BLM Becomes the PLO

I am inclined to think that the Palestinians have some legitimate beefs, historically speaking. I just don’t care very much. You blow up children in pizza shops, and your priorities go right to the bottom of my global humanitarian to-do list.

Palestinians want a state? I wouldn’t lend Mahmoud Abbas a cup of sugar.

It isn’t quite the PLO — not yet — but the slow-rolling crime-wave-cum-terrorist-front that is burning, looting, and murdering a ragged path through American cities is brutalizing its way into irrelevance. In June, a solid majority (54 percent) of Americans told pollsters they approved of the protests, but as the body count of the “mostly peaceful protests” climbed throughout the summer, that support has declined to barely over a third, according to the Associated Press.

Americans of all political stripes were shocked and repulsed by the treatment of George Floyd, and nearly 70 percent of them said in June that they believe the George Floyd episode indicates a bigger and deeper problem with American law enforcement.

As recently as June, a majority of Republicans supported the George Floyd protests.

Not now.

This represents a truly impressive display of political incompetence on the part of Black Lives Matter and its allies. If you came to the American public with an argument that cities such as Louisville and Philadelphia are poorly governed, that this poor governance imposes especially terrible costs on African Americans, that the municipal incompetence naturally extends to police work, and that sweeping reform is called for, you would get a great deal of buy-in from both sides of the aisle. Republicans don’t need a whole lot of convincing that Chicago is a flying circus of whirling buffoonery.

In truth, the Left isn’t especially interested in police reform. If they cared about police reform, progressives would be offering actual halfway serious proposals for police reform, which have been notably few and far between over these past months, drowned out by unserious and irresponsible rhetoric about abolishing city police departments. The police are a special problem for the Left in that they represent an incompatibility between the Left’s post-1960s Bill Ayers–style radicalism and the realpolitik that recognizes police as unionized municipal employees and hence natural constituents of the Democratic Party.

The scandal of urban America is a stumbling-block for Democrats, for the obvious reason that this is pretty much exclusively their show and has been for generations. Louisville, currently convulsed by the death of Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. Portions of American cities were ceded to armed militias over the summer, not by Republican authorities accommodating right-wing radicals descending from the hills of Idaho but by the powers that be in impeccably progressive Seattle inviting a left-wing occupation force to set up shop in a corner of that declining city, where they promptly set about shooting a few children.

Because Democrats run the most troubled cities, they are desperate to either change the subject from the performance of the municipal agencies in Minneapolis, Louisville, San Francisco, etc., to something more general and more politically malleable, hence the vapid, empty talk about “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” It’s bullsh**, and everybody knows it’s bullsh**. Even the president of Princeton more or less admitted his bullsh** was bullsh** when the Trump administration had the uncharacteristic wit to actually call him on said bullsh** and threaten a civil-rights investigation into the school after he denounced its “systemic racism.” A vague problem vaguely related to the vaguely racist actions of vaguely identified vaguely Republican people elsewhere is a much more comfortable discussion for the powers that be in Minneapolis than the question of how Minneapolis is run, who runs it, how they run it, who benefits from that, and who pays the worst social costs. One suspects that Democrats in such cities actually prefer the riots and arson to having that uncomfortable discussion. Remember when the Minneapolis city council vowed to defund the police department? More bullsh**, as the New York Times reports. Of course they never meant a word of it — they just feel obliged to make certain noises with their faces and perform histrionic pantomime of moral seriousness.

We see this kind of thing all the time. San Francisco doesn’t need to abolish capitalism or eliminate “inequality” to alleviate its affordable-housing problem, but it does need to reform its zoning and land-use laws — something that Nancy Pelosi’s rich San Francisco friends have been fighting tooth and talon for decades. And so San Francisco pretends that San Francisco’s problems are not of San Francisco’s making, that the problem is “white privilege” or some other comfortable abstraction.

BLM could be using the Democratic Party to pursue a reform agenda; instead, the Democratic Party is using BLM to prevent the pursuit of a reform agenda. It’s always the same question: Who, whom?

Because we have 50 states and a great deal of genuine diversity within and between our communities, a federal system of government with checks and balances, and three rivalrous branches of government, it takes a considerable degree of political consensus to get anything very important done in the United States. That is a benefit, not a defect — it protects our liberties and the rights of minorities from the factional passions of temporary majorities. The tragedy of the months following the death of George Floyd is that a real consensus for police reform, and urban reform more broadly, could have been built. Instead, we got riots and arson, and roving bands of quasi-Maoist bullies conducting impromptu struggle sessions at Washington sidewalk bistros and alfresco restaurant seating in Dallas, along with a lot of outmoded Marxist rubbish about the secret white-supremist roots of rhyming poetry, off-Broadway theater, and traffic laws.

You want to improve police practices and governance in American cities? I’m your huckleberry, and a great many conservatives are ready to work toward that goal. You want to smash a few plates of kale-and-quinoa salad, smash windows, and smash capitalism? Then we don’t really have anything to talk about, because you are ridiculous and irresponsible children. The United States is not going to be governed by boutique radicalism and mob violence. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, and we don’t negotiate with bullies — or cooperate with them.

BLM is pursuing a losing strategy, which is why it is losing support and setting itself up to lose entirely.