By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, March 14, 2019
New York City collapsed in 1977. There were 1,557 murders
in the city that year, more than twice the number there had been ten years
earlier. That awful trend would continue to get worse until the city hit its
homicidal apex in 1991, with 2,245 murders, but the shadow — the literal shadow
— of 1977 continued to loom over the city.
Anno Domini 1977 saw the nation as a whole suffering from
stagflation, and New York City in particular was crippled by a financial crisis
following years of misgovernment heavy on policies that lately have enjoyed a
revival: tuition-free education at City University of New York, substantial
growth in public-sector personnel spending, big deficits financed by
potentially volatile securities, short-term emergency financing, etc. Against
that background of chaos and desperation, the so-called Son of Sam serial
killer commanded the headlines as a brutally hot July settled over the
simmering city.
And then the lights went out.
The 1977 blackout saw New York City burn. Arsonists
attacked 31 neighborhoods in the city, burning down a five-block commercial
stretch in Crown Heights with 75 stores. Bushwick was still burning the next
morning. Hundreds of stores were looted, and a Bronx Pontiac dealership was
relieved of most of its new-car inventory. Hundreds of police officers were
injured in the riots, and thousands of looters were arrested. Thousands had to
be evacuated from stalled subway cars. And New Yorkers were trapped: The
tunnels had to be closed down as the ventilation failed, and the airports were
closed. Mayor Abe Beame described it as a “night of terror.”
ConEd, the municipal monopoly utility, called the event
an “act of God.” But it was no such thing. The situation of New York City was
the result of the acts of men — and their hubris.
New York City was not alone.
On the other side of the Atlantic, London had found
itself in much the same situation, along with the United Kingdom at large. It
was the high-water mark of British socialism, with strikes crippling the
country, rampant inflation crippling the economy, and the attempt to impose
wage-and-price controls in response making things even worse. Homes lost their
heat, hospitals were running on batteries or ceasing to operate at all,
transportation came to a standstill.
The 1970s saw much of the notional radicalism of the
1960s put into actual practice in the United States and the United Kingdom,
producing a terrible alloy of étatist
command-and-control economics, cultural libertinism, and delusional
liberationist policies touching everything from law enforcement to mental
health — it was the golden age of “deinstitutionalization,” the results of
which can be seen and smelled and heard raving on the streets of any U.S. city
today — all under the watchful eyes of powerful public-sector unions and related
interest groups. In short, it was a time of permissiveness in all the things
requiring rigor and regimentation in all the things requiring liberalism.
The blackouts in the United States and the United Kingdom
were emblems of the despair of that time and, more pertinent, of the failure of
the political ideas that shaped those years. But there were others: Gasoline
rationing and hours-long waits at fuel stations come to mind.
In the United Kingdom and the United States, the
rejection of that arrogant and dysfunctional étatism resulted in the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan, respectively, and in support for their broadly deregulatory,
market-oriented reform agendas.
But it is in the nature of human beings to forget. When
Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela, progressive activists in the United
States and the Democratic politicians allied with them lionized him as a rebuke
to American capitalism and its excesses, celebrating him as a people’s champion
and the leader of an authentically popular movement. Philadelphia Democrat
Chaka Fattah accepted the gift of a few gallons of heating oil from the
Chávez-run state oil company and sang hymns to the great dictator, thanking him
“and the Venezuelan people for their benevolence.” New York Democrat Jose
Serrano later eulogized the Venezuelan strongman as a hero who “understood
democracy and basic human desires for a dignified life. His legacy in his
nation, and in the hemisphere, will be assured as the people he inspired
continue to strive for a better life for the poor and downtrodden.” Joseph
Kennedy suggested that those critical of Democrats who accepted the patronage
of the Chávez regime were countenancing “a crime against humanity.” The usual
suspects — Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore — came to sit at his feet.
Under Chávez’s successor caudillo,
Nicolás Maduro, things got worse, but Jesse Myerson of Rolling Stone assured his fellow Millennial socialists that
Venezuela’s economic program was “basically terrific.” There was no food, medicine,
toilet paper, etc., and people were reduced to eating pets and zoo animals, and
opposition leaders were disappeared in midnight raids, but Myerson insisted
that Venezuela’s “electoral system’s integrity puts the U.S.’s to abject
shame.”
The lights have been out for a while in Venezuela. People
are dying in Venezuelan hospitals because there isn’t enough electricity to run
the dialysis machines and other necessary pieces of equipment. People are
starving because food cannot be refrigerated or transported. Looting is common.
The police crackdowns and political retaliation are brutal. As one Venezuelan
put it, literally and perhaps more poetically than intended: “We don’t have
light.”
None of this should surprise us. Not in New York. Not in
London. We have literally seen this before. And where are American
progressives? On Maduro’s side of the barricades, to a depressing extent. The
failure of what Bernie Sanders likes to call “democratic socialism” in
Venezuela cannot
be forthrightly admitted lest they come to discredit Democrats’ domestic
political ambitions. What has, say, the average columnist at The Nation learned from this brutality
and privation? “The left wing of the Democratic Party needs to sharpen its
crisis-response message,” writes Greg Grandin, “to figure out a way to use such
moments to put forth a compelling counter-vision to the bipartisan
foreign-policy establishment.” As long as the suffering of the Venezuelan
people can be used for something! If
it helps Ilhan Omar, then at least it will not have been entirely in vain.
Some shadows are very long indeed, and some darkness
almost impenetrable.
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