Nobody on your political bench can do much better than what you’re seeing now. Democracy has produced the government you actually wanted for so long that the bill is coming due. I wrote about the “Four Horsemen of Rhode Island’s Apocalypse” 15 years ago, and the situation’s only gotten worse as people not in the following four groups have left to find hope and opportunity outside of their reach:
1. Powerful insiders. These are the folks who benefit most directly from Rhode Island’s system and represent what might be termed the power base: legislators, judges (and magistrates), union executives, activist leaders (such as the crew at the Poverty Institute who get their say in just about every Journal article), and other heads of “important” institutions in the state.
2. Budget-bought political commodities. 630AM talkers Dan Yorke and Matt Allen often point to what they term the “rub ’n’ tug” system, whereby the legislature hands out non-itemized grants to community groups as offerings of endearment, but from a certain perspective, rubbing ’n’ tugging is the core function of the state government. Unions and the social-service industry can turn out people to vote and to demonstrate (often while everybody else is at work) in an industrial rub ’n’ tug with the powerful insiders.
3. The unaffected rich. Think Sheldon Whitehouse. Small in numbers, perhaps, but huge in wealth, a significant number of people in Rhode Island (which my father, in New Jersey, calls “a playground for the rich”) are free to experiment and pay ideological homage to their vanity, because no conceivable policy could have so detrimental an effect as to do more than create the possibility that some future generation will have to sell the Newport summer manse.
4. Affianced ideologues. With some substitutions of kind, but not of essence, the above groups could stoke corruption across the political spectrum. However, in Rhode Island those who give the state its blue hue are wedded to the Democrats, as are the many, generally apathetic, citizens who have somehow imbibed the notion that a vote for the Democrats is, simply by their role in the natural order of the universe, a vote for the good guys.
For decades voters in those four groups have wanted the sort of government we have, so nobody within striking range of important elective office has any idea how to govern in ways that don’t satisfy them. And satisfying them has nothing to do with ensuring sudden bridge failures don’t disrupt the lives of everybody in the region or that major employers don’t pack up and leave.
Think about it. The special interests who run the state benefit from the deterioration of our infrastructure, economy, and society. The failure of a crucial piece of infrastructure means more excuses for federal money and more people willing to pay taxes and fees just to fix the problem. The loss of major private-sector employers means, first, more people in need of government services, and second, fewer powerful institutions that might have conflicting interests to those of the insiders. Failing schools mean the possibility of more pressure for funding and government programs, not to mention a more-pliable public (while the insiders can send their children, if they have any, to private schools).
All of these incentives mean politicians currently on the radar for higher office are necessarily bought and sold, and the reality of mail ballots means nobody will be able to swoop in from off the radar. Those who’ve been hitching a ride on the four ponies will have to jump off and do something unpredictable, like think for themselves and expand their perspectives beyond narrow, immediate interests.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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We humans have a natural impulse to fight fire with fire. When it comes to politics, we have a tendency to think the move that has worked against us will work in reciprocation, but it isn’t always so. Often, in the long run, a maneuver or tactic that advances the opposition’s cause does so whoever wields it, because it is fundamentally the opposition’s tool. Evil always serves the cause of evil, even (or especially) when the good think they can benefit from it. Water is the antidote to fire, not more fire.
It’ll take me a moment to explain why, but this is where my mind goes when I see commentary from progressives like this:
Putting aside interpersonal histories and visceral reactions to emotional issues, a curious thing is going on here that merits some thought.
Progressives want to celebrate transgenders. Conservative legislator Jon Brien is here highlighting an anti-Christian school massacre executed by a mentally ill girl who thought she was trans. In response, progressive activist Alex Kithes insists that Brien is the danger, and we have no reason to doubt that this is Kithes’s sincere reaction. Similarly, progressives want to celebrate Palestinians (and Muslims, generally). When people have highlighted the anti-Semitic massacre in Israel on October 7, Democrat politicians — and especially progressives — have proclaimed the danger of backlash against Muslims.
