Note: This article was written in response to a brief excerpt from Daniel J. Mahoney’s book, Recovering Politics, Civilization and the Soul: Essays on Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022). The excerpt was published by The American Mind on November 16, 2022, the response on the same date. Reprinted with permission.

 

Rights unfettered by natural law are also undefended by it. Most states in today’s United States periodically undertake the task of revising academic standards for their public schools. Recently, in one such exercise, a member of the commission charged with reviewing the standards for social studies moved to omit the first sentence and a half of the Declaration of Independence—all that stuff about the Laws of nature and Nature’s God, self-evident truths, and unalienable rights that governments are instituted to secure. Sounded like a violation of the separation of church and state to him. Instead of learning such unconstitutional heresies, the reformer suggested students should begin their study with the phrase, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”

Under this proposed dispensation, “consent” means assent—freedom from those bothersome constraints imposed by anyone or anything beyond the inclinations of the agreeing parties—which Daniel J. Mahoney here wittily calls “the categorical imperative of individual choice.” Kant, however, might not be amused—or, if amused, sardonically. Hardly an orthodox Christian or even a natural law man himself, even he wanted religion to live within “the limits of reason” not in accordance with the limitless scope of human desires.

“Consent” and “choice,” redefined as desire, define much of modern “individualism,” whose non-negotiable imperative is “I want what I want.” In one sense, modern individualism fits neatly into modern democracy. “Who died and left you in charge” is a rhetorical and egalitarian question that shuts down a lot of arguments, neutralizing unwanted commands.

Still, democracy is above all a name for a sort of regime, a ruling order: authority may no longer be allowed to come from above, but it does come at you from all sides, as the experience of high school (with or without a curriculum that includes the Declaration of Independence) emphatically teaches. What democratic egalitarianism gives—entitlement to dismiss all opinions but one’s own—it readily takes away, inhibiting any expression of opinions at variance with those around us, on pain of social ostracism. Regimes include and exclude: democracy is no different than any other in that way. So I have my rights—until I don’t.

Rights are insecure in contemporary American democracy, because they are neither limited nor defended by the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Our individual agency can only withstand the assault of other people’s collective agency if each understands himself beholden to some absolute standard, rather than the mere unfettered will of the majority. 

When rights conceived as inherent in individuals meet societies organized democratically, the result has been not rugged but harried and timid individualism, as described by Tocqueville. Overwhelmed by the loud importunities of the crowd, the intimidated individual withdraws from public engagement, the only effective means of securing rights. Against this, Tocqueville famously commends the American practice of civil association, whereby individuals form small but sturdy local organizations—clubs, churches, schools, political parties—still democratic but humanly scaled, agents of resistance against the weight of mass democracy.

So long as federalism was respected and natural rights upheld this worked tolerably well. Self-government in civil associations and town meetings guaranteed that people argued with people they knew about things they knew about. The power of the knowing eye-roll kept most people within the bounds of common sense.

But for a century or more, natural rights wielded by self-governing citizens active in civic associations and local governments have slowly yielded to claims of ‘historical’ rights advanced by a variety of Marxist and Marxisante thinkers. To conceive of rights as historical, evolving in accordance with vast historical forces said to be physically and even morally irresistible, is to reintroduce the ‘massifying’ and isolating effects of democracy under an increasingly centralized administrative state.

This in turn trains citizens to hope for a defense of their rights not by themselves and their elected representatives but by the only institutions powerful enough to manage such forces—the administrative state itself and the equally bureaucratic modern corporation, often in collusion with each other and always with the increasingly fearsome resources of digital technology at their disposal. 

Under the new regime, citizens are not really wanted Indeed, they are inconvenient. Travel down an American highway to see the proliferation of billboards touting marijuana dispensaries and online gambling. A satisfied, stupefied, and indebted populace can no longer want to declare it independence, feeling more threatened than fortified by such notions as the Laws of Nations and of Nature’s God, taking license for liberty and self-will for self-government.

This article was first published in Constituting America, August 1, 2022.

