How Democrats May Deliver a GOP Landslide
Virtually everyone agrees that a black man’s death under the knee of a white Minneapolis policeman looked like murder. But, charging the officer with homicide didn’t prevent cities from burning. Sadly, some people cannot simply share community outrage or condemn and protest police misconduct without engaging in violence, often opportunistically.
There are huge ironies in the left-labeled and executed “racial justice” rioting, looting and vandalism following George Floyd’s death.
For example, after the American Civil War, rebel commander General Robert E. Lee publicly opposed statues and monuments honoring the insurrectionists who formed and fought for the Confederacy, all Democrats, in order to encourage national reconciliation and discourage further rebellion.
Ignoring Lee, post-war Democrats erected many, including Baltimore’s Lee/Jackson monument dedicated in 1948 by the late Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a Democrat, then Baltimore mayor, and father of current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Accordingly, Mrs. Pelosi’s recent demand to remove Confederate monuments is highly ironic. Even more ironic is the alleged George Floyd-inspired rioting, looting and arson in American cities that Democrats, including Pelosi’s father, have run for decades. In Boston, rioters mindlessly defaced a memorial honoring a black Civil War Union regiment. A Philadelphia abolitionist’s memorial was defaced. Both raise doubts about whether urban rioting is really about racial justice.
An old business axiom applies equally to government: The culture comes from the corner office – in other words, from the boss.
Allegations of police brutality have persisted since Democrat bosses started running big cities, so, if “police reform” is needed today, why, in fifty or more years, didn’t Democrats reform policing?
Recent rioting has taught residents of Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Chicago that their lives and properties are no longer safe, because Democrat governors and/or mayors and their police subordinates stopped enforcing the law and, in effect, began enabling criminals.
Passive elected Democrats have convinced law-abiding black city dwellers that the police aren’t there to safeguard them or black-owned businesses, but to protect rioters. In fact, movements to defund or disband police departments have emerged, beginning with a unanimous Minneapolis City Council vote in favor.
Over time, implicitly-sanctioned lawlessness hollows out communities, as it did Detroit, once America’s most prosperous city, following uncontrolled 1968 rioting.
Meanwhile, soft-on-crime appeasement policies will create inner-city food/retail “deserts.” One enabler, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, pleaded with Walmart and other major retailers that suffered heavy losses during her city’s violence, looting and vandalism to reopen there. Why would they?
Democrats are in an awkward position, especially in an election year. After all, 1968 riots helped elect Republican President Richard Nixon who ran a “law and order” campaign. Worried, a few are catching on, but, generally, because the rioters and their sympathizers are more likely to vote with them, Democrats haven’t figured out a risk-free way to even admit that blue-zone lawlessness is a problem, much less to stop it.
With no “safe” options, Democrats would rather President Donald Trump played “bad guy.”
But, local problems call for local solutions. In a final cause/effect irony, today’s urban anarchy is actually a blue-state crisis. Some insurgents may claim a higher purpose, but, generally, they are disaffected left-liberal Democrats waging asymmetric warfare directly against the left-liberal Democrats for whom they voted.
The president would be smart to stay sidelined, remind blue-state governors that they command in-state National Guard units, and then, along with the rest of America, watch and catalog the chaotic failures of single-party liberal governance.
Conservative voters are already motivated, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent to independents and traditional Democrats that, because they’ve ruined and lost control of areas they’ve misgoverned for years, left-liberal Democrats would wreck America, too.
Most blue-state autocrats have already imposed and enforced crowd-gathering restrictions on law-abiding, church-going citizens (among other unpopular COVID-19 policy blunders), so, if elected Democrats refuse or fail to control criminal rioting and jurisdictional occupations, November could be easy pickings for Republicans.
