You’re not supposed to say this in polite company, but what went up in flames in Baltimore Monday night was not merely a senior center, small businesses and police cars. Burning down was also the blue-city model of urban governance.
Nothing excuses the violence of rampaging students or the failure of city officials to stop it before Maryland’s Governor called in the National Guard. But as order starts to return to the streets, and the usual political suspects lament the lack of economic prospects for the young men who rioted, let’s not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years.
The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are “progressive.” This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America’s sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn’t in the top 25.
The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning.
When Leftists demand that the most important relationship anyone should have is with the Government, then those institutions dedicated to instilling and supporting Western principles (family, church, school) fall away.
As Dennis Prager said the other day about the rioters in Baltimore, how many of them (if any) come from homes with both a mom and dad? How many are regular church/temple goers? How many of them had attended church/temple the previous weekend?
These are questions the media will never ask of those “protestor in the street” interviewees.
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More from Heather MacDonald
What happened last evening in Baltimore was simply a larger and better-covered version of the flash mobs that have beset American cities for the last half-decade, in which black youths gather via social media to steal from stores and assault whites. […]
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Washington D.C., among other cities, have all grappled with similar violence. None of it deserves a righteous political gloss. Nor does the violence last night, which began with an invitation sent out over social media to convene at a local mall and “purge” it.
Perhaps if the media had not shrunk from reporting on the flash mob phenomenon and the related “knockout game”—in which teenagers tried to knock out unsuspecting bystanders with a single sucker punch—we might have made a modicum of progress in addressing or at least acknowledging the real cause of black violence: the breakdown of the family. A widely circulated video from yesterday’s mayhem shows a furious mother whacking her hoodie-encased son to prevent him from joining the mob. This tiger mom may well have the capacity to rein in her would-be vandal son. But the odds are against her. Try as they might, single mothers are generally overmatched in raising males. Boys need their fathers. But over 72 percent of black children are born to single-mother households today, three times the black illegitimacy rate when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his prescient analysis of black family breakdown in 1965.
Given that most of the rioters I saw looked to be in their 20s, it’s fair to say that the people rioting were the community’s fathers. Who wants to bet a dollar that any 23-year-old taken into custody the other night isn’t already skipping support payments on at least two kids?
[S]enior law enforcement source told him Mayor said, ”Let them loot, it’s only property.”
Social Justice on the installment plan by the Mayor, while Obama plans to deliver it wholesale worldwide.
The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools . . .
Add to that a political culture where those in power see their roles as enjoying as many perquisites of office as they can lay their hands on. Sure, some of them get caught, but most do not. It’s merely a smaller, grubbier version of the Clinton Foundation.
Law enforcement officials might begin suggesting and insisting that if law enforcement officers are going to be required to wear body-camera and sound recording devices while at work, then maybe it’s time all the politicians do the same. That might afford some proof of otherwise deniable claims about politicians’ speech which is currently hardly ever captured, save in the presence of the occasionally forgotten hot-mic.
Very nice sdfer, in fact “you first” should be the mantra for all progressive politian schemes.
Obamacare? You first.
Lowering carbon footprint? You first.
Common core? Your kids first.
Gun control? Get rid of the secret service first.
Come on guys, lead by example, the list is endless.
>then maybe it’s time all the politicians do the same.<
hilarity's server is here to serve
…How many are regular church/temple goers? How many of them had attended church/temple the previous weekend?
How many attended a mosque [especially of the Nation Of Islam variety]?
”Let them loot, it’s only property.”
No it is resources destroyed. Where are the environmentalists?
No, it is taking away people’s hard work and that is time taken from their lives that they will never get back. Sounds like assault to me.
bgbear, it’s redistribution without having to enact a pesky tax increase which might haunt you at the next election.
Eliminate the middle man!
With extreme prejudice.
Eliminate the Middle!
[…] The official account (still) doesn’t make any sense. Baltimore P.D. and City Government managed to make this controversy a huge story. How in the hell does a man go into a van uninjured and come out with a fatal broken back and crushed windpipe? If it were a violent drug reaction, that would be confirmed in the autopsy. Was he beaten by the cops? Was it a “nickel ride”? It does not look like we will get answers this week. Instapundit: Fifty Shades of Freddie Gray and did Freddie Gray injure himself (I seriously doubt it, without drug or other forensic evidence to the contrary). It is just amazing that post Ferguson that Baltimore could manage to do a worse job with public relations. This does not excuse the rioters–President Obama called them thugs (and Obama got the race card played against him in response). Riots are not justified but they were still foreseeable. The Baltimore City and Police Department officials certainly could have done more to diffuse this situation. As Allen West notes, no one wants to talk about Baltimore’s dirty little secret: Democrats have run this town for almost fifty years and their policies have left their mark. Rush Limbaugh: What Democrats have wrought and Baltimore Mom trapped by Liberalism Protein Wisdom: Is your city burning? Thank a Democrat. […]
[…] Protein Wisdom: Is your city burning? Thank a Democrat. […]
Reforming families and family values isn’t something that can happen with a wave of a magic wand, or throwing huge sums of money at the problem. It would take time that we do not have, and the current social and societal climate that we now have won’t allow any such change to get off the ground.
For a half century we have abdicated our duties and responsibilities as a society, as citizens and as a people. All the talk and ‘program ideas’ in the world will now not so much as slow down what has become inevitable.
War is coming, and it will not be denied.
Enabling and Re-Enabling.
