MacIntyre: The world liberals made

Last week, activist Ryan Carson was stabbed to death in New York City and journalist Josh Kruger was shot and killed in his Philadelphia home. Both men were radical leftist activists who had downplayed the danger of crime in major U.S. cities. A heated debate quickly erupted online after many conservatives pointed out that these men fell victim to a problem they helped manufacture and justify.

Progressives became livid over the fact that someone might recognize the simple cause-and-effect relation between these men’s politics and the sorrowful state of the cities in which they lived. The fact that conservatives noticed the connection between leftist policies and violent crime was far more offensive than the violent crime itself. The key to maintaining a progressive worldview is screaming loud enough to drown out the reality unfolding before your eyes.

While I personally find mocking these deaths in poor taste, it is hard to take the outrage and pearl-clutching from progressives seriously. These are the same people who danced on the graves of every COVID skeptic, celebrated the deaths of conservative pundits and Supreme Court justices, and talked about putting their enemies in re-education camps. Leftists are happy to celebrate the demise of their political opponents and feel justified in doing so.

Progressives view conservatives as enemies in the Schmittian sense: an alien “other” who poses an existential threat and against whom extreme action is justified. Carson, an outspoken Antifa activist, cheered the destruction of police stations during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and celebrated the death of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on his social media accounts. While those on the right might need to conduct themselves with decency for the health of their own souls, the left’s current calls for propriety are utterly fake and hollow.

Ultimately, it is a deeply flawed view of the human condition that leads the left and the areas they control into ruin.

To the progressives, human nature is infinitely malleable and individuals can be molded into the perfect subject that will produce an earthly utopia. The human starts as basically good, kind, and socially cooperative and is only forced to commit criminal acts by a set of oppressive institutions. People are not fallen creatures who steal and murder due to the evil that lurks in every human soul, but victims compelled to commit crimes by the white Christian capitalist patriarchy that drives them to acts of desperation. The left views the hard, physical deterrents of police and prisons not as necessary institutions for maintaining civilization against a violent aspect of human nature that will always exist but as the primary cause of that violence.

As amazing as it seems, leftists and even a great many liberals have difficulty connecting the application of their utopian ideology with the horrific consequences that follow. The Antifa activist can call for police abolition, open borders, and reduced prison sentences for violent felons while still being totally shocked by the fact that the streets are full of criminals who would knife a man sitting on a bench with his girlfriend.

Preventing crime is no mystery. Aggressive policing and strictly enforced penalties will usually do the trick, but the results tend to offend liberal sensibilities. The commission of crimes is not distributed equally across all demographics, and effective deterrence will naturally follow this unequal distribution. Leftists see this pattern and, due to their warped view of human nature, assume that it is deterrence itself that causes crime. People should be able to sit on a bench in New York City at any time, day or night, without fearing for their lives. This is not an unrealistic goal; the social technology required to achieve this is neither new nor profound; but the left is obsessed with the idea of social progress and cares very little about the destruction the leftist revolution leaves in its wake.

A few years ago, a popular internet meme featured the most absurd, degenerate, or violent event possible with the text “this is the future liberals want” emblazoned across the top. That meme format is dead because it has simply become the world we now occupy. Leftists demand police abolition but are then shocked by violent crime. They call for open borders but are shocked by human trafficking, low wages for workers, and a housing shortage. Leftists championed locking down the nation’s children during COVID but are shocked by massive educational setbacks and cratering mental health.

If the communist revolutions of the past have taught us anything, it is that progressives will continue their march toward utopia, no matter how violent, depressing, or economically devastating the consequences of their policies become. The left is utopian. Utopia is impossible. Therefore, no matter how long the left has been in power, real leftism has never been tried. Leftists' only solution is to try harder.

Those with what economist Thomas Sowell called the constrained vision understand that human nature is deeply flawed and largely unchangeable. We live in fallen world where people can and will make evil choices, even if their material needs are met. Greed, violence, poverty, addiction, and crime are tragically just as much a part of the human experience as love, peace, joy, and contentment. That does not mean that individuals with the constrained vision are exempt from making the world a better place. They still feel a strong sense of duty to care for and improve the lives of those in their families and communities.

But, unlike those with the utopian unconstrained vision, conservatives know there are hard limits to human nature, and so they are less likely to support social engineering. Utopians believe that crime can be ameliorated by social workers armed with therapy. Conservatives understand that some evils can only be stopped by a police officer armed with a gun.

Conservatives love to quote John Adams' famous line, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” and with good reason. It communicates the traditional view that faith and a shared commitment to the same moral vision are the building blocks of society. But they rarely consider the implications of the line that follows: “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Liberty is the rare and precious fruit of virtue. Virtue is not the fruit of liberty. Progressives have deconstructed traditions that constrained our nature in the hope that it would allow them to reach utopia. Instead it has unleashed the far darker impulses that lurked beneath the surface of civilization. The representative republic established by the U.S. Constitution and the liberty it provided were not meant for those bent on civilizational suicide. Liberals have a monopoly on political power in most major American cities, and the results are as predictable as a heroin user with a blank check.

The difficult but unavoidable truth is that progressives are simply incapable of self-government. The left has destroyed the regions it rules and will continue to do so no matter how devastating the consequences become.

In the past, a pendulum effect ensured that the delusional polices of the left would foster high crime and social decay, followed by a conservative reaction of self-preservation to clean up the streets and restore order. Before long, of course, people would forget why things got so bad and return to pursuing utopia. That time has passed. The pendulum is broken. The progressive revolution has driven all conservative influence out of blue cities. The liberals got the future they wanted, and now they must suffer the consequences of the world they made.