By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, September 02, 2020
Reporters standing in front of scenes of arson, flames
billowing behind them, not very far from scenes of shooting and murder, insist
that the protests are “mostly peaceful.” National Public Radio and a
multi-billion-dollar global media conglomerate team up to bring you an
illiterate “defense
of looting.” The president comes to the defense of a dangerously stupid
teenager who went looking for trouble illegally armed with a rifle in his hands
and, to no one’s great surprise, found the trouble he was looking for.
The lesson of the summer is that intellectual and moral
anarchy eventually bring with them political anarchy, that chaos in the
democratic mind unleashes chaos in the streets.
Our friends on the left pirouette from position to
position, desperate to please the mob. Consider a point of comparison: Only a
few years ago, a bunch of irresponsible people who took out mortgages they
could never hope to afford eventually lost their houses in foreclosures. People
lost businesses, too. That was, we were assured, a national tragedy, an
indictment of capitalism. But now the anointed mob is burning down homes
and businesses, and progressives sniff that these losses are “just property.”
Sometimes, property losses (those resulting from failure to pay a valid debt)
are the cause of lamentation and the rending of garments, and sometimes
property losses (those imposed by criminal violence) are no big deal.
A cynical man might suspect that such progressive
posturing is not to be taken seriously.
In reality, it isn’t “just property.” It is mobs setting
fire to homes with children in them. It is mobs shooting children
to death. It is mobs shooting adults to death. It is arson that endangers the
lives of innocent bystanders, firefighters, and other emergency workers.
It is also a near guarantee of long-term disinvestment
from communities in which property is not secure. The same people burning down
grocery stores today will be complaining about “food deserts” in 18 months.
But if it were “just property,” that would be bad enough.
Governments exist to protect property. That is what they
are there for — life, liberty, and property, each of which is bound up
in the other two. Property is the basis of liberty, and security in one’s
property is a prerequisite of a decent society. Attacks on property are attacks
on civil rights.
Property is necessary for the exercise of civil rights.
Civil rights without property rights is a rhetoric, not a reality. The freedom
of the press enjoyed by the New York Times is not worth $0.02 without
the hundreds of millions of dollars in printing facilities and digital
infrastructure that the newspaper relies on to actually disseminate the news.
Burning that down would not be “just property” damage. If you can see that but
cannot also see how looting a business involves more than “just property,” then
you should go someplace quiet and think about it for a while, and pray
fervently to whatever deity you believe in to reach down from the transcendent
celestial realm and make you a little less stupid.
The answers are not on the radio.
But if there is a case to be made for looting, how about
we start with NPR and its affiliates? The NPR Foundation reported holding $342
million in assets in 2018, and NPR’s management and on-air talent are
splendidly compensated, many of them in excess of a half-million dollars a
year. You can commission a shipload of lectures on income inequality and the
salubrious effects of looting for that kind of “just property.” NPR’s
headquarters on North Capitol Street in Washington, D.C., is “just property,”
too — property NPR isn’t even much using at the moment, because of the
epidemic. Would NPR object to someone burning it down to make a political
point? Would looting NPR’s property be defensible? Yes? No? Why or why not?
A professional investor once said that in the short term,
markets are dominated by greed and panic, but, in the long term, they are
dominated by math. Politics in the short term may be dominated by tribal hatred
and petty advantage-seeking, but politics in the (very) long term is dominated
by ideas. Ceding the field of ideas in pursuit of short-term electoral
gains is always an error, because vacating the field does not make it vacant —
it only clears the field for other ideas, other articles of faith, other
systems of values.
In the short term, the problem is the looting. In the
long term, the problem is the defense of looting.
Because we live under the yoke of a post-literate
culture, there are certain obvious truths that are effectively impossible to
communicate to the mass population. Everybody who has ever dealt with the TSA
should understand in broad outline what is going on with law enforcement in
cities such as Minneapolis and San Francisco, that it is not only possible but common
for public-security measures to be simultaneously excessive and insufficient,
invasive and ineffective, heavy-handed and incompetent, corrupt and abusive and
necessary, that criminal violence and police violence — and police corruption
and political corruption — are genuine problems that are entangled with each
another in complex ways. There are productive ways to respond to that. Burning
down cities is not one of them. Tweeting hysterically about burning down cities
is not one of them, either.
But the petulant children in Portland want only to
play-act at being Jacobins, and the petulant child in the White House requires
a full-time culture war lest he be forced to run for reelection on his record
of spotless administrative excellence and confidence-inspiring leadership. If
ever two clutches of fools deserved one another, these are they.
Life, liberty, and property: simple to say, difficult to
achieve — and still more difficult to achieve if you have forgotten how and why
to secure them or never understood in the first place.
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