If you just flew in from Siberia or landed your spaceship on earth over the last couple of weeks, you could be excused for believing that the problem between cops and communities of color -- long thorny but now as explosive as a powder keg -- is the sole responsibility of Republicans, conservatives, and President Donald Trump, not necessarily in that order.
I mean, certainly the great cities that have been declared by leftist politicians, big media outlets, and wizened academics as cesspools for “systemic racism” -- the latest mantra for those serious about virtue-signaling -- must be ruled by those white-privileged Republicans.
Oh, wait.
Let us stop for just a moment and consider some facts that are utterly inconvenient to the cultural Marxists having a field day at the expense of decent Americans. This default position about the race-tarnished right is not only untrue -- it is the opposite of the truth.
Who exactly is responsible for the behavior of the police? It’s the mayors and councils elected to run our cities. And who negotiates with police unions, for contracts that cover everything from compensation to the adjudication of misconduct charges? Why it’s those same politicians. And what party is thus responsible for working conditions and accountability? Well, what do you know, the Democrats.
So when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is hit with 17 misconduct complaints, and not one is adjudicated, who is ultimately responsible for the 18th incident that has stoked race riots across the land?
Consider New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Baltimore, among others. All ruled by Democrats. All hit by post-Floyd riots. All with major police problems. All with a wide assortment of important black Democratic officials. No GOP fingerprints anywhere.
To put a finer point on it, just one of the nation’s ten largest cities and five of the top 30 have Republican rule: San Diego, El Paso, Jacksonville, Fort Worth, and Oklahoma City. And as much of urban America was under siege, not one of those GOP-run cities was hit by major insurrections.
Who is responsible for the type of persistent poverty, crime, joblessness, and misery that leads to the violence and racial Balkanization we’ve been forced to witness? Maybe it has something to do with the people who have governed those cities for decades.
Maybe it has something to do with the people who have governed those cities for decades.
But we need to go further back than that. Progressives have been animated by the “1619 Project,” the brainchild of the Trump-addled New York Times, which claims that the true founding of this nation was 401 years ago, when slave ships arrived on our shores. It argues that event created a white supremacist footprint so deep and wide that it can never be remedied, only destroyed.
So let’s go ahead and review what has happened over those 401 years. Slavery was embedded in the culture before America’s independence, and after the founding it became a lifestyle for Democrats and was opposed by Republicans (remember Abraham Lincoln?). Then came segregation, lynchings, the KKK, Jim Crow laws, all fostered in the former Confederacy, the virtually exclusive domain of -- you guessed it -- Democrats.
But that’s old news, say the Democrats, we are different since the days of the civil rights movement. So how are Democrats to blame for the explosion of racial violence that followed the execution of George Floyd?
For Exhibit A, let’s connect two dots obvious to normal people but buried by the left: gross police misconduct and the end-to-end progressive leadership of Minneapolis. The larger of Minnesota’s twin cities features a young uber-progressive mayor in way over his head and a 100% Democratic city council. One comment by Council President Lisa Bender tells all. After she and her colleagues endorsed full defunding of their police department, she was asked how she would respond to the concerns of, say, a homeowner trying to fend off an attacker in a police-free environment. She said that question “comes from a place of privilege.” Really.
As for Trump, the perpetual target of unhinged leftist rage, perhaps a little math will bring perspective on the four-centuries-long, steaming cauldron of white supremacy depicted by the shark-toothed progressives. They blame Trump for the riots, as they have done for everything else, but if you pull out your calculators, you’ll notice that Trump has been president for exactly 7/1,000 of 1% of the time since the “true” founding of the country. That’s 0.007%. So much damage in so little time, apparently.
Just how much wreckage must be strewn across the landscape before we come clean about the unmitigated nightmare that has been the rule of the Democratic Party over urban America?
The media will never connect the dots. And, of course, neither will the academic Marxists undergirding the political class as they poison the minds of our youth with deconstructionist lectures from the safety of their ivory towers. They are largely responsible for fomenting the present movement to tear down society as we know it. William F. Buckley once famously said that he would rather be governed by the first 1,000 people listed in the phone book (remember that?) than by the faculty members of an Ivy League university. Amen.
The only promising option for reining in the cops without abandoning the rule of law is to strip authority from the spectacularly incompetent Democratic politicians who have for decades demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to curb police misbehavior. Or, since these riot-torn cities generally refuse to elect Republicans -- except temporarily to clean up messes left by particularly incompetent Democrats -- maybe it’s time to consider privatizing the police. After all, could the private sector, or even a bunch of randomly selected individuals with a lick of common sense, possibly do any worse than the Democratic Party?
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Read more from Tim Donner.
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