The standard line from sympathetic but critical liberals like Atlantic columnist David French is that he never should have been there. This is true, actually. Kyle Rittenhouse should not have been there, because other people should have. The city’s police force should have been capable of maintaining peace on the streets. If that failed, the elected governor should have sent in the National Guard. As the last resort, private citizens should be capable of stepping up. When the maintenance of order demands the use of force, public spaces should be protected by men with guns, who know how to use them and how not to.It transpires that there were other private citizens with guns in Kenosha that evening. That link goes to an article that Rachel Campos-Duffy's daughter Evita posted, and the social media engagement might be creating as much congestion as Thanksgiving traffic on the Dan Ryan. The money quote: "Any able-bodied man over 16 years old had a moral obligation to defend Kenosha against vandals, looters, and arsonists attacking while police stood down." Wisconsin governor Tony Evers (D - Public Instruction) comes in for some deserved stick in that article, but it's Mr Leary's points I want to address.
Kyle Rittenhouse is not that—though his actions and apparent instincts suggest he is the kind of man who, given better formative circumstances, would be. As it is, he’s a naive kid who fell in with some LARPers, who really were (in perhaps the one characterization Thomas Binger managed to get right) mostly just “wannabe soldiers acting tough.” In the Week, Samuel Goldman wrote about them at length, “marginal men to whom flames and bullets are more appealing than their chances for a quiet life … the lonely, damaged men our educational, economic, and political institutions seem to generate in large numbers.” Nobody who watches the videos of that night or has followed the progression of testimony in court can conclude in good faith that, along with these other would-be protectors, Kyle—who, for instance, made the initial, basic blunder of getting himself left alone in a hostile environment—knew what he was doing.Let us leave for another day whether three shots, three targets down is "not very competently" defending yourself. Let us experience the consequences of the absence of bourgeois convention.
This points to another big-picture concern. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same system that left Kyle Rittenhouse feeling like he had to defend his streets with a rifle also failed to prepare him to do so very competently. When society collapses because the men are all too soft to maintain order, neither those men nor the sons they’ve raised can really be expected to put it back together again.
The great tragedy of Kenosha is that, in a matter of days, civilization collapsed so fully that the only people willing to stand against chaos were teenagers and twenty-somethings who barely knew how to shoot, much less how to fight, and not at all how to establish or maintain control. That is the reason people died, and the reason Kyle Rittenhouse will spend the rest of his life with the weight of having killed them: the wholesale dereliction of basic duty by an ineffectual government, and the inability of the whole society to form men as capable as they are willing to step into the breach. Once the regime finally crawled out of its bunker, with whole sections of the city turned to ash, the best it could manage was to send some effeminate mediocrity to prosecute the youngest of the LARPers for killing a pedophile and another violent criminal in ham-fisted self-defense.If Evita Duffy's reporting is correct, there were other armed adults protecting the business district, and it might be that in focusing on protecting their property rather than rushing to put out dumpster fires, they stayed out of the unfamiliar waters Kyle Rittenhouse found himself in.
The Samuel Golden essay Mr Leary refers to makes for instructive reading.
Even if he isn't guilty of murder and his open carrying of a rifle was legal, Rittenhouse's decision to enter a "war zone" was extremely stupid. It does not matter whether he believed he was helping to maintain order. Despite the American mythology of indomitable voluntarism, sometimes it's better just to stay home.To continue the bluntness, these people experienced the consequences of the absence of bourgeois convention.
But the same is true of Rittenhouse's alleged victims. Initially characterized as harmless bystanders, it turned out that they included a homeless convicted child abuser who was treated for a suicide attempt on very day he died; a demonstrator with his own record of violent conduct; and a gun enthusiast and self-appointed (though also certified) paramedic loosely affiliated with something called the People's Revolution movement.
To put it bluntly, these are the profiles of people who find trouble without looking very hard.
Previous misdeeds aren't legally relevant, of course, but their biographies suggest Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreuz had more in common with Rittenhouse and each other than you might expect from the contingent circumstances of their encounter. To different degrees, these men share histories of family instability, domestic abuse, and run-ins with the law. From this perspective, the real story here may not be the ideological clash that fascinates commentators. Instead, it's a tragic encounter among lost "boys" (Rosenbaum, the oldest and most disturbed, was 36, Huber and Grosskreuz were in their 20s, and Rittenhouse was just 17) for whom political causes were likely a pretext for seeking excitement, camaraderie, and danger.And sometimes, public officials get it right.
Two weeks ago, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) drew much derision and some praise for suggesting there is something very wrong with a society that offers few prospects to the lonely, damaged men our educational, economic, and political institutions seem to generate in large numbers. The tragedy in Kenosha suggests he's right.Justice is served, according to Rod Dreher. Deconstruct those institutions at your peril.
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