Have you noticed something about our Democratic friends? They seem to be real relaxed about gangs. And that is odd because it is Democratic voters, as in inner cities, that suffer most from gangs. What is going on here?
Let us start with a text from St. Augustine:
Let us not forget my definition of government:
So the point about governments and gangs in that they are in the same business. Now, you may observe that governments very often sign treaties of alliance with other governments. Or they might fight wars with other governments, as the mood takes them.
So it would not be surprising to learn that governments can form alliances with gangs, particularly if we accept my definition of a gang as a government merely lacking "the addition of impunity and the assumption of benevolence." In fact, you might easily come to the conclusion that it is convenient for a government to have a gang hanging around, to do the dirty work with what we now call "deniability" for the kindly king or president. Good cop, bad cop, and all that.
Now let us pass in review the gangs or paramilitary forces with which our Democratic friends have treated over the years. I suppose we should start with Boss Tweed, a Democratic politician of Scots-Irish descent who entered public life in 1848 when he organized Engine Company No.6 in Manhattan. All very harmless, no doubt, just handing out a few bennies to the helpless Irish tumbling off the coffin ships onto the Manhattan docks.
But let it be said that our Democratic friends had a relaxed attitude towards political looting and plundering, right at the start of the modern age.
Then comes the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the South the resistance to the Republican Reconstruction was a Democratic Party thing, and the armed wing of the Democrats -- what in Latin America our lefty friends call "death squads" and on the campus of University of Missouri Professor Melissa Click called "muscle" -- was the Ku Klux Klan. Hey! Call them "peaceful protesters!" They didn't really mean any harm, not unless they had to frighten someone. But the point is that when you are conducting a guerrilla war or an insurrection or a counter-revolution or whatever, you need an armed wing that is not too closely identified with the local notables. But it sure doesn't hurt to have those fearsome gang-landers in the background.
And what about labor unions? Back in the day, labor unions were illegal because they were regarded in common law as "conspiracies in restraint of trade." Which is, of course, what they are. We now permit labor unions because the workers wanted them and the workers have the vote. The power of a labor union is its ability to intimidate the workers at a place of work, to intimidate them not to be "scabs" or strikebreakers. Democrats have had a close relationship with labor unions since the late 19th century, and derive much of their money and organizational muscle from the unions. But really, a labor union is a gang of looters and plunderers. And the interesting thing about a labor union is that it usually gets to be the most motivated in the aftermath of a recession when employers are trying to cut wages in order to adapt to the new market conditions just to stay in business, and the workers are desperate to hang onto their jobs. I would say that this sort of thing is counter-productive, but what do I know.
All through the modern era Democrats have seemed to have a curious relationship with urban criminal gangs. We had Irish gangs, then Jewish gangs, then the Italian mafia. And who can forget the Prohibition era gangs in the 1920s and 1930s? All these gangs seemed to coexist rather comfortably with the Democrats running the big cities? How could this be? I couldn't possibly say.
Now here is an interesting thing: in the Kennedy administration, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy started a war on Organized Crime. How about that? Or was this just the newly respectable Irish beating up on the rather less respectable Eye-talians?
But in the post civil-rights era Democrats seemed to lose interest in fighting gangs. For instance, every big city with a large African American population seems to have a gang problem. And yet the Democratic politicians don't seem to want to "do something" about the problem. Why is this? And now we have Latin gangs and the fearsome MS-13 which, I understand, is a Salvadorean gang.
Today, I understand, the problem of the US border is intimately involved with the problem of gangs. Gangs bring drugs and people over the border; they are intimately intertwined because the people are used to carry drugs. Not only that, but it seems that the drug cartels amount to a de facto government in huge parts of Mexico outside Mexico City. You may have noticed that our Democratic friends want to disband ICE, and open the border. Hello?
Let us assume that the gangs and cartels are predominantly lower-class outfits, doing the dirty work of trafficking in drugs and people that more perfumed people are reluctant to do. But then we come to "activism" and "peaceful protest" which is an activity of the best and brightest. Here there is a whole universe of political activity from environmental groups to race-based activist organizations like Black Lives Matter and La Raza.
