Progressive Policies Are Doomed to Failure

Member Group : Guy Ciarrocchi

In a still-unfolding tragedy, land over twice the size of Manhattan has burned to the ground across greater Los Angeles. Lives have been lost. Thousands have lost their homes, their businesses. Billions lost in property damage. However, this should not be a surprise.

Progressive policies always fail. We are watching it, again, in real time. Like so many other disastrous progressive policies forced upon us in the last several years, the Left is running Californians through a real life “lab” experiment. “What if we ignore common sense? What if we try this out and see what happens?

They’re failing in California — costing lives, livelihoods, and billions in property losses. Greater Los Angeles needed firefighters, equipment, commonsense leadership — and water.

What they were given by their mayor, city council, and governor were DEI policies for hiring and promoting fire fighters. Worse, climate extremists forced unnecessary, anti-commonsense policies on Californians: multi-million dollar fire department budget cuts, years of dead and dried-out brush built up, millions of gallons of rain and snow water intentionally poured into the Pacific Ocean instead of stored for use, and an enormous reservoir left bone-dry in the face of dangerous conditions and raging fires.

These are horribly bad decisions. And the results are obvious.

But it’s not simply the policy decisions that have created this tragedy. It’s the priorities and values of California Democrats — built on an ideology shared by far too many Democrats across America.

Their policies and values are not only idiotic, they’re dangerous, costly, and deadly. And they will impact Californians — and all Americans — for years.

The primary responsibility of elected officials is health, safety, and welfare. But they valued DEI over competence, training and commitment. They valued the habitat of a fish over lives, livelihoods, and billions of dollars of homes and businesses. They spent taxpayer money on left-wing, feel-good HR programs and trainings, rather than on firemen and equipment.

These are not policy decisions: these are value judgements. A policy disagreement is when the two parties fight over whether the top income tax rate should be 27 percent or 37 percent. But when elected officials vote not to build life-saving reservoirs because they want to save a fish habitat, that is not a policy disagreement — that’s placing the fish over people.

Our fellow Americans in greater Los Angeles are living through hell on earth, in large part because left-wing politicians failed them for years. Knowingly. Willfully. Stupidly.

Because of the left-wing values — their valuing fish over people and valuing “fighting the climate” over clearing out tons and tons of dead brush — people are dead and countless lives will never, ever be the same.

The left doesn’t value commonsense, everyday concerns and traditional hopes and dreams. They value virtue-signaling and chasing after the latest self-created crisis or cause. Tragically, in places like California — and New York, and much of American suburbia — they can get away with it politically. Let’s recognize that it’s not unique to California’s Newsom or the officials in LA.

From Philadelphia to New York, from San Francisco to Seattle, from Chicago to Portland, Democratic Party leaders and their left-wing funders have put forth District Attorneys who might as well be leaders of organized crime. They’ve sanctioned shoplifting, plea-bargained away felonies, and harassed our police officers. Again, not just bad policies but tragically backwards priorities.

In New York, another tragedy of errors — all built on left-wing values and priorities. The DA and Attorney General are focused on Trump and “corporate fraud,” while tolerating shoplifting, vandalism, subway fare-jumping — even violence. And putting cops and Good Samaritans on trial.

This has led to less people wanting to use subways. Yet, at the same time, the social “do-gooders” who hate the autonomy of people having cars and who worship the “climate-change god,” built miles and miles of bike lanes — in Manhattan! This turned four-lane streets into three; and two lanes into one.

Fewer people on the subway plus fewer lanes for cars equals traffic jams. Traffic was getting so bad that something had to be done. So, the governor came up with a proposal: charge a $9 a day toll to drive into Manhattan.

Value criminals over law-abiding citizens. Impose a European-master plan of bicycles in Manhattan. Create traffic and chaos — and, then, further punish the innocent victims.

The people being harmed are disproportionately poor and working class. After years of inflation, the last thing that every bartender, paralegal, or shopkeeper needed was to pay $45 more each week just to get to work.

Never forget the thousands who are still homeless in western North Carolina. Churches, non-profits — even the Amish — are doing their best to help. But it’s not enough. As a nation, we don’t lack money, expertise, or compassion. What we lack is a Biden/Harris administration that cares and that will prioritize helping those families, now!

Nationally and across Pennsylvania, we were Covid hostages in our homes and are still suffering from inflation due in large part to misguided policies based on misguided values. Economics 101 taught us that reducing the workforce, breaking the supply chain, and pumping trillions into the economy would create inflation and chaos, but they did it anyway.

Anyone with common sense knew that offering just about any person on Earth free entrance into America — with housing, medical care, cash and a cell phone — would create a crush at the border and bankrupt our cities, schools, and hospitals. And allowing just about anyone to claim “asylum” like kids playing “Simon says,” would lead to thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of criminals and terrorists into our nation. But they did it anyway.

Far too many Democratic politicians have become left-wing ideologues. They prioritize “understanding the criminal” and “fixing” the justice system over supporting cops and tough prosecutors. They prioritize their own ideology and partisan, political goals over securing our border and preventing more Laken Rileys.

Their cult-like adherence to “fighting climate change” only intensifies when confronted with the realities of everyday life—and, science. They value ideology over energy, virtue-signaling over heating our homes. They value fish over people.

Like lab rats in a science center, too many Democrats have been testing out their ideology, their theories, their “religion” on our families, our Bill of Rights, and our students.

It’s been an abject failure. Voters have given the Republicans the chance not only to change policies, but to restore commonsense priorities. We need to hold them accountable — and any Democrat politician that stands in their way.

Guy Ciarrocchi is a Senior Fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation. He writes for Broad + Liberty and RealClear Pennsylvania. Follow Guy at @PaSuburbsGuy.