Knowingly. But after all, those same leaders – mayors and city council members – were chosen to check off certain identity boxes, as well as for their leftist ideology. DAs were chosen in an Orwellian manner: for their propensity to negate the system they were elected to supposedly follow.
The mayor and council members didn’t need to know how to run a city. That wasn’t the point. And when push came to shove, they didn’t even defend the very first principle of a city: to protect it and its citizens.
One of the earliest posts I wrote post-Floyd was on June 1, entitled: “Restoring order is a top priority, or should be.” Should be, but wasn’t:
We hardly needed any more proof that our society is in terrible trouble. But we’ve gotten it in the failure of government authorities to restore order in riot-torn cities a timely fashion. That’s one of the most basic functions of government, and too many people have lost either the will to do it or the skill to do it.
That loss of will can be a result of leftist ideology (including the cultivation of guilt in those with “privilege”) or of cowardice, although I suppose the two are not mutually exclusive. But civil society requires that people feel a sense of basic safety in their homes, their workplaces, and their property, or it descends into chaos because there never will be enough police to ensure safety in an environment in which those things are not generally respected.
That used to be a universally accepted truth. Not so much anymore.
However, I assumed naively that even leftist mayors wanted to have a tax base and to not preside over an enormous murder rate. Over time, I thought that they would have to do more to restore a sense of safety, before their cities were damaged in a way that would harm all their citizens.
For the most part, I assumed wrong. They’ve only acted when their backs were to the wall, and in very tepid and temporary fashion.
This article from August 14th focuses on Chicago, but it also describes a lot of other Democratic cities wracked by violence:
The sacking of Chicago’s North Side was more than a tactical failure. For months, key officials—the state’s attorney responsible for prosecution, the mayor, and the governor—have failed to condemn criminals sufficiently or act with necessary force against such violence. They have contributed to a culture of impunity that tolerates mobs and hoodlums…
The state and city’s ineffective leaders are all the product of a progressive ruling elite that promoted them beyond their competence because they helped advance political goals…
Given their backgrounds, it’s no surprise that the trio of Foxx, Lightfoot, and Pritzker has done nothing to halt the state and city’s decline.
They have also failed to sustain the first condition of civilization: order under law. One feels almost nostalgic for the days when Chicago was run by a Democratic political machine that at least understood this cardinal principle of statecraft.
This article describes the larger process of infiltration of institutions by the left:
…[The] “long march through the institutions” implicitly acknowledges a reality of civil society that is much neglected today. Society in the West has historically been governed not by a single central authority. Rather it takes shape through a fluid symbiosis of multiple self-governing institutions, which include municipalities, churches, guilds, universities, and various voluntary associations…
The strategic goal of the left-wing radicals as far as these institutions are concerned is simply “the seizure of power,” i.e., the occupation of the crucial positions of authority and determination of their policies by fellow-believers, followers and sympathizers. The partial autonomy vis-a-vis the state and the economy enjoyed by these institutions, on the basis of certain fundamental rights such as the freedom of research, teaching, expression and belief, all of which have been won through long struggles, is the point of entry through which power can be gained.
The revolutionaries’ purpose is to transfer the decisive means of exercising power out of the hands of the system’s most capable trustees or, even more easily, out of the hands of those custodians who, as Kenneth Minogue observed in “How Civilizations Fall,” had already sold the pass to its foes. Julien Benda lodged a similar complaint against the cultural stewards of the 1920s for abandoning their posts in favor of lending intellectual and moral support to political passions centered on race, class, and nationality.
This happened in education and in the press. But it has also happened in Democrat-controlled city governments in particular, at all levels. It is also happening among the Democrats in Congress and in fact, is evident in the new younger leadership of the Democratic Party as a whole (Joe Biden is only a shadow leader).
Once a critical mass of leftists has been reached, it’s game over for all those hard-won liberties.
