Friends, Frisco is a tough place to be a cop -- just ask You Know Who. And, as challenging as it was in the past, it's getting worse and worse, because its woke residents are insisting that the police stop enforcing the law, and the courts stop punishing lawbreakers. Well, I certainly can't imagine any potential downside to those policies, can you?
I jest. My latest article discusses the rapidly collapsing retail sector in San Francisco, which is a result of a spectacular (and entirely predictable) rise in shoplifting. I draw some surprising political lessons from this unfolding tragedy.
Doubling Down on Failure in
America's Cities
Recent
news that Walgreens has now closed
17 of its 70 stores
in San Francisco due to “out of control” shoplifting probably
didn't wow many Americans, but it's additional confirmation of a fact
that's become painfully obvious in the last few decades: Democratic
and progressive policies in deep blue areas are increasingly making
life for ordinary citizens unlivable.
In San Francisco,
the problem goes back to a weak-on-crime limousine liberal philosophy
that would have been familiar to Dirty Harry as he patrolled
(fictionally) the mean streets of Frisco back in the early 70s. Then,
starting in the 80s, Californians came to their senses and cracked
down on violence and criminality. Even Kamala Harris got in on the
act, rising in Golden State politics based on a reputation for
toughness as a prosecutor and then as California's Attorney General.
Give them enough
time, though, and the bleeding hearts will always return to their
roots. In 2014, California voters passed a proposition that made it a
misdemeanor, instead of a felony, to steal anything worth less than
$950. The idea was, of course, that no one – especially not a
person of color – should face imprisonment or be burdened with a
rap sheet because of mere thievery.
The problem, of
course, is that making the consequences for theft less onerous
encourages the less honest and scrupulous among us to steal. San
Francisco deadbeats seem to have gotten the message. Losses to
shoplifting in San Francisco Walgreens and CVS stores are several
times what they are at typical drug stores, and the costs of security
in the Bay Area are sky-high. Increasingly, retail chains are
reaching the obvious and inevitable conclusion that doing business in
San Francisco is impossible.
Of
course, left-wing weak-on-crime policies have had similar effects for
decades, and in the last year the costs of “defunding” and
demonizing the police have become more and more apparent. Crime rates
in cities like San Francisco have
soared.
Urban residents thus face a lot more than mere inconvenience in their
purchases of medications and toiletries – they face substantially
increased risks of assault, mugging, carjacking, rape, and
murder, because Democratic politicians are more concerned with the
rights of criminals than they are with the rights and quality of life
of law-abiding citizens.
A
Republican or a conservative might be tempted to object at this
stage, “Ah! But there's a silver lining, surely. The decreasing
livability and increasing lethality of deep blue jurisdictions
proves,
as mere rhetoric never could, the utter absurdity and toxicity of
'progressive' policies”. Furthermore, once voters experience this
epiphany, we would expect them to draw the appropriate conclusions
and “throw the bums out”, replacing leftist, Democratic
leadership with solid Republicans.
If life were fair, and people were sensible, this argument would
hold. Well, life isn't, and people aren't.
The
sad fact is, when naive and/or extreme Democratic and progressive
policies lead to disaster, the Democrats and progressives, instead of
being exposed as charlatans, rise to the occasion and find ways to
redirect the public's ire. What that means, in practice, is that the
left-wing Democratic politicians and activists – who are
charlatans, but who aren't fools – concoct alternative narratives
that explain the shuttered storefronts, vicious crime sprees, and
frightful unemployment rates in their own backyards. These narratives
pin urban blight on, you guessed it, the Left's favorite boogeymen:
conservatives, Republicans, white people, the rich, corporations,
Christians, gun owners, etc etc.
In
the case of the shrinking retail economy of San Francisco, Democrats
and progressives will inevitably fall back on that ultimate
chart-topper of the left-wing hit parade: “systemic racism”.
Surely, the argument goes, Walgreens' refusal to serve the mostly
BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) population of the City
of San Francisco is a reflection of their rapacious
capitalism, rooted ultimately in their (conscious or unconscious)
racism and their enthrallment to America's original sin of white
supremacy. The result of Walgreens' departure from certain San
Francisco neighborhoods will, after all, be to deprive people of
color of necessary services, and anything that harms minorities is,
ipso facto,
a product and a proof of ingrained American racism. Case closed.
The sad part, from the dyed-in-the-wool critical race theory
perspective, is that Walgreens could have done the right thing: it
could have absorbed the losses associated with shoplifting in mostly
BIPOC communities, viewing it as a form of reparations for the long
history of injustice and oppression visited upon hapless minorities.
It could have passed along the cost of those tacit reparations to its
(mostly white) customers in other, less sticky-fingered
neighborhoods. No harm done.
But instead Walgreens chose to punish the good people of San
Francisco for their trivial infractions of outdated, racist laws.
Shameful!
The fact is, therefore, that, while Democratic and progressive
policies have utterly and consistently failed to solve the problems
of urban America – instead, they have exacerbated them – the
likelihood is that Democrats' unbroken (since 1964) control of San
Francisco politics will continue, and it may even be further
entrenched. Meanwhile, Democrats' iron grip on urban American
politics in general seems destined not just to persist, but to extend
itself gradually into our increasingly diverse suburbs. Democrats
will not be punished for their failed policies, in other words –
they will be rewarded! That's because registered Democrats, who
predominate in urban areas, accept almost unanimously the pack of
lies about American racism, and the wickedness of conservatives, that
Democratic politicians have been feeding them for decades. The real
world performance of Democratic policies is, to these diehards,
irrelevant.
This
realization can only serve to depress those of who believe in
conservative principles and in good governance, but there is
a slim ray of hope. If urban America and the Democratic Party are
beyond salvation and immune to reason, as it appears they are,
moderate and independent voters are another story. These relatively
open-minded, and unquestionably decisive, voters may not find the
Democratic/progressive false narrative about urban blight compelling.
When Democrats propose to these ordinary Americans that, against all
the evidence of our senses, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland,
Chicago, and New York are models for what a truly progressive America
could and should be like, they may just recoil. If so, then
conservatives will have a chance to propagate their own narratives,
and to expose the last several decades of Democratic rule in urban
America for what it was and is: a travesty of epic proportions.
Dr.
Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred
and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com.
He appears on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.
And here it is at WND:
https://www.wnd.com/2021/05/dem-run-cities-making-life-miserable-ordinary-americans/