What then do you call the Occupy Movement, the Black-bloc, and AntiFa? These groups are obviously condoned by Democrats as "peaceful protesters" and activists whose hearts are in the right place. Unlike the truly peaceful protesters of the Tea Party that were deliberately harassed by the Obama administration acting through the IRS. Imagine the IRS harassing AntiFa!
So how do you make sense of this brief history of Democrats and gangs? I think the simple thing to understand is that Democrats and the left believe in the saving truth of political power, and political power spans the whole spectrum from upper-class politicians from Ivy League schools to the election-day muscle in the inner city, whether we are talking about the Irish carving out a place for themselves in the Gangs of New York period, or the KKK taking back the South from the Yankees, or the gangs that help organize and pacify the inner cities for the pols at City Hall. On this view I think that Occupy and AntiFa are just upper-class conceits, pretty boys and good little girls playing at "activism" while the dirty work is done by others lower down in the activism hierarchy.
See, if you are a middle-class professional, a businessman, or even a white working-class deplorable, you are really not interested in political power, because your life is mostly defined by your work in the market economy, and your family and work relations, and you can live pretty well the life you want by going along with the market and its prices and its trust. So, for you, there really is not point to intimidation and street action. Hey, let's work it out and make a deal. But our lefty friends believe in political power.
Here's the thing, expressed by a couple of folk today. We are going to be at war with Mexico, which is going to fail worse than usual under newly-elected AMLO. That means more gang action. And more Mexicans fleeing the violence to the US. And more violence at the border. What do we do about it? Invasion? Occupation? Exporting democracy that worked so well for Iraq? Special Forces hunting down gangs like ISIS? Yet the Democrats want to open the border and shut down ICE.
Here's the big thing that I think is coming down in the next few years. Do you notice that the law does not apply to Democrats? Hey, Occupy and AntiFa are just mostly peaceful protesters. Illegal aliens are to be protected from federal law enforcement. Hispanics in the Central Valley can strew garbage around, but don't you dare use a plastic straw. The homeless get to camp out in the cities against the law. Labor unions get to muscle workers, and it's OK. Hillary Clinton gets to expose national security secrets with her illegal emailing of classified documents, and hey, she was just careless. Oh, and diversity and inclusion administrators get to administer colleges and corporations according to race and sex in violation of the spirit of our civil rights laws.
I don't think that this lawlessness is going to end well for Democrats. And that is why I have created my maxim to explain it: "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice." See, liberals think that justice is something that their political action is going to create, and I think they have it backward. Government doesn't create justice. On the contrary, the primary product of government is injustice. Of course it is, because government is force: you want to work, to sell a product, to drive a car? First you gotta pay the government so it can reward its supporters.
And this injustice machine often needs the help from its informal "muscle," the chaps at the KKK or its modern instantiation AntiFa.
Let us start with a text from St. Augustine:
Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made of of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed upon. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it hold places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.I think it is worth thinking for a moment about the saint's words. I would say that they could be improved. I would say that the "addition of impunity" is a necessary but not a sufficient part of the definition. I would add the the notion of "the assumption of benevolence" is usual for the leader of a kingdom, for he is normally someone that "cares about people like me." The robber lord revels in his fearsome and evil reputation, but the kindly king wants to be loved by the people he rules and plunders. This is shown in the experience of Mao Zedong in his Red Base in China in the 1930s. He ruled then only by terror. After he became the emperor of China he began to take on the aura of a benevolent demi-god, a Son of Heaven. And when he leveled the country with the Great Leap Forward and purged it with his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he was just trying to do the right thing. Right, lefties?
Let us not forget my definition of government:
Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the people thereof to reward its supporters.Notice that my definition includes a criminal gang that more-or-less occupies territory and more-or-less taxes the people by its "nice little business you got here, pity if something should happen to it" policy of extracting protection money from people within its territory.
