Root causes
Bookworm on Apr 17 2008 at 6:45 am | Filed under: Barack Obama
I wrote the following for American Thinker, and republish it here:
Root Causes
One of the hallmarks of the Left is its fervent belief that, if poor people behave badly, the fault is not theirs, but instead it lies with “root causes.” For example, a word search in the New York Times for “root causes and crime” returns over 100 articles from that newspaper alone.
A significant number of these Times articles, which were especially prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s, have a politician arguing that, in dealing with crime, it’s pointless to punish the criminals themselves. Instead, it’s the government’s job to destroy crime at its root, a concept that invariably translates into pouring more money into social welfare programs. I’ve gathered a small collection of these articles. In each of them, I’ve emphasized a few key words, the significance of which I’ll explain below.
In 1987, New York Police Chief Benjamin War shocked the liberal establishment by stating one of New York’s dirty little secrets: Young black men were disproportionately responsible for the City’s crime. The liberals were quick to respond. Although they couldn’t deny the statistics, they placed the blame squarely where it belonged - on white society and ineffectual (Reagan-era) government:
Poor people historically have been more prone to commit street crime, and blacks are disproportionately poor (though most, of course, are law-abiding). Blacks are uniquely burdened with a legacy of slavery and violence. I. Blame is abundant. So are drugs. Opportunity. is not
[snip]
Unless root causes of crime are addressed, Mr. [Charles] Rangel said, “there will never be enough prosecutors, judges and courts or jails to sweep our secrets under the rug.” (Emphasis mine.)
Three years later, liberals were still singing the same root crime song. Here’s the lead from a 1990 article about Mayor Dinkins:
Mayor David N. Dinkins took his anticrime campaign on the road today as he lobbied here for stricter national gun-control laws and an all-out effort against “the root causes of crime,” including poverty, homelessness, drug addiction and growing despair. (Emphasis mine.)
Fast forward another four years, to the Gubernatorial election 1994, and you’ll see that Mario Cuomo, who was seeking reelection, still knew the words to that root crime tune:
For his part, Mr. Cuomo, especially in recent months, has spoken more about crime’s root causes, of draining what he has begun to call the “poisoned lake” of poverty, racism and lack of opportunity that many people believe is at the heart of violence. At the state trooper graduation in Albany, for example, he complained that “so far we have not discovered the cure for the greed, the viciousness, the despair that drives this traffic in drugs.” (Emphasis mine.)
I could come up with more examples, but I suspect you get the point: In Liberal land, as sure as night follows day, poverty, a lack of opportunity and despair add up to the dangerous pathology of crime.
Barack Obama, however, has taken the root crime concept to a whole new level, by adding pathologies that I suspect, to him, are far more dangerous than garden-variety felonies. Here is the infamous bitterness speech that Obama made before the very rich San Francisco liberals gathered to hear him at the Getty mansion::
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them - like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they’ve gone through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Obama’s much more verbose than the others I’ve quoted, but it seems to me he’s seeing precisely the same pattern that Dinkins, Cuomo and Rangel identified: Poverty creates bitterness, and bitterness creates dangerous pathologies.
There is a difference in the speeches, of course. As you see from the quotations, liberals of twenty years back were primitive enough to define as pathologies actual criminal activity (drug use, theft, assault, rape). Obama’s argument makes a dramatic break with that traditional by targeting as pathological, not crime, but standard American beliefs.
To that end, he explicitly says that the garden-variety root causes that have been part of political discourse for twenty years (poverty and despair), when visited upon primitive white Pennsylvanians, inevitably lead to the horrors of faith in God; a belief in the Second Amendment; and a pervasive sense that it is fundamentally unfair for illegal aliens to come waltzing into America so that they can hold American jobs, send their kids to American funded schools, get American healthcare, and dine (not well, admittedly) off of American food stamps.
Already back in the 1980s and 1990s, I was unimpressed by the way in which the “root cause” doctrine was being used to relieve people of any responsibility for their actions. I’m even less impressed with the bizarre new use to which Obama has put it. Nevertheless, despite the theory’s silliness, his making the argument does serve a purpose: While it tells us nothing about Pennsylvanians, it does give us another look into the mind of a man who has a profound disdain for the values that Americans have held dear for centuries.
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16 Responses to “Root causes”
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If the Liberal/Left worldview on “root causes” had any validity, the Great Depression should have been marked by a huge crime way…except that it didn’t happen. How does the song go…”don’t know much about history..”?
It is poor people who are driven to crime by grinding poverty, injustice, drug addiction and despair. The root causes of crime having social origins can thus be ameliorated. Repair society and you repair the criminal. However, white collar criminals on the other hand are motivated purely by greed and malice and thus cannot be rehabilitated but only punished. Another variation of “tell me who you are and I will tell you what justice you get.”
Exactly, Danny; you pre-empted me. My comment is: if that were the case, how we are here? Clearly none of our parents could have survived the ongoing riot that the Depression must have been!
Zhombre, I don’t know what shape your forebears were in when they got to this country, but most of ours had pretty much zip when they straggled off the boat. Pretty much walking definitions of “poverty.”
But I would post that most of us are not the grand-children or great grand-children of criminals.
The underlying philosophy here can also be applied to the detailed argument Deana is having with Helen over at the Obama Speech thread.
For example, how would people explain that blacks from Afrika are not as spoiled and full of grievances like their spoiled American counter-parts here? Africans have their own problems, obviously, one of them being Islam and another one being tribalism. Meaning, they tend to learn towards nepotism and ruthless actions in the absence of law or authority or strongmen. Look at all those civil wars and genocide attempts. Those happen because they don’t have a strong top dog like the US sitting over them being able to judge who is right and who is wrong and enforcing it, like we do in Europe, in order to prevent wars and genocides.
