The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is.
Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches.
.. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment.
.. Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization’s history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise.
.. Frustrated Californians of the interior of the state without money and who cannot afford to move to the coastal communities of Santa Monica or Santa Barbara (the entire middle class of the non-coast) are leaving for low-tax refuges out of state — in “if I cannot afford the coast, then on to Idaho” fashion.
.. Meanwhile, the coastal creed is that Facebook, Apple, Hollywood, and Stanford will virtually feed us, 3-D print our gas, or discover apps to provide wood and stone for our homes.
.. since 2014, violent crime has skyrocketed by 38 percent. This May, California’s association of police chiefs complained that since the passage of Proposition 47 — which reclassified supposedly “nonserious” crimes as misdemeanors and kept hundreds of thousands of convicted criminals out of jail — crime rates in population centers of more than 100,000 have increased more than 15 percent.
.. California governor Jerry Brown has let out more parolees — including over 2,000 serving life sentences — than any recent governor.
.. Most of us in rural California go into town to mail our letters, because our rural boxes have been vandalized by gangs so frequently that it is suicidal to mail anything from home. (Many of us now have armored, bullet-proof locked boxes for incoming mail).
.. I saw a commercial van stopped on the side of the road on the family property, with the logo of a furniture- and carpet-cleaner company emblazoned on the side. The driver was methodically pumping out the day’s effluvia into the orchard.
.. Down the road, I saw the morning’s new trash littered on the roadway — open bags of diapers and junk mail. Apparently California’s new postmodern law barring incorrect plastic grocery bags (and indeed barring free paper grocery bags) has not yet cleaned up our premodern roadsides.
.. The truck was found four days later, still operable but with the ignition console torn apart and the interior ruined, amid the stench of trash, marijuana butts, beer bottles, waste, and paper plates still full of stale rice.
.. Her relatively new hybrid bicycle was immediately stolen
.. Be careful in paying for anything with a credit card, because the number is often stolen and sold off.
.. The office is designated as a DMV center for licensing illegal aliens. The entire office, in the linguistic and operational sense, is recalibrated to assist those who are here illegally and to make it difficult if not impossible for citizens to use it as we did in the past.
.. What makes the law-abiding leave California is not just the sanctimoniousness, the high taxes, or the criminality. It is always the insult added to injury. We suffer not only from the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation, but also from nearly the worst schools and infrastructure. We have the costliest entitlements and the most entitled. We have the largest number of billionaires and the largest number of impoverished, both in real numbers and as a percentage of the state population.
.. California is the most contentious, overregulated, and postmodern state in the Union, and also the most feral and 19th-century.
.. In one, shacks dot the lot. There are dozens of port-a-potties, wrecked cars, and unlicensed and unvaccinated dogs — all untouched by the huge tentacles of the state’s regulatory octopus. Nearby, another owner is being regulated to death, as he tries to rebuild a small burned house
.. The staggering costs for its illegality are made up by the shrinking few who nod as they always have and follow the law in all its now-scary manifestations.
.. From her nest in Rancho Mirage, a desert oasis created by costly water transfers, outgoing senator Barbara Boxer rails about water transfers.
.. When Jerry Brown leaves his governorship, he will not live in Bakersfield but probably in hip Grass Valley. High crime, the flight of small businesses, and water shortages cannot bound the fences of Nancy Pelosi’s Palladian villa or the security barriers and walls of Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley billionaires — who press for more regulation, and for more compassion for the oppressed, but always from a distance and always from the medieval assumption that their money and privilege exempt them from the consequences of their idealism. There is no such thing as an open border for a neighbor of Mr. Zuckerberg or of Ms. Pelosi.
A final window into the California pathology: Most of the most strident Californians who decry Trump’s various proposed walls insist on them for their own residences.
Gallup: One Third of Households Victimized by Violent Crime in Past Year
Nearly one-third of U.S. households (29 percent) contain a family member victimized by violent crime in the last year, according to Gallup.
The survey reveals that Americans’ “direct experience” with crime is at a 16-year high.
Seventeen percent said they or someone in their home had money or property stolen, while 14 percent said they had property, including their home or vehicle, vandalized. Another five percent said they had their car broken into and four percent said they or someone in their household had a car stolen from them.
