Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Sober Analysis Is Not Unpatriotic
Coffee: Check.
Biscuits and marmalade: Check.
Classical piano music: Check.
Apricot nectar: Check.
Now then, hiking through the online thicket, the common theme that emerges from across the political spectrum is that in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump paints a distorted and unnecessarily bleak picture of America. The candidate’s canvas, we are told by Slate’s Franklin Foer, is, “an anarchic mess, beyond the technocratic solutions proposed by desiccate, politically correct elites.” Over at CNBC, I read where our friend and Ricochet commentator John Pohoretz laments, “The America Donald Trump portrayed is a horrible place, awash in barbarity, crime, disorder, decay, deceit, rigging, cheating, exploitation.” Podhoretz continues:
I could be fancy and find myself a quote from Tocqueville, but it’s really the philosopher Merle Haggard who said it best: “When you’re running down my country, Hoss, you’re walking on the fighting side of me.” Trump spent nearly 77 minutes running down my beloved country, and I don’t take kindly to it.
On ABC, Chuck Todd opined that, “He painted a dark picture of where America stands today.” To which former Clinton Administration operative George Stephanopoulos said, “And, Martha Raddatz, a pretty dark speech labeled Hillary Clinton the candidate of death, destruction terrorism and weakness and mass lawlessness.” Over to you, Martha: “Yeah. If Americans are not scared for their safety before tonight, they are tonight,” she said. The diversity of opinion, which varied between sycophancy and unanimity, was numbing.
Here, I turn off the music, push aside the biscuits, take a gulp of coffee and point a few things out, not least of which is that here in Memphis, Trump’s diagnosis sounds remarkably like our local newscast, which has become little more than a daily police blotter of death, mayhem, theft, a burgeoning anarchic class, and governmental corruption and ineptitude. Last night’s news, for example, featured the usual reports of various shootings around town along with a hideous story of a pregnant lady who was raped at gunpoint and went into labor as a result.
The city of Memphis barbecue, Beale Street, and Graceland is fast descending into a jungle of deadly violence in which no one and no part of town is safe. To date, 129 people have been killed here, 103 of them black, 62 between the ages of 18 and 29. A total of four of these 129 deaths involved the police, while two Memphis police officers have been killed in the line of duty in the last 12 months. The violence has reached such a level here that on Beale Street a $10 cover charge has been introduced for those wishing to take in the music clubs and barbecue joints after 10PM in an effort to weed out local predators. Why? From WREG:
It was only a week ago when Officer Verde Smith was killed after police said Justin Welsh shot three people and hit Smith with a stolen car. The week before, a stampede involving hundreds of people broke out downtown. And the week before that, Myneshia Johnson was shot and killed on Second Street just a block away from Beale. The teen and two other people were shot when a man sprayed the crowd with an assault rifle.
And that’s just in the tourist district. This is the reality of life across Memphis these days and across much of the country at large. Even the New York Times, hardly an appendage of the Trump campaign, admitted that, “Many of Mr. Trump’s facts appear to be true,” though the Times was quick to add sufficient qualifiers and contextual interpretations of the data to soften the stark reality that civil society is unraveling before our eyes. But they did not dispute, for example, Trump’s contention that homicides spiked by 17 percent in 50 of the country’s largest cities last year, or that homicides are up by 50 percent in Washington DC or 60 percent in Baltimore, or that Barack Obama’s hometown has seen more than 2,000 shooting victims this year alone, or that approximately 180,000 illegal immigrants who have been ordered to be deported are currently moving freely about the country.
I will grant you until the cows come home and Gabriel’s trumpet sounds that Donald Trump is a badly, and perhaps fatally, flawed messenger, but the message remains and the facts will not change themselves. You can’t extinguish a fire by shooting the fire alarm. So what is it that accounts for the anger at Trump’s having identified a reality that a great many Americans see with their own eyes on a daily basis? Here, I think the inestimable Charles Murray put his finger on an important tendency in a recent interview with Jim Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute:
Well, you’ve got two kinds of problems with experts, and one of them has to do with all of the mistakes that they have made. And that is, we have had experts on how to do deal with poverty, how to deal with welfare, how to deal with crime, how to deal with other things over the past 50 years, who have recommended policies that have been disastrous. The experts have been simply wrong. They were wrong about school busing; they were wrong about “prison only makes people worse” back in the 1970s when the prison population dropped even though crime was soaring; again and again you’ve had people who were experts who were advocating and passing policies that ordinary people looked at and said, “This is absolutely nuts.” Affirmative action, by the way, sort of falls into that category as well. So one problem is that they’ve been wrong.
