make more monsters through the injustices of being white. In the name of racial equality, a radical inequality will be established between those doing the drugging and those being drugged, those running experiments and those being experimented upon.
[special_offer]
Let the blood spill in the streets
Unless and until liberals fulfill their technological fantasy of ending America’s historical oppression through pharmacology, the madness in the cities must continue unabated. The only American idea in politics is competition — that’s why we only have two parties. But that has ceased to matter in the metropolises, which are almost one-party states. There, liberalism can talk idealism and practice brutality. It can promise heaven and administer hell. There are never any consequences for the elites who do this.
Federal authority and the creation of conservative news and opinion outlets can still reveal the ugly truth about what liberalism has done to the cities. A new generation out there in digital America can break from the cable-show fantasies of our media and see the horror with their own eyes. They might even break away from the temptation of serving the elite therapeutic-pharmacological system of social control. We can recruit new politicians, journalists, artists and uncelebrated officials. Some of them might even tell the truth.
It’s not natural to have vast, untold wealth and bloody violence living next to each other. It’s not healthy to have exalted and moralistic authorities tell us we’re imagining it when we see it, and we’re seeing it because we’re racists. It is un-American to withhold equal protection under the law from the poor — and horrifying to do it in the name of their own dignity.