So the point about governments and gangs in that they are in the same business. Now, you may observe that governments very often sign treaties of alliance with other governments. Or they might fight wars with other governments, as the mood takes them.
So it would not be surprising to learn that governments can form alliances with gangs, particularly if we accept my definition of a gang as a government merely lacking "the addition of impunity and the assumption of benevolence." In fact, you might easily come to the conclusion that it is convenient for a government to have a gang hanging around, to do the dirty work with what we now call "deniability" for the kindly king or president. Good cop, bad cop, and all that.
Now let us pass in review the gangs or paramilitary forces with which our Democratic friends have treated over the years. I suppose we should start with Boss Tweed, a Democratic politician of Scots-Irish descent who entered public life in 1848 when he organized Engine Company No.6 in Manhattan. All very harmless, no doubt, just handing out a few bennies to the helpless Irish tumbling off the coffin ships onto the Manhattan docks.
But let it be said that our Democratic friends had a relaxed attitude towards political looting and plundering, right at the start of the modern age.
Then comes the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the South the resistance to the Republican Reconstruction was a Democratic Party thing, and the armed wing of the Democrats -- what in Latin America our lefty friends call "death squads" and on the campus of University of Missouri Professor Melissa Click called "muscle" -- was the Ku Klux Klan. Hey! Call them "peaceful protesters!" They didn't really mean any harm, not unless they had to frighten someone. But the point is that when you are conducting a guerrilla war or an insurrection or a counter-revolution or whatever, you need an armed wing that is not too closely identified with the local notables. But it sure doesn't hurt to have those fearsome gang-landers in the background.
And what about labor unions? Back in the day, labor unions were illegal because they were regarded in common law as "conspiracies in restraint of trade." Which is, of course, what they are. We now permit labor unions because the workers wanted them and the workers have the vote. The power of a labor union is its ability to intimidate the workers at a place of work, to intimidate them not to be "scabs" or strikebreakers. Democrats have had a close relationship with labor unions since the late 19th century, and derive much of their money and organizational muscle from the unions. But really, a labor union is a gang of looters and plunderers. And the interesting thing about a labor union is that it usually gets to be the most motivated in the aftermath of a recession when employers are trying to cut wages in order to adapt to the new market conditions just to stay in business, and the workers are desperate to hang onto their jobs. I would say that this sort of thing is counter-productive, but what do I know.
All through the modern era Democrats have seemed to have a curious relationship with urban criminal gangs. We had Irish gangs, then Jewish gangs, then the Italian mafia. And who can forget the Prohibition era gangs in the 1920s and 1930s? All these gangs seemed to coexist rather comfortably with the Democrats running the big cities? How could this be? I couldn't possibly say.
Now here is an interesting thing: in the Kennedy administration, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy started a war on Organized Crime. How about that? Or was this just the newly respectable Irish beating up on the rather less respectable Eye-talians?
But in the post civil-rights era Democrats seemed to lose interest in fighting gangs. For instance, every big city with a large African American population seems to have a gang problem. And yet the Democratic politicians don't seem to want to "do something" about the problem. Why is this? And now we have Latin gangs and the fearsome MS-13 which, I understand, is a Salvadorean gang.
Today, I understand, the problem of the US border is intimately involved with the problem of gangs. Gangs bring drugs and people over the border; they are intimately intertwined because the people are used to carry drugs. Not only that, but it seems that the drug cartels amount to a de facto government in huge parts of Mexico outside Mexico City. You may have noticed that our Democratic friends want to disband ICE, and open the border. Hello?
Let us assume that the gangs and cartels are predominantly lower-class outfits, doing the dirty work of trafficking in drugs and people that more perfumed people are reluctant to do. But then we come to "activism" and "peaceful protest" which is an activity of the best and brightest. Here there is a whole universe of political activity from environmental groups to race-based activist organizations like Black Lives Matter and La Raza.
What then do you call the Occupy Movement, the Black-bloc, