LAKEFRONT LIBERALS' LUXURY BELIEFS.

Our President is contemplating sending National Guard troops to support immigration enforcement efforts in major cities.  It's muddled and authoritarian, according to Matt Bernius at Outside the Beltway.

Separately this week, Trump indicated that he and his team are in the planning process of deploying the National Guard to three cities: Baltimore, Chicago, and New Orleans. The [impetus] (?? — Ed.), according to official comments, was over the issue of crime.

Meanwhile, in those fifteen square miles of privilege surrounded by the Third World, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker has been assuring all and sundry that Chicago is safe and the local authorities can handle it.  John Kass is having none of it.

Hey Gov. Pritzker, if Chicago is so safe why not prance around the West and South Sides at night without your phalanx of  armed bodyguards? You might go it alone. But you wouldn’t dare do that. You expect minority women of low-incomes to take the filthy and dangerous CTA at night to and from work. And to vote Democrat, for you. You must think them to be stupid.

Of course you do. They keep voting Democrat. They’re not stupid. Those women are good people. And they don’t deserve the garbage thrown at them by politicians and the press.

Angry? Yeah, I’m angry, with good reason. Because there is another deadly game going on in America, a political game of Russian Roulette that unfortunately is not so obvious.

And who loses? Not the American political class. But some lose. They lose everything.

This game is played by Democrats seeking to maintain power in the mapping and gerrymandering of Congressional Districts. And it has killed many Americans and broken many American families and killed many children.

Yes, often in those districts that keep voting Democrat, in part because no other political party has offered a better value proposition.  Enterprise zones, less restrictive zoning, and no broken windows, anyone?  I mean, stopping crime is one of those eighty-twenty issues, and those fifteen square miles of privilege aren't as safe as they once might have been.

Pedestrians can't walk downtown without being accosted by the homeless and illegal beggars. Kids can't play in the parks without navigating "tent cities" and dodging needles and fentanyl zombies. The Fire Department is responding to out-of-control fires in these encampments at least weekly. The rat and bedbug infestations are rampant and as we mentioned, the buckets of human waste, piles of garbage and discarded gas cylinders make Chicago look and smell like a Third World shithole.

The fact that enforcement is suddenly on the table makes it obvious the polling numbers are massively supportive of what's coming in the next week or so.

There's much more material from assorted keyboard warriors urging additional law enforcement in Chicago, and other major cities.  That is for another post on another day.

Today's post is about the luxury beliefs that come bundled with the urban crime.  In "Sorry, White Old Hippies: We Black People Want Safe Streets," Daily Signal contributor C. J. Pearson goes straight at those luxury beliefs.

Black families don’t want lectures. We don’t want platitudes about “equity” from people who retreat to million-dollar condos after the rally ends. We want safety. We want to know that kids can play outside without dodging bullets. We want to know our grandparents can ride the bus without being attacked. Safety is the ultimate form of justice and white liberals pretending otherwise are lying. Not just to themselves, but to us.

Crime doesn’t hit Georgetown. It hits Southeast Washington. It hits the neighborhoods the protesters wouldn’t dare walk through at night. And the statistics don’t lie: The vast majority of homicide victims in this city are black. Every time a repeat offender is released, every time the police are told to stand down, it’s black lives put at risk.

So who benefits when Trump takes the handcuffs off the police and puts them back on criminals? The very people the protesters claim to represent. And that’s the Left’s worst nightmare: that black Americans might actually be safer under policies they despise.

And now, Trump has announced that the crackdown isn’t stopping with the District of Columbia. His administration is preparing to expand this tough-on-crime strategy to other Democrat-run inner cities plagued by violence. Places like Chicago and Baltimore that have been decimated by progressive policies and soft-on-crime delusion. For decades, liberal mayors and city councils have turned their backs on the very communities they claim to fight for, leaving ordinary people at the mercy of criminals. Thank God we finally have a president that is saying enough is enough.

Yet surely, however, his critics will scream “authoritarianism.” They’ll cry about “over-policing.” But those critics don’t live in the neighborhoods where gunfire is the lullaby at night. They don’t send their kids to schools where gangs recruit in the hallways. They don’t sit in churches with bullet holes in the windows. We do. And we know that real justice starts with real safety.

That's a long prologue to a story that is at least as old as my awareness of politics.

Yes, if one thinks of the Trump campaigns as a weighted average of Nixon, Ross Perot, and Wallace, one does not go far wrong.  That the court intellectuals for the Democrats continue to campaign and govern as if the Kerner Commission and the Diversity Bureaucracy have authorized the continued deplorable-shaming of those Angry White Guys doesn't help.  Or perhaps that's echoes of my having lived through that campaign as a high school sophomore.  In those days we had Greasers and Freaks, and that was to some extent political, even if it was primarily to determine who sat at the cool kids' table; and only as that generation passes from the scene will a more objective understanding of the politics of that era be possible.

Continuing in that vein, Richard Nixon's 301 electoral votes plus the 46 for George Wallace well swamped Hubert Humphrey's 191, "a powerful rebuke of liberalism and government overreach."

It's possible, as many court intellectuals for the lakefront liberals argue, that a big chunk of the Wallace vote in 1964-1972 and of the Trump vote in 2016-2024 was racially motivated:  Jim Crow had to continue in order to prevent the white working class from making common cause with the black working class.  Or that so voting might have been misguided.  That's the whole What's the Matter with Kansas? line of inquiry.

I submit, though, that those Republican-populist votes were a recognition that the lakefront liberals were making good on their luxury beliefs to the benefit of people who had been subject to unequal and oppressive treatment, by making people who were not that much further up the social pecking order or the economic food chain do the accommodating.  "Then, perhaps, we can have a serious discussion of the ways in which, fifty years ago, privileging the Kerner Commission's report and ignoring the Moynihan report has not turned out well for the people the Great Society programs and civil rights legislation and comprehensive immigration reforms of that era intended to help."  As ever, it is Theodore H. White seeing what is at work long before it presents more generally.  "On the long march of the American people to the uplands, most have usually been willing to go along so long as they feel that they or their children will not be discarded, or crushed, or sacrificed in the journey; they will follow as long as they feel those at the head of the march have a competence, a skill, a practical understanding of affairs which touch their lives."  Do you ask why "We are being governed by stupid people" resonates?

Consider as well, dear reader, that "selective service" meant deferments for college students, intelligently designing a work force in the National Interest, with infantrymen here and rocket scientists there.  Thus Chelsea sent its men to Vietnam when Cambridge did not.  Likewise, because school integration plans took place within, rather than among, school districts, it was South Boston kids who had to share with students from Dorchester, the kiddos in Newton Highlands went on unaffected by the fray.  You could repeat the experience in Detroit and Milwaukee.  It was business as usual in the suburbs, with those people who had the means to flee to Troy or Howell or New Berlin or Waukesha to do so.  The gentry liberals?  Their spawn always had the local version of Sidwell Friends to attend.

What Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds has to say about the corona tyranny generalizes to the gentry liberals and their luxury beliefs.

[I]ts practitioners never bother to demonstrate competence in the nation’s mainstream culture.

When that comes back to bite you, it isn’t “fascism,” but the wages of narcissistic political ineptitude.

Of course, these problems might be forgivable if the CDC were, you know, good at its actual job.

But it’s not.

This was demonstrated in its shambolic response to Ebola a decade ago, and much more dramatically demonstrated in its equally shambolic response to COVID.

In truth, most of our institutions have become useless and corrupt as those who run them become more concerned with performing for fellow elites than performing their actual jobs.

And because the elites have such contempt for normal people, they reward those who seem “transgressive” — regardless of whether they’re good at their jobs (they often aren’t), and regardless of the damage done to public trust.

And here we are.  "One of the main reasons behind the political alignment we’re seeing in the West is that the working & middle classes finally woke up to the fact that the Left hates them."  There are more Normals yet to mobilize.  "What I can’t explain is why voters in blue cities persist in electing administrations that expose them to unacceptable levels of violent crime. Democratic Party governance is a perverse, self-inflicted disaster."  One, John Kass notes, that can be fixed.  "It’s our fault for electing people like Pritzker and [Chicago mayor Brandon] Johnson."