Prosecutorial discretion, so useful, both ways. See also “John Doe Wisco.”
One hopes that the few remaining businesses will make note of this sort of thing on their way out. “Our elected representative encouraged our neighbors to destroy our business, and his wife made sure that none of them were punished for it. As a result, we are taking our insurance settlement and moving out of this corrupt, Godforsaken hellhole. We hope that the people of Baltimore enjoy living in neighborhoods where there are no goods or services to be had, and we hope they understand exactly why it is that the unemployment rate is shooting from 50% to 80%.”
Hey Everybody!
The new Apple Watch is raaaaacist!…
http://fusion.net/story/60771/will-the-apple-watchs-coolest-feature-work-for-people-of-color/
Steve Jobs must be rolling over in his Grave Pod.
Just turned on Fox news, and who do I see running interference for the mayor? None other than Al Sharpton.
So let us recap, people of Baltimore.
Your mayor- part of the liberal/progressive/democrat regime who’s policy- with your votes and approval, people of Baltimore-has brought you to your current state; who ordered the police to stand down and then apologized to the rioters for using the word “thugs” to describe them, considers her best course of action at this time of peril for you and your city to cozy up to…Al Sharpton.
Fuck you, people of Baltimore. Reap what you’ve sown.
To say that the present situation is irreversible is akin to accepting the Left’s claim that all Southerners do now, and forever will, support a reinstitution of slavery.
Fundamental transformations have been wrought in the past, and been reversed. Or is Germany still the Third Reich?
City? No.
Nation? Sure is. Maybe not fast enough for the transformers though.
Your examples are not at all the same, McGehee, and I believe you know that.
This will change how? What’s your starting point?
The people will say “that’s enough!!” and rise up? What people? The ones who by over 50% voted for ‘free candy’?
The ‘best and brightest’ who believe only in they’re way, and that any dissenting opinion is evil and must be destroyed?
The people of different colors and ethnic groups will suddenly come together as Americans? A quick check of the news or a stroll through town shows that to be firmly in the land of fantasy; and the gap widens every day.
The ‘parties ‘ will put aside their differences and stop looting the treasury and unite to serve the people for the good of America?
We’ll affect change in politics? How my friend? In the voting booth? Another ship that sailed a long time ago over the horizon.The process has been proven to be corrupt, with votes from the dead to the illegal effecting elections.
And speaking of illegals. When the libs/dems and their pragmatic allies across the isle grant them citizenship and voting rights- and yes, it will happen- then there won’t be any point in the dog and pony show anymore.
With 10-20 million illegals, along with their family and friends, voting “D’, our elections will be as valid as the one Saadam ran in Iraq to mollify us and the u.n., when he got what,98% of the vote? Not that they’ll need them, as better than 50% will vote free candy again anyway.
There is nothing to work with, no starting point to change things. For a half century the nuts and those who would destroy and ‘fundamentally transform ‘this country have been on the march with impunity.Your government, the media, your education system. They run things, they make the rules. This will end badly any way you look at it.
Is Germany still the Third Reich? No, but only because it was defeated by superior force of arms. Or it- and much if not all the rest of the world- would indeed still be the Third Reich.
The day is coming when the choice will be simple-resist, or bend your knee, bow your head, and do as your masters tell you to do.
Then why are you still typing?
You’ve lost hope, and now your mission in life is to deprive everyone else of hope?
You’re so sure that your conclusion is 100% irrefutably correct that you just want to save all the rest of us the trouble of finding out for ourselves?
You’re right. I give up.
Good luck.
There is always Hope because God exists.
Things are pretty damn bad. The national government is so riddled with the Leftist Virus that I don’t think it can be saved.
But I believe our Hope lies in we, The Remnant, gathering together in several of the Several States and starting to work towards effecting a Restoration.
I think it is important to point out that at no point during the American Revolution did a clear majority actively support independence. Maybe, MAYBE, a third were actually working to bring such efforts about, with a roughly equal amount preferring the status quo, and a few who would rather just have been left alone to raise a family and make a little money at whatever trade they were practicing.
The Founding Fathers knew that they were on the short ends of whatever odds any bookie would have cared to place, and if England hadn’t been tied up fighting France across most of the known world at that time, they would have been captured and hanged as traitors in short order. But even after the newly-formed United States had taken their first tottering steps, they STILL had to deal with threats from within and without. Washington had to quell an internal rebellion very early on from people who still didn’t want to pay any taxes, and the first few Presidents had to cope with foreign military forces (such as American sailors being shanghaied and impressed by British warships, which caused the War of 1812, and Jefferson having to cope with rampaging “Musselmen” pirates sailing out of Tripoli – which explains the mention of that city in the Marines Corps Hymn).
We are in a similar position where about a third of the populace want to hand everything over to the government, about a third are sick unto death of seeing what overpowerful government forces are doing, and about a third just want to be left alone.
It comes down to one thing: democracies have four boxes that determine how change is made. Soap. Ballot. Jury. Ammo. We have almost totally exhausted the first three, and as dicentra pointed out in another thread, there is no example of any society anywhere in history that has seen the cliff approaching and made the hard choices to avert the disaster. The only question at this point is “what will be the result of the anarchy and chaos to come?”
Ace is talking divorce “for the sake of the kids”, Heinlein predicted a Balkanization into several smaller nations along generally cultural lines, and I cannot see that there will be an election in 2020, no matter who wins.
You’re welc*urrrrrp*
Every pendulum eventually reaches its endpoint and then returns.