Another problem with the experts — and I think that this gets to a lot of the visceral anger that people have — is that the experts have been recommending policies for other people for which they do not have to bear the consequences. The case of immigration is a classic case where I can sit down with economists on both the left and the right, and we with great self-satisfaction talk about all of our wonderful analyses that show that this idea that immigrants are driving down wages of native-born Americans is way over-exaggerated; that immigration is essentially a net plus, so forth and so on… Those analyses may be right, but that does not change the fact that we aren’t the people who are like the carpenter who used to make $16 an hour, and he is losing work because contractors are hiring immigrant carpenters for $12.
Okay. So perhaps it’s an unpleasant mixture of those who, A) are disconnected from the implications of their own rules and policies, and B) those who understand the implications all too well, and therefore refuse to cede the floor to realisms that would call into question their general competence. Recall please Peggy Noonan’s insightful essay on the protected and the unprotected classes in America:
Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration — its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine — more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.
The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment — another word for the protected — nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
Mr. Trump came from that.
Indeed, and it was to those people that Donald Trump spoke during his acceptance speech. Yes, he spoke in “all caps” throughout the thing, and yes he was repetitive and long-winded. But with respect to John Podhoretz, it wasn’t Donald Trump who was running down our country, but rather the predators and thugs who roam our neighborhoods, far from the gated communities of the protected, who fill our local newscasts with atrocities and our lives with uncertainty. Trump merely confirmed that which a great many of us already see and understand, and he’s not unpatriotic for having done so.
It was sober analysis, not a lack of patriotism, that led Whittaker Chambers to write in the middle of the last century that:
It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
For his part, if Mr. Trump can curb his infantile vindictiveness and avert his gaze from Ted Cruz long enough to continue shining a much needed light not only on the crime and lawlessness that eats away at our country like a cancer, but on the air of approbation that circulates from the White House down to the editorial offices and outlets of the media and into the halls of academia which fuel that cancer, we may yet have a slim chance at restoring a great nation.
Published in Immigration, Law, Policing
Good point. His internal IMDB is amazing.
Just as long as we all agree it’s not showing up on his Pandora …
Exactly. For me, it seemed so strange to repeatedly have the experience of hearing and seeing a different part of the RNC followed by reporters and pundits misrepresenting what I just heard and saw.
Dave, I wish everyone in the country would read this post. I hope Donald Trump reads it.
D J Trump was not in charge then, daddy was. Try again – oh and something from over 40 years ago is beyond the Statute of Limitations….
BTW, Omarosa seemed to do pretty well – try something other than Kristof talking points..
I agree entirely, Dave.
Me too.
I think we take our national security for granted. But our national security depends, in large measure, on our relationships with our foreign allies. And our relationships with our foreign allies in turn depend on the predictability of our foreign policy.
In my estimation, Trump’s comments on NATO, the WTO, the imposition of tariffs, and the “strength” showed by dictators, including Putin, Hussein, and Yang Shangkum, will do more to harm America–regular people in America–than any domestic malfeasance that Hillary Clinton might perpetrate or condone. That Trump doubled down on these positions after receiving the nomination demonstrates that he will not conform his behavior to the best interests of America and our democratic allies.
Illustrative of this point is the GOP’s removal of support for arming Ukraine from its party platform. This shift is apparently due to the influence of Paul Manafort and other pro-Russian lobbyists within Trump’s campaign. The reality is that we may discover what motivated this shift in policy, but if you are unaware of Manafort’s track record, see https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/paul-manafort-donald-trump-campaign-past-clients.
Further illustrative of this point is that Trump is not merely suggesting that NATO allies pay their dues. He is suggesting that the US should unilaterally renegotiate “good” deals in order to extract additional protection money. And he suggests that keeping North Korea in check is not an American interest.
These are dangerous times, indeed.
You expect Trump to stand up to Putin?