 

Good government produces good administration, Publius has written. Good administration is what we need from the executive branch charged as it is with carrying out the laws enacted by the legislature within the framework of the supreme law of the land, the United States Constitution. A good executive must act with energy. To enable executives so to act, the offices they occupy must have unity, duration, adequate provision in terms of money and personnel, and competent powers. Publius therefore defends the Frames of the Constitution in their establishment of a presidency unlike the consular system of ancient Rome, which assigned domestic policy to one consul, foreign (and especially military) policy to another. The American president serves as chief administrative officer for domestic policy as well as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Congress may not manipulate his salary and the president can exercise the power to veto Congressional legislation, thereby maintaining his independence of judgment. He is, hen, neither a monarch nor a legislator but a republican executive.

In Federalist 71, Publius presents the reasons for and the institutional means to enable duration in office, “the second requisite to the energy of the executive authority.” There can be no substitute for character for “the personal firmness of the executive in the employment of his constitutional powers.” Nor can there be any substitute for “the stability of the system of administration which may have been adopted under his auspices” as a consequence of that firmness of character. But no person can exercise such character or carry out such a system without an institutional framework which permits him to do so.

As always, Publius shows the link between the Constitution’s institutional arrangements and human nature. “It is a general principle of human nature that a man will be interested in whatever he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it; will be less attached to what he holds by a momentary or uncertain title, than to what he enjoys by a durable or certain title.” The firmness of the man must be reinforced by the firmness of the office. The “unity” of the office, the fact that the president will share it with no one else, provides some of that institutional firmness. But even a unitary executive can find himself hamstrung if another branch of government has the power to dominate him, remove him at pleasure. In regimes whose executives serve at the whim of the legislature, as in many parliamentary systems, why would any person of character take the executive office seriously? Better to be a power broker in the parliament than the hapless holder of fly-by-night executive powers, powers that will not last if you exhibit the slightest hint of independence. And if you accept such an office, why risk anything to defend powers which are not truly yours to wield? Such an institutional arrangement undermines civic courage, inclining the one who suffers under it, “too little interested in it to hazard any material censure or perplexity from the independent exertion of his powers, or from encountering the ill-humors, however transient, which may happen to prevail, either in a considerable part of the society itself, or even in a predominant faction in the legislative body.”

This defect had already been on display under the Articles of Confederation, which did not separate executive power from the legislative branch. The Americans who wanted to retain the Articles regime against the proposed Constitution were “inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the executive to a prevailing current, either in the community or in the legislature, as its best recommendation.” They want representative government to mirror Athenian-style direct democracy as much as possible, to have it register the opinions and even the passions of the people and their elected legislators. Publius considers such notions as “very crude,” with regard both to the ends and especially the means of government.

The Declaration of Independence had set down the just purpose of American government—indeed of any government—as securing the safety and happiness of the people, a purpose justified by their natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Much of that is “self-evident,” the Declaration affirms. Publius agrees: “It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD. But as the American people themselves acknowledge, having learned it from experience under the Articles regime, they do not “always reason right about the means of promoting” the public good, “beset as they continually are by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and those who seek to posses rather than to deserve it.” Democracy has its ‘courtiers’ as much as monarchy does.

If self-government is therefore dangerous, “the republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom” the people “entrust the management of their affairs.” Characteristically, Publius attempts to increase the chance that the distinctively human characteristic, reason, will have the greatest possible authority in government while acknowledging the impassionate—a Christian would say ‘fallen’—character of human beings.

There will, then, be circumstances “in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have anointed to be the guardians of those interests to withstand the temporary delusion in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.” Thus to serve the people “at the peril of their displeasure” takes “courage and magnanimity.” Without well-designed institutions, such virtues will do no good, as statesmen in the late Roman republican learned; without such virtues, the institutions will stand unused, and may be undermined.

It is important to pause and appreciate the moral structure of Publius’ argument, here. He wants to see the rule of reason in the United States—to the extent possible, given human frailty. The Constitution generally, and a four-year, renewable presidential term in particular provides an institutional framework for such rule. But neither the rule of reason nor the defense of the Constitution can survive without two other virtues that array themselves against popular passion. civic courage is easy to understand and to appreciate, if not commonplace. We have all seen men and women, even children, who have refused to buckle under ‘peer pressure.’ Magnanimity is less well understood.