In both cases, an interesting question arises: Is this a deliberate strategy of narrative distortion, or is it a natural reaction based on core political sympathies? Or is it both, maybe for different people? In the case of narrative distortion, one cannot respond in kind with contrary distortions because it pushes the truth even farther out of sight. And in the case of political sympathy, one cannot respond with hostility, because it reinforces the core political allegiance.
Broadly speaking, for harmony in the human community, the antidote must be truth offered with expanded sympathy. We must be less concerned about the political significance of narrow groups because when we find the higher-level group of which we’re all a part, we respond to each other as individuals. And when that is our perspective, we can identify root causes. We don’t stop our analysis by concluding a person did something because he is part of Group Y, and that’s what Group Yers do. Rather, we ask what it is about Group Y that leads to such actions, and we realize that we might do it, too — maybe even that there’s something justified about it, whether or not we think it is being done well.
Here we see the essential problem of Leftist thought, which insists that everything must be political and that people must be divided into groups for the sake of a comprehensible narrative. We also should see that the solution to the Leftist problem is not to ensure that our group is the stronger one in an exchange of punches, because that cedes ground that we very much need to hold for the long run.
It’s like a boa constrictor. Pushing in one direction might gain the victim a small bit of motion in a particular direction, but the snake makes gains everywhere that the victim relaxed for the sake of the push.
For a full illustration of the point consider Rhode Island progressives’ promotion of the latest white supremacy sticker sighting, this time in Cranston:
- Left-wing state senate candidate Arthur Flanders posts pictures of two white-supremacy stickers that he claims to have come across on a Cranston bike path (before and after he attempted to destroy them).
- Turning Point RI jumped in to suggest (via quotation) that the sentiment of one of the stickers was unobjectionable: “It’s OK to be white.”
- Progressive podcaster Bill Bartholomew took the opportunity to prove his moral superiority by “flagging” the post while insisting that he has “basically ignored the juvenile RI Turning Point crew” (leaving unstated that he basically ignores all conservatives, whatever their maturity).
- Progressive UConn journalism professor Mike Stanton expressed his ideological allegiance with Bartholomew and followed up with this explainer from the Anti-Defamation League:
The phrase “It’s Okay To Be White” is a slogan popularized in late 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the controversial discussion forum 4chan. The original idea behind the campaign was to choose an ostensibly innocuous and inoffensive slogan, put that slogan on fliers bereft of any other words or imagery, then place the fliers in public locations. Originators assumed that “liberals” would react negatively to such fliers and condemn them or take them down, thus “proving” that liberals did not even think it was “okay” to be white.
That’s quite an insight, and it has the air of a confession. Just so are all the days of remembrances, the series of This-That-Or-The-Other-Group Months, and the assorted identity weeks that seem to mark a perpetual time of commemoration of progressives’ favored groups. Promotion of this calendar is an obvious provocation seeking any objection activists can flag as evidence of “white supremacy” and the full platoon of haters. We’re all supposed to be celebrating Group Y this day/week/month; if you refuse to do so, it must be because you’re a bigot. In the case with which I began this post, Kithes simply thought Brien took the bait (although I’d suggest Brien outsmarted him).
The only way to win this game is not to play. As the saying goes, you shouldn’t wrestle with a pig, because you’ll only get covered in mud, and the pig likes it. Such are progressives. They obviously want hatred, fighting, division, untruth. They thrive in that environment. Don’t let them have it.
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3 and Photoshop AI.
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Progressive state representative Enrique Sanchez is entirely wrong, here:
Housing is a store of value. People will put up their own money for their own homes and for investment properties. If they’re not doing so — especially as the demonstrable value climbs and climbs — then government is doing something wrong to prevent it. This is absolutely clear and rudimentary analysis.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Ideological rot in the Ivies
- When the governor’s got nothing but some basic maintenance to talk about
- Procaccini and Neronha bring up an important question… badly
- What’s the real point of police in schools?
Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 3.