Three percent said someone in their household was assaulted or mugged; two percent said a member of their household was a victim of armed robbery; one percent cited sexual assault.
The Virtues of Reality
youth culture has become less violent, less promiscuous and more responsible. American childhood is safer than ever before. Teenagersdrink and smoke less than previous generations. The millennial generation has fewer sexual partners than its parents, and the teen birthrate has traced a two-decade decline. Violent crime — a young person’s temptation — fell for 25 years before the recent post-Ferguson homicide spike. Young people are half as likely to have been in a fight than a generation ago. Teen suicides, binge drinking, hard drug use — all are down.
.. It is easy to see how online culture would make adolescent life less dangerous. Pornography to take the edge off teenage sexual appetite. Video games instead of fisticuffs or contact sports as an outlet for hormonal aggression.
.. younger men dropping out of the work force: Their leisure time is being filled to a large extent by gaming, and happiness studies suggest that they are pretty content with the trade-off.
.. But if anything, the virtual world looks more like an opiate for the masses. The poor spent more time online than the rich, and it’s the elite — the Silicon Valley elite, in some striking cases — that’s more likely to limit the uses of devices in their homes and schools, to draw distinctions between screen time and real time.
.. any effective resistance to virtual reality’s encroachments would need to be moral and religious, not just pragmatic and managerial.
2016 The Two Speeches That Explain American Politics Right Now
But if you want to understand the gulf between the two conventions and the two parties in just two speeches, you should watch Republican Rudy Giuliani’s fiery stem-winder in Cleveland and then Democrat Cory Booker’s exuberant address in Philadelphia. Giuliani, a 72-year-old white man who stepped down as mayor of New York 15 years ago, outlined a dark vision of fear and fury. Booker, a 47-year-old black man who is now a senator from New Jersey, delivered an optimistic message of love and togetherness.
.. For the Republicans in Cleveland, that mood was scared and angry—and more precisely, angry about being scared. And the Giuliani New Yorkers remember as a moderate who was progressive on social issues and immigration and once endorsed Democrat Mario Cuomo for governor was nowhere to be found. He began his speech with a blunt description of a nation traumatized by out-of-control crime and a constant threat of terrorism, his voice rising with every sentence: “The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe. They fear for their children. They fear for themselves. They fear for their police officers, who are being TARGETED!”
.. Booker took it even further into New Age hippie-talk, arguing that the ultimate patriotic American value is not mere tolerance but actual love. “You can’t love your country without loving your countrymen and countrywomen,” he said. “We don’t always have to agree, but we must be there for each other, we must empower each other, we must find common ground.” Love, he said, is even a source of national security. “Love recognizes that we need each other, that we as a nation are better together, that when we are divided we are weak, yet when we are united, we are strong.” Even in the depths of the Civil War, Booker reminded the cheering crowd, Abraham Lincoln promised “malice towards none and charity towards all.”
.. This was another big theme in Cleveland, the notion that Trump will destroy ISIS, balance the budget, and Make America Great Again through his own sheer strength of will
.. But he worked himself into a frenzy over his desire to obliterate Muslim extremists: “You know who you are! AND WE’RE COMING TO GET YOU!!!”
There was nothing subtle or touchy-feely about Giuliani’s rhetoric. He was making an emotional call to arms, a daddy-party appeal to a frightened public. The closest he came to a policy argument was attacking Clinton’s willingness to accept Syrian refugees in the United States: “They’re going to come here and kill us!”
.. The Republicans are portraying America as a massive crime scene, even though violent crime is actually down nationwide, and terrorism as the catastrophe of our time, even though terrorists kill fewer Americans every year than lightning strikes.
.. Trump is an extraordinarily unorthodox candidate, but the implication of his candidacy is that desperate times call for unusual approaches. He has described Obama’s America in remarkably apocalyptic terms, and Giuliani set the tone in Cleveland by describing 2016 as the last chance to stop Obama-ism.
.. That was the heart of the Republican argument in Cleveland, that America is collapsing, and that Trump is the only hope to restore its greatness.