Magnanimity literally means greatness of soul: in Latin, magnus means great, large; anima means soul. The classic description of the great-souled individual comes from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics IV.3. The great-souled man, Aristotle writes, “deems himself worthy of great things and is worthy of them.” This means that he possesses all the cardinal virtues—courage, moderation, justice, and prudence—to a very high degree. Accordingly, he stands ready to withstand the demands of others, however intensely they may clamor, when he sees that those demands are cowardly, immoderate, unjust, or imprudent. He can take the heat, and he can do it without resentment.

A republican regime undergirded by a democratic civil society will test him. He can pass that test, but without a firm institutional foundation on which to stand he will be physically overwhelmed by the majority tide, helpless to resist “the humors of the legislature.” The Articles of Confederation government had folded executive and judicial power into the legislature, giving inadequate support for reason, courage, or magnanimity—the finest human characteristics. “To what purpose separate the executive or the judiciary from the legislature,” as the new Constitution had done, “if both the executive and the judiciary are so constituted as to be at the absolute devotion of the legislative” branch? The powers would then be separated in name only, with the legislature “exert[ing] an imperious control over the other departments,” unbalancing the apparently balanced powers of the federal government as framed by the Constitution.

This is exactly what had been happening under the Articles. The same thing will happen again unless the president enjoys a stable tenure in office. In view of this, “it may be asked whether a duration of four years would answer to the end proposed,” whether such a duration of a presidential term will suffice to resist attempts b legislators to dominate the system. Publius does not pretend that he knows the answer since a four-year term was untried in previous American governments and the lifelong term of a European monarchy—in principle of not always in practice as stable a provision as can be had—was highly undesirable. It is nonetheless reasonable to think that a four-year residential term “would have a material influence upon the spirit and character of the government.”

Why? Because any person “endowed with a tolerable portion of fortitude” should see that there is “time enough” before the current term expires, and the prospect of re-election draws near, for the people and their legislative representatives to have calmed down to be ready to assess the president with equanimity. True enough, this would mean that he might not dare to resist popular disapproval so readily as hi term drew to an end, but for most of the time he would be able to hold steadily to his constitutional duties and best judgment. At the same time, unlike a monarch, a president won’t stay in office long enough “to justify any alarm for the public liberty.” Which is not to say that his enemies won’t try to raise such alarms.

Publius’ understanding of the presidency not only departs from the conception of executive power which prevailed under the Articles, it also contradicts the new conception of the presidency advanced by the Progressives, more than a century later. President Woodrow Wilson rejected the United States Constitution as an antiquated and constricting product of a bygone era, and equally rejected its moral foundation in the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. In place of natural right he substituted historical right, claiming that the course of events, guided by divine Providence, provided the true moral light for humanity. In view of this continuing historical progress, the Constitution must be reconceived as an ‘elastic’ or ‘living document to be reinterpreted by political leaders such as himself who placed themselves on the cutting edge of that progress. In place of magnanimity, Wilson substituted compassion not so much a virtue as a sentiment, one intended to carry the people along on a tide of emotion with slogans like ‘I feel your pain.’ The president then should serve not so much as the executor of Congressional legislation within a stable constitutional framework but as the principal leader of the nation the person who senses where public opinion should go next, appealing more to popular passion than to prudence in the hope of inducing the people to follow him to that ever-new, ever-higher destination.

As a result, the Progressives raised expectations to unfillable heights, grafting their own unusual brand of moving-target ‘constitutionalism’ onto the old Constitution, with predictably confusing and self-contradictory result that have persisted to this day.

Michael Schellenberger: San Fran-sicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2021.

 

The book’s title more than suggests that we’re in for a polemic, most likely from the ‘Right.’ Not so, however: Schellenberger, “a progressive and Democrat all my life,” wants to know why progressives’ policies have failed to ameliorate the conditions of drug addiction, mental illness, homelessness, and ineffective law enforcement that have made life not only in San Francisco but in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis increasingly miserable for all residents, and especially for the afflicted. He has concluded that “much of what I and other progressives had believed about cities, crime, and homelessness was all wrong,” and “we needed to get it right.” Although not free of polemic, his book is for the most part a courageous and clear-sighted attempt to correct errors of policy which have had destructive consequences for tens of thousands of Americans. Progressives are not the only ones who ruin cities, nor are they incapable of saving them. But when they have ruined them, in recent years, they have done it “in similar ways, and for similar reasons.”