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Maybe I’m getting old and crotchety, but these performances just seem so silly, lately:
They’re basically elitists passing through on their way to lives of privilege and entitlement, yet we act simultaneously as if they’ve got some long-standing right to dictate the actions of the institutions and that those institutions’ highest purpose is to give them a forum for performance art against privilege.
Anyway, congrats all around for convincing many of us that recent Ivy grads are to be avoided in the professional realm.
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Silly and local as it is, this is one of those stories that makes me despair for the future:
A few years ago, some folks petitioned for Tiverton to give some land next to the library to a group that wanted to put together a dog park. People using it are supposed to park across a lightly traveled road, but they’ve usually parked in the library parking lot. One day, they were having an event of some kind, and I actually had to drive into the library parking lot the wrong way because they were blocking access.
To address these problems, the library put up a fence that makes the dog park parking as convenient as the library lot to access the dog park. This is the controversy:
The fence, which has been on the library’s list of “to do” projects for more than a year, is intended to clearly show the dog park’s boundaries and its entrance point, and to encourage visitors to use parking spaces on the nearby town recreation property on Roosevelt Avenue, rather than library property, when using the park.
But not all appreciate it, and in online discussions have called it “spite fence,” a “vindictive” act, and more dramatically, “the Mason/Dixon line of Tiverton public property.”
Government is meant to help us find ways to live together, but some people will never be happy. Every accommodation they must make to others is an afront, and every assertion of contrary interests is an act of war. Frankly, they’re making a case for saying “no” much sooner. No donation of land for the dog park, no trouble for the library. Life is simple.
Perhaps a broader point of political philosophy can be derived from this example. If the library and the dog park were private parties, the neighbors could turn to the local government to arbitrate their interests according to objective rules. While the dog park faction might not like a fence in a certain place, if it is within the property and rights of the library faction to put one up, the government will recognize that fact, and everybody can move on.
In contrast, as more of our activities are processed through government — as with a government-run library or a donation of public land to a dog park — making your neighbor do what you want (or not do what you don’t want) becomes a political possibility. At the end of that road is dictatorship and social division.
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This will look familiar to anybody with even a passing familiarity with the history of the Twentieth Century:
Leftists are constantly provoking and agitating the public in their lust for power, and eventually people rebel, sometimes while being driven into the arms of the Far Right in an enemy-of-my-enemy way. Socialism is a divisive, Satanic force.
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That’s a deliberately provocative statement, but it points to a common error in our thinking. When aspects of our culture strike us as bad, or at least wrong, we tend to think of them as lingering shadows from our benighted past. We see more clearly these days, right?
But some of those things — maybe many or most — could have developed for a reason and evolved in subtle ways to provide multiple benefits that we cannot see because we take them for granted. Subjecting kids to a Lord of the Flies environment in which they resolve their own problems, for example, does teach them to… resolve problems. Naturally, they frequently do so in ways we don’t like, such as bullying, but we should arguably trust an evolved culture to have balanced the pros and cons better than we can reactively accomplish from within it.
I’ve thought about this as stories emerge of girls physically hurt during sporting competitions to which males have only recently been permitted. In the past, perhaps boys choosing to play those games would have been aware of the risk that harming girls would bring the unwelcome attention of boyfriends. Maybe they would have thought twice about playing, or maybe they’d have been more careful while doing so.
To be sure, the progressive always wishes to march on, so he or she will now object that this is tantamount to inviting bullying of transgenders. In addition to defining every conflict they don’t like as “bullying,” this only brings us to the next level of thinking we know all the consequences of the modern social innovations they support.
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We’re descending to a place, in the United States and Rhode Island, in which controversy is not permitted over certain subjects, as Erika Sanzi points out:
Of course, several trends probably all come together. Media outlets don’t have the business model to fund all that they used to, and most journalists don’t have the legal expertise to understand these issues, so they’re reluctant to use their limited time to step into a contentious issue, especially when their reportage could raise questions about a cause they support.
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