I think helen’s explanation is that the institutional racism from whites here in America have made blacks dependent or inferior compared to the cool and exotic, meaning superior, Afrikaans.
I postulate that many Democrats prefer Afrikaan culture to American culture, seeing Afrikaan culture as superior, probably because, not inspite of, the Islam and tribalism component to Africa.
My greatgrandparents arrived here about 1900, quite impoverished. Perhaps you missed my point. I wasn’t advocating a two-tier system of justice. Just stating what seems to me to be the (il)logic of the left.
I thought your first point was right on the money, Z: poor folk commit crime because of circumstances, so they must be pitied; richer folk commit crime because they’re evil, so they must be punished. It’s actually a pretty easy way to analyze the world, isn’t it?
Rather, it is just that rich people can exercise free will, and evil only comes from choosing it. Poor people don’t have a choice, Book, so they cannot be blamed anymore than you would blame a scissor for cutting you. And just like a pair of scissors, the Left sees the poor as being the same, a piece of property that must be taken care of and maintained, Book.
That’s why “rich folk” crime is so important to them. If you stop the tool users from doing crime, you also stop the harm that the tools are doing since nobody is around to use those tools.
It’s a harsh way of looking at things, but that’s how it breaks down philosophically if you follow the logic of the Left to its ultimate conclusion. Not only does this explain the Left’s views against Enron, it also explains their support of the UN and their support of corrupt politicians.
Barack Obama seeks root causes within the evil of capitalism and the American system for everything that is wrong among the poor and suffering… and Barack Obama is the most liberal member of the US Senate. Seems like there’s a strong correlation here.
Hmm, except, YM, I believe that there is certain significant subset of (Liberal, Left, Democrat) people who perceive (key word, that) themselves to be unjustly poor and unappreciated for their natural gifts to humanity (politicians, many of them) and therefore when they accumulate mountains of wealth through graft, pay-offs, baksheesh, post-Presidential speaking fees, phony publishing deals, ghost payroll positions, etc… and stash their loot into not-for-profits and overseas bank accounts, it’s not unethical or illegal, it’s simply leveling the playing field with those “others” (Republicans, conservatives, business people, capitalists) who got theirs unfairly and undeservedly. What do you think?
Related to the “root causes” of crime is the “Black rage” defense. It basically argues, “he did cause he’s black.” Yet racial profiling — “he’s a suspect because he’s black” is bigoted and illegal. Fo figure.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980835,00.html
What do you think?
Certainly one of the reasons why the Left is so messed up is because of the individual virtues, or rather lack of virtues, in Leftist members. Any organization can be made to be evil if it keeps recruiting evil members and any organization can become good if all its members are good. Regardless of what the organization originally “intended” to do.
The feudal model is very applicable to the question you posed, Danny. In feudalism, aristocrats not only fought the peasants for control of the peasants, their children, and their land, aristocrats also fought each other using mercenaries and peasant conscripts.
So certainly Leftist members may only see their corruption as being a normal and justified “counter” against those other aristocrats, like Bush, hogging all the loot for Haliburton and what not. And the rhetoric they used about “fairness” and “justice” is only intended to brainwash the peasants into fighting and dying for the anti-Bush aristocrats.
The key is, how does the Left do such things, Danny, and not die of guilt and shame? Why, by adopting the justifications, rationalizations, and delusions in my comment 8!!
Why, the Left isn’t crushing the poor and peasants underfoot, Danny, they are helping them against Haliburton and evil Bush capitalists! Making money is just part of what needs to be done to fight evil, Danny. After all, when could a war ever be done without money to buy weapons? Can a war be won if we refuse to kill terrorists, just as terrorists are killing us? No.
PS.
My last paragraph is simply a demonstration that normal and reasonable rationalizations about war and survival have been twisted and perverted to Leftist creed. It is so successful for them precisely because it is normally so reasonable. What could be more reasonable than saying we must kill them because they are using violence and death against us?
I want you to go here and read the series of articles by David Brin, Danny.
http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/deconstructing-star-wars/
By now it’s grown clear that George Lucas has an agenda, one that he takes very seriously. After four “Star Wars” films, alarm bells should have gone off, even among those who don’t look for morals in movies. When the chief feature distinguishing “good” from “evil” is how pretty the characters are, it’s a clue that maybe the whole saga deserves a second look.
Just what bill of goods are we being sold, between the frames?
* Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn’t be consulted. They may only choose which elite to follow.
* “Good” elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability.
* Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you are important enough.
* True leaders are born. It’s genetic. The right to rule is inherited.
* Justified human emotions can turn a good person evil.
The issue is a mite complex, what with George’s real life comments about Bush and how Emperor Palpatine in George’s stories just so happens to behave exactly like how Lucas accuses Bush of having behaved.
But I think you will enjoy Brin’s articles. Also, don’t forget to pick up his Uplift series of novels, since they teach a nice morality lesson on the duties of a higher evolved civilization towards a more primitive species. Something we all have to face with the issue of Iraq and societal re-engineering.
>>they teach a nice morality lesson on the duties of a higher evolved civilization towards a more primitive species.>>
But but but…what about the Prime Directive????
That’s for fake liberals, not classical liberals.
Watcher’s review 04/25/08…
As readers of Soccer Dad are aware, I’m a member of the Watcher’s Council a group of twelve bloggers who submit and vote on posts every week supervised by the Watcher of Weasels. That is every week except this week. Unfortunately, this week due to a …