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.

It turns out that Barack Obama might have been on to something with his bitterness speech. In case you’ve forgotten, he said:

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.

Where Obama got it wrong was that he focused on the wrong bitter people.  Down in Los Angeles, in the gun-ridden, crime-ridden, gang-ridden communities that taught that sprawling City, people are indeed getting increasingly bitter, although it’s a liberal government’s refusal to enforce the law that’s raising their ire:

When Jamiel Shaw Sr. stood up last week to call for a change in Special Order 40, it touched an already raw nerve in the black community. Shaw’s son, 17-year-old star football player Jamiel Shaw II, was gunned down within shouting distance of his house. The suspect, 19-year-old Pedro Espinoza, is an alleged gang member and an illegal immigrant. Special Order 40 has prevented law enforcement from probing the immigration status of some suspects and deporting criminals with dispatch. Even if Special Order 40 were modified, there’s no guarantee that Jamiel would still be alive, but to a community convinced that Latino-on-black racial violence is on the upswing, it’s still a matter of simple justice.

And that’s true despite the statistics Police Chief William Bratton (seconded by the Los Angeles Times) piled on the public table in recent weeks, numbers that back up the claim that, with the exception of young Shaw and a handful of other cases, the majority of the killings of blacks are by other blacks, not Latinos. That won’t ease black fears that some Latino gangs are bent on wiping them out.

The author of the above op-ed goes on to say that African-Americans are right to feel that this is all a racist thing, with the Hispanics trying to kill them because they’re black and the City government ignoring them because they’re black.  As to the first point, when one considers that gang warfare has been a fixture of American urban life practically since there were American urbs, I doubt that’s the case.  That is, the Hispanic gang members are gunning blacks down, not because they’re black, but simply because they’re the other gang, and this is a pure turf battle.

I also doubt that there is racism in the City’s response.  Instead, I suspect the City’s unwillingness to acknowledge black concerns this has more to do with a City wedded to a stupid liberal policy that makes it a haven for illegal immigrants (because liberals know that “no person is illegal.”)  To me, this snotty liberal attitude is evidenced by the fact that Bratton assured blacks that the policy is not a problem, since blacks are killing each other faster than Hispanics can.  In other words, what you’re seeing here isn’t racism run amok; it’s liberal politics and identity politics run amok.

In any event, I think the African-Americans in LA have the perfect right to be bitter that the City of Los Angeles does nothing about an influx of criminals into their communities, criminals who should be deported instantly before they get guns in their hands and victims in their sights.