For context of what follows, my neighborhood is deep, deep blue; >90% voting Democratic. But it is also a neighborhood which has been suffering dramatically rising predation in the past three years. Theft of cars, car larceny, and porch thefts are up dramatically, almost a daily event in some parts of the neighborhood.
The first post sheds some information about the problem and its magnitude. In the more prosperous neighborhoods, crime is rising 15-30% a year. The City flushes money away on subsidies to large corporations while failing to provide even rudimentary services, especially including police and courts. Ideologically there is in the Mayor's office a strong aversion to police and a deep commitment to keeping people out of jail through restorative justice diversion programs.
The following set of (anonymized) exchanges occur on NextDoor.
In the most prosperous neighborhoods, crime is up 20-30% and there are increasing rumblings from the otherwise Democratic base.
What is so striking to me about this exchange is that it mirrors the observation I have made elsewhere of the inversion of the respective roles of Democrats and Republicans since the 1960s. It used to be that the Republicans were the social throw-backs, unconcerned about civil rights, nativist, anti-international, etc. with a strong whiff of racism, anti-semitism and anti-catholicism.
They shed those positions but it seems as if, unwilling to let them go to waste, the Democratic base has picked up them all.
Someone endorses that there is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.
Of course a clever Dick with little knowledge of statistics tries to magic away the problem.
He is soon set straight by someone who does know statistics and does know the APD numbers.
Next a woman in the neighborhood makes the archaic, widely reviled and horrendous argument that the victims were asking for it.
The victims are responsible for their victimization. Just astonishing.
Someone gently points out that the criminals are the ones breaking the law, not the victims.
Having made the "They were asking for it" argument in defense of the criminals the far left neighbor next asserts:
She now seems to be making the argument for vigilante justice. Unintentionally, but there it is in her words.
In this exchange, we see the new Democratic base morphing before our eyes into the Democratic Party of Bull O'Connor. A Democrat of an earlier era when "She was asking for it" and "We'll take the law into our own hands" were the theme of the day.
The astonishing thing is that the woman making the argument, judging from her other comments, is a hard left Democrat, fully bought into the postmodernist critical theory view of the world. And here she is unconsciously parroting the world view of an earlier, unacceptable time without even realizing that is what she is doing.
Its a strange world.
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