San Francisco has a large number of homeless people who have no place to shelter themselves, no alternative but to live ‘on the streets.’ This misery intensified in the 1980s, when expensive cocaine was altered into ‘crack,’ much cheaper and thus “available to the poor and working class.” Progressives responded by demanding housing for the homeless, including the addicts, simultaneously asserting the right of homeless people to “camp in public places. “By the early 1990s, advocates for the homeless were hosting seminars where they taught people how to camp out in the city,” one of several efforts to relax enforcement of city ordinances. Progressives also called for, and received, substantial increases in spending to support the homeless, which in effect subsidized drug use. These policies caused lawlessness generally to spike, with violence among homeless persons themselves leading the cutting edge of ‘History.’ By the time progressive mayor Willie Brown retired, he could think of nothing more to do, conceding that homelessness may be an insoluble condition.

Progressives want the homeless to be moved off the streets and out of those shelters that still exist into housing. That cannot work because the cost of housing in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles is insupportably high; no government can afford to provide it, and even if they could, readily available housing would only exacerbate the dilemma by attracting more of the homeless to the city that provided it. Finally, although providing housing conditioned on abstinence from drugs does reduce homelessness, progressives have opposed that stipulation on civil-libertarian grounds.

One way to ‘house’ homeless persons who commit crimes is to jail them. Schellenberger observes that incarceration rates in the United States have quintupled since 1970. Many progressives claim that most prisoners have been convicted of nonviolent drug possession; the fact is that although 47% of inmates in federal prisons are indeed there for such crimes, less than 15% of inmates in state prisons are, and the state prison population substantially exceeds the population of federal prisons. Most prisoners in state prisoners are ‘in’ for violent offenses. “Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove most incarceration, nationwide and in California.”

Or is racism to blame? It is true that police arrest African Americans at a rate far exceeding their percentage of the overall population. But on this matter, progressives’ memories are short. The 1994 crime bill, signed by President Clinton and produced by the Congressional Black Caucus working with senators Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, which imposed tougher punishments for violent crime, was intended to counteract the unusually high murder rates in African American communities. As one scholar has asked, “How racist can a law be which the Congressional Black Caucus vigorously supported and even considered too weak?”

Progressives have claimed that the way to reduce the drug addiction which contributes to overcrowded jails is to legalize drugs. Schellenberger once shared that assumption: “Much of what I had believed about prohibition was wrong.” The original Prohibition movement, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages, did not (as progressives have long supposed) cause an increase in violent crime, as the decrease in “drunken murders” offset the increase in gangland murders. Deaths from cirrhosis of the liver declined sharply, and it is probable if unprovable that domestic violence also declined. The end of prohibition reversed all of these trends. Today, there are four times the number of abusers of legal alcohol than abusers of illegal drugs. Before the 1980s, most homeless persons were alcoholics, not drug addicts; the number of drug addicts increased because ‘hard’ drugs got cheaper. And as for law enforcement, “people are not dying from drug overdose…in San Francisco because they’re being arrested”; “they’re dying because they aren’t being arrested.” Decriminalization of illegal, addictive drugs has increased per capita deaths wherever it has been tried, from California to Portugal.

Progressives’ claims that drug addiction and homelessness can only end when “racism and poverty” are abolished is an example of false profundity. Such alleged ‘root causes’ don’t cause what progressives have said they cause. Straightforward mandatory treatment of drug addicts as persons, not merely of ‘drug addiction’ as a syndrome, is what works. And although the aspiration to eliminate racism and poverty evinces compassion, the progressives’ policy of drug decriminalization hardly qualifies as compassionate. As one former addict asked, “How compassionate is it to let somebody just shoot dope the rest of their life?” By contrast, European cities such as Amsterdam, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich have shut down “open-air drug markets,” combining law enforcement with social services. In the United States, however, progressives now dislike cops and prefer not to work with them. But cops provide the necessary preliminary step toward a hastened recovery: coercion. Without coercion, drug addicts need to ‘hit bottom’ before they consent to working toward recovery. That often includes vicious crimes along the way; and sadly, the ‘bottom’ the addict hits may be death.