I should add, Dave, that while I do not agree at all with your post, I very much respect your writing and thinking. If Trump had some proposal for fixing the problem of local crime, I might find it persuasive. Even if he had a plan, I would very much doubt there is anything the federal government could do lawfully and effectively to implement such a plan.
And the agreement of the truly great Dr. Paul Rahe with your post gives me further pause, but on the final analysis, our foreign alliances are far more important to our long-term safety than our short-term domestic concerns. If there was any serious, sustained increase in crime, I might be persuaded to think otherwise. But we are living generally in a time with one of the lowest crime rates of any civilization, and only time will reveal whether the current troubles are a true threat to the core of our society or a short-term period of instability.
YES!
LOL.
Thank you Paul, both for your perspective and for your tone. I have some substantive questions to ask, but it will have to wait as the freight schedule will hit early in the morning and I need to get some rest while I can. I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can.
I do not intend to vote for Trump — but I waver on this particular reason, because the Democratic nominee is who it is. Trump’s language on NATO is of a piece with his general tactic of blaming all America’s problems on either the rest of the world or on elites — sometimes true, sometimes not — and is likely enough no more than campaign rhetoric — albeit dangerously irresponsible and at best ill-considered.
This is not the only factor in my thinking, but if it were I would be a truly undecided voter.
Sure. One of the lowest crime rates of any civilization of any time. I agree with that.
But it’s definitely worse. Stats indicate this is true and IMO don’t tell the whole story. Murders are down partly because modern medicine is better at saving victims of violent crime. And felonies are down, partly because what used to be a felony is now a misdemeanor.
Well said, and I’m getting damned tired of reading the same leftist talking points from sore loser NeverTrumpers.
[Editors’ Note: Similar to our note at #24, accusing fellow members of “reading the same leftist talking points” also amounts to a trolling, personal attack.]
Can you give me one example of a crime that used to be a felony but “is now a misdemeanor”? I would argue that the trend actually goes in the opposite direction, with the definition of a “felony” expanding far beyond its former scope. Perhaps you mean some crimes that used to be charged as felonies are now charged as misdemeanors. If that is the case, what is Trump going to do about it? Issue an executive order directing that state prosecutors always charge a felony if it is cognizable? That would clearly be unconstitutional. Even a federal law directing the same result would be unconstitutional.
If crime is “definitely worse,” when is it worse from? Are you saying it is worse in 2016 than it was in 2015? Or are you saying it is worse in 2016 than it was in 1968? You cannot say that crime is worse in the abstract. You need a specific point of comparison to make a valid statement. If you are claiming that things just generally feel worse, that is not a sound basis for policy and in any case, the President of the United States can do nothing about it.
Before Trump, they were Republican talking points. American talking points, in fact.
I certainly don’t think that all Trump voters are racists. Some of them are holding their noses and doing the best they can in difficult circumstances. Others are going much further, and embracing the very flawed man as the future of a new politics for the Republican party.
In any case, we have been told for months that all of Trump’s outrageous conspiracy theories and statements advocating religious tests and intentional slaughtering of non-combatants would stop and he would pivot to the general. We have also been told by some that Trump is the better choice because good Republicans would be able to keep him in check, or more easily remove him from office if necessary.
After watching this week’s RNC and its aftermath, are either of those propositions valid? Let’s say Trump’s statements are not racist, but merely improvident. Who is going to stand up to that improvidence? The loyal party men who jeered Senator Cruz’s call for everyone to vote their conscience? I understand “loyal” Republicans won’t stand up to him during the election, but do you think it will be easier to stand up to a sitting President than a private citizen, albeit one with the nomination?
If crime is “definitely worse,” when is it worse from? Are you saying it is worse in 2016 than it was in 2015? Or are you saying it is worse in 2016 than it was in 1968? You cannot say that crime is worse in the abstract. You need a specific point of comparison to make a valid statement.
The way the chief of police of my small town explained it is that theft being charged as a felony or a misdemeanor is now determined by the value of the items stolen and or damaged.
Here in Cali I believe the cut off is $950. And I do believe this is a recent or fairly recent change.
As far as “definitely worse”; I am speaking from my own experience. In my town. In my life. In my experiences.
We have had several home invasion robberies and too many car thefts to count. (As way of comparison, my husband’s car was stolen in 1994 and it was a big, big deal)
I’ve lived here for 30 years – the park where I used to let my children play unattended is now off limits thanks to a homeless problem.
My brother who lived in one of the safest towns in Cali (Torrance) has bugged out for another state after a horrible, invasive robbery.
So yeah, things are worse.
Edited : On a personal note, slow your roll. We’re just having a conversation here. I don’t “need” to do squat.
Duplicate post
Oh honey. No one beats up Republicans like other Republicans.
In light of some comments on this thread, we remind everyone of the CoC’s admonitions to “to assume fellow members are arguing in good faith and that they assume the same for you.” As also noted in the On Good Faith article, if you believe the other party is not acting in good faith, we recommend:
We further suggest that there are conservative reasons to support Donald Trump just as there are conservative reasons to oppose him. Whatever one’s opinion of another’s argument on the latter, there is no reason to presume that the other does so out of leftist and/or racist motives.
Regarding the misdemeanor vs Felony discussion:
“In November 2014, California voters approved Proposition 47, which downgraded may offenses from felonies, or wobblers, to misdemeanors. (Prop 47 took effect on November 5, 2014.) Previously, people with at least three prior petty theft convictions, or a conviction for certain other theft-related crimes, who had been imprisoned as a result, could be charged with a wobbler if they committed a subsequent petty theft. These defendants could end up with felonies.
Prop 47 narrowed the number of people who could be charged with wobblers in these situations, making such a charge possible only if the defendant had at least one prior petty or theft-related conviction, and had been imprisoned as a result; and has a prior conviction for a serious or violent offense, for any registerable sex offense, or for embezzlement from a dependant adult or anyone over the age of 65. All other defendants must be charged with misdemeanors.
That is not really a recent development. American legal systems have long set thresholds for what crimes constitute felonies or misdemeanors. At common law, if you stole any property of any substantial, identifiable value, you could be convicted of a felony and subjected to the death penalty in theory. For more than a century, common law jurisdictions have by statute defined whether a theft is chargeable as a felony or a misdemeanor by the value of the object stolen. Some jurisdictions periodically adjust those thresholds to account for inflation. Surely, you would not agree that stealing $1 worth of bread should constitute a felony? And if you do, that is not the source
On the other side of the equation, there are many new crimes that have been established by the federal and state governments, and defined as felonies. Just look at the incredible expansion of our regulatory state, and our tax and drug laws. Look at all the people who have had their hard-earned money seized for violating banking “secrecy” laws.
See comment # 82. November 2014.
That was a change to the circumstances in which you can be charged with a felony for committing a misdemeanor based on prior criminal conduct. If you commit a felony, you can still be charged with a felony. You just can’t be charged with a “three strikes” felony based on committing a misdemeanor.
That might very well be a bad policy decision. But it is a local problem, not a national problem. And we’re talking about electing a President, not a governor of California.
No, sir. You and I were talking about crime and stats and whether they tell the whole story.
I never mentioned Trump.
So from this, it is clear that crime has gotten worse in California since 1994. That does not mean crime is worse throughout the U.S. since 1994.
And more importantly, it does not mean that Trump has any policy proposal that will help the situation. Just saying that he stands for “Law and Order,” won’t magically fix the problem.
Hillary of course will not fix the problem either. But she at least won’t threaten to withdraw our troops from Korea or Europe.
No [expletive] Sherlock.
Have I ever said that Trump was the answer to all our problems? Did Dave?
You are basically saying: Crime isn’t that bad! It isn’t worse! And even if it is Trump can’t help.
Reread Dave’s post. He’s explaining what Trump is tapping into.
I said nothing of the sort. I am explaining why it is not logical for Trump to “tap[ ] into” a problem that has nothing whatsoever to do with the office for which he is running, and further suggest he is better on that point than the other Democrat running for President.
The entire course of this discussion is about the persuasive force of Trump’s comments about the crime problem. You have the (understandable) view that crime is a big problem, and that Trump is speaking about a problem. Taking that as a given, where does the rubber meet the road? We have had eight years of a president who relied on rhetoric over sensible, reasonable, and lawful policy. What does more of the same (albeit on a different, and more pressing, issue) get us as a country?
Annefy, I’d disengage here.