What happened to mental health hospitals? Governor Ronald Reagan is often blamed by his political enemies, the progressives, for closing the hospitals. He did, but he was (perhaps foolishly) only following the policy of his predecessor, Pat Brown, and the legislative act he signed to continue that policy passed the state legislature by 77 votes to one; “it would have passed even had Reagan vetoed it.” Such progressives as President Kennedy and Diane Feinstein were advocates of deinstitutionalization before and (in Feinstein’s case) after Reagan’s governorship.

In addition to drug addicts, over 120,000 mentally ill Americans now live on the streets. About 35,000 are in state hospitals and 356,000 are incarcerated. It is out-of-control mental illness that often gets homeless people shot by cops. Although California spends liberally on mental health treatment, the number of homeless mentally ill citizens has “risen dramatically” thanks to a shortage of beds in mental hospitals. But spending more on such hospitals by itself won’t solve the problem, especially so long as progressive reformers persist in claiming that “mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder” result from “class, racial, and other forms of inequality and oppression” that can only be addressed by redistribution of wealth and resources. “Idealism and ideology” have “triumphed over pragmatism and reason,” especially since the likes of Michel Foucault have persuaded two generations of progressives that treatments that work constitute evil ‘microaggressions’ against the ill; indeed, in their more radical formulations, Foucault and his followers deny that mental illness is an illness at all, but only a vile ‘social construct.’ The ideological move from humanism—including the reform of mental hospitals—to ‘post-humanist’ ideology hasn’t done much for humans.

Foucault argued that there’s no such thing as individual responsibility, which is only “a myth used by powerful people to punish and discipline others for things they could not control.” There is biology and there is environment; there is no free will. Following this claim, many progressives now rule it “taboo to suggest people are on the street for any reason other than poverty.”

“The problem with this line of thinking is that people appear to behave far better when they take responsibility for their actions than when they don’t.” They do exercise free will in their own way, however, by playing the role of victims of societal forces beyond their control because doing so brings them such rewards as welfare payments and, on occasion, ‘free’ housing—a strategy known as “victim signaling.” “As a result, there are more people who identify as victims today, even as actual trauma and victimization are declining.” On the contrary, parents now are more inclined to coddle their children, treating them as if they are “natural, pure, and fragile, requiring as little discipline as possible,” rather in the manner of Rousseauians who have never bothered to read the Emile. Without much capacity to handle stress, such children are found more likely to use drugs to ‘cope.’ “Lack of discipline to delay gratification makes people fragile.” “Even if we were to accept that everyone on the street has been victimized”—and many have not—and “even if we were to agree that victimization has grown worse” in recent decades—it hasn’t—does “that mean we should give them the identify as victims, and make them above the law?”

In contrast, an older addiction program, Alcoholics Anonymous, works because it holds people responsible for their actions throughout its famous Twelve Steps. This is what’s now called “contingency management,” which means that your advancement toward greater and greater rewards is made contingent on your behavior—a form of treatment psychologists call “operant conditioning.” Those who were introduced to this concept through college experiments with rats in mazes hunting food pellets might be offended by the thought that humans respond to similar treatment, but they do. Anything from gift cards to shelter works, swapping “one set of rewards, such as meth and heroin, for another set of rewards.” In one major trial, participants receiving contingency management treatment were nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to abstain from drugs than the control group, far less likely to be hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, and more likely to remain abstinent. The treatment is also less costly. “External reinforcements build internal strength over time.”

Counseling also works. As far back as the 1920s, the Viennese psychiatrist Victor Frankl established youth counseling centers in an attempt to reduce the rate of suicide among adolescents. He “demanded that his depressed patients find a reason for living,” asking, provocatively, “Why do you not commit suicide?” Faced with this question, they identified their purpose in life, typically personal relationships or some form of activity or work that held them back from taking the final step. Once they had specified a reason to live, a sense of responsibility began to develop. “Where Freud wanted people to orient toward the past, toward their childhood traumas, Frankl wanted people to orient toward their future, toward their goals.” To put it another way, teleology proved more effective than genealogy, Aristotle wiser than Nietzsche. 

What about the much-discussed issue of racial bias when it comes not only to drug crimes but crimes generally? Conservatives often ascribe the higher rates of police killings of African Americans (42% of the killings, 10% of the population) to the higher rates of violent crime by African Americans—nearly three times that of whites. But it isn’t that simple. The real question is whether there is any difference between the rates of police killings in circumstances that justified the use of lethal force—when a suspect pulled a weapon, for example. Harvard University researcher Roland Fryer found no evidence of racial bias in the data concerning police stops; however, data concerning justified police use of lethal force are obviously harder to assess. What is demonstrable is that in 2019, the most recent year statistics were available, 30 times the number of African Americans were killed by civilians than by police. Since “young men, street gangs, and large numbers of handguns have existed in American society for hundreds of years, and over periods where homicides declined, such as in the early 1990s” until 2018, what exactly accounts for the recent sharp increase in violent crime—e.g., homicides up 17% between 2014 and 2015?

It can’t be poverty or racism. Both were worse in the 1950s and 1960s, when rates of violent crime were much lower. Crime rates declined even during the period of the economic downturn of 2007. “Homicide is irrational and emotional, not a natural and predetermined response to personal setbacks.” Violence does, however, increase when the public’s trust in the regime, patriotism, fellow feeling with other citizens decline. In California, and not only California, those things have been occurring simultaneously with a two-decade-long reduction of penalties for using and dealing hard drugs. Of more recent origin is the movement to get rid of policing altogether, spearheaded by anarchists who re-branded themselves as ‘anti-fascists.’ Today, “there are fewer policy officers per capita than at any time since 1992.”

Nor is a proven response to the crisis beyond the mind of man. If you break up the open-air drug markets and impose “guaranteed, immediate, and short jail time for parole violations like failing a drug test,” crime rates go down. San Francisco ignored this approach, which has worked in Hawaii and New York City.

Of major importance in stiffening resistance to such commonsense measure has been one of the core sentiments animated most progressives: compassion. To view homeless, drug-addicted, and/or violent citizens as victims rather than as human beings capable of making rational choices when incentives and disincentives are rightly structured isn’t compassionate so much as patronizing. And as to liberty, a principle progressives often define doing whatever you want with ‘your own body,’ this misconceives liberty, ignoring its rootedness in self-government humanly understood—the government of the human ‘self’ or soul by reason, not by appetite or sentiment. 

Even Marx and Engels, among their demands for proletarian self-government and indeed dictatorial rule over the bourgeoisie, never supposed that the lumpenproletariat, the truly down-and-out, could possibly serve as a sound center for political life. Our neo-Marxists are operating on exactly that supposition. But since the lumpenproletariat manifestly cannot rule anyone until they have achieved personal self-rule, “the dark side of victimology is how it moralizes power,” first by pretending that “victims are inherently good because they have been victimized,” and then by making a claim to rule over those victims but especially over those designated as their victimizers. “This is not a phenomenon of ignorant people but rather of highly educated ones,” or perhaps of the ignoramuses amongst the highly educated, who don’t use their heads except when it comes to demanding ‘power’ for themselves. Their compassion “acts as cover for darker motivations,” as seen in such infamous tyrants as Stalin and Mao. The overwhelming majority of Americans who self-identify as progressives hardly approach to extremity, and one hopes they never will, but we do “need to understand how and why compassion, altruism, and love have created a blind spot, and not just in relationship to foreign despots but also to homegrown ones,” such as the mass-murdering ‘Reverend’ Jim Jones, who initially found allies in two San Francisco mayors and the Marxist ideologue Angela Davis. 

Such cults thrive when religion declines, as “the decline of traditional religion has allowed for the rise of untraditional ones.” Schellenberger calls “victimology” a “secular religion”; “it meets the contemporary psychological, social, and spiritual needs of its believers,” appearing “obvious, not ideological, to them.” To weaken this dogmatic attachment, he recommends using “specific words that refer people to the real world,” avoiding such abstractions as “homelessness” by distinguishing the reasons people become homeless, which include not only drug addiction and mental illness but family breakup and unemployment. Additionally, “we must train ourselves to be alert for misinformation ad manipulation of our emotions, including compassion, anger, and shame”; “gaining mastery of the facts is essential to gaining mastery over our thinking and feelings.”

With this advice (which might well be commended when considering any choice in politics, or in private life), Schellenberger recounts the six reasons why progressives ruin cities he has discussed so far. Progressives divert funding from homeless shelters to permanent housing; they endorse the right of ‘victims’ to break laws against occupying public spaces; they label those who disagree with their policies as uncompassionate, racist, and so on; they reduce penalties for petty theft, drug using and dealing; they “prefer homelessness and incarceration to involuntary hospitalization for the mentally ill and addicted”; they “misattribute the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homeless crisis to poverty and politicians dating back to the 1980s.”

Given their poor record, how have progressives managed to stay in charge of cities? Conservatives “ceded the issue of homelessness to progressives,” a move easily made because most Republicans don’t live in areas where homeless persons live. In California, the ranks of left-leaning voters swelled thanks both to the rise of the new professional class of ‘techies,’ who “emerged from the Sixties counterculture” and to the influx of Latin American immigrants. In contrast with the “civic spirit” of the earlier generations of progressives, the Sixties-generation progressives “sought to replace the principle of gratitude”—including patriotism and an appreciation for or at least toleration of opposing viewpoints—with “an attitude of entitlement” which allows for no give-and-take in political disputes. One might observe that the paradigm of political action shifted from that of Aristotle’s illustration of the relation of husband and wife, of reciprocity, of ruling and being ruled in turn, to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, whereby the slave simply asserts his rights and fights to the death for them. 

Ruling and being ruled is what Aristotle calls politics. It is essential to a genuinely political understanding of liberty. The liberty of civil libertarians—and progressives uphold social laissez-faire even as they condemn the economic kind—permits no coercion of persons living under “the inhumane conditions of street addiction.” Beyond even the new progressives, “anarchists can cheerlead disruptive and even violent actions and then evade responsibility when things go wrong.” After all, being anarchists, they hold no public offices.

“And so it is to reconstructing a new moral foundation, one capable of uniting moderate conservatives and progressives, that we can now turn.” (Easier said than done, one is inclined to reply.) “We need a new, pro-human, pro-civilization, and pro-cities morality” to replace the now-decrepit ‘New Morality’ of the Sixties. “Freedom is essential but without order it can’t exist in cities,” increasingly unsafe, menacing, uncivic. This newer morality in fact resembles the older morality of (for example) James Madison, who understood genuine liberty as a condition of moral responsibility (a word he, as ‘Publius’ in several of the most important Federalist papers, popularized in American English).

Schellenberger proposes a sort of civic religion, although he doesn’t call it that. “Cities are sacred”—because the city “is, or can be, the place of the highest human possibility, flourishing, and freedom”—and “thus there must be rules for behavior in them.” “People must not be exempted” from the rules “because we feel sorry for them and label them Victims.” So, enforce existing laws, toughen those that have been relaxed by jailing violent offenders and stigmatizing hard drug use by breaking up the open-air markets, thereby dispersing the drug trade and making drug purchases a lot more inconvenient.

Since the true addicts will ferret out the drugs they crave, no matter how inconvenient that may be, Schellenberger (showing his old-progressive colors) advocates the formation of “a new and powerful state agency in California,” Cal-Psych, which would “efficiently and humanely treat the seriously mentally ill and addicts, while providing housing to the homeless on a contingency based system,” as he had previously discussed. He pins his hopes on the suggestion that “California is overdue for a turn toward pragmatism and moderation when it comes to these issues.” The head of the agency would report directly to the governor.

New York City’s experience with policing in the past half-century leaves little room for optimism on this. There, the police commissioner reports to the mayor. The mayor appoints the Police Commissioner. Ergo, public safety in the city has depended upon who the mayor has been. John Lindsay was weak, as was his less ideological but no less unfirm successor, Abraham Beame. Edward I. Koch turned things around, only to be followed by the dapper and ineffectual David Dinkins. Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg tightened things up, but Bill di Blasio reversed their course, with predictable results. The current mayor, Eric Adams, made tough-on-crime noises during his campaign but has yet to deliver in office. And so it has gone. That is, New Yorkers themselves incline to return to the old bad ways as soon as things begin to get better. Are Californians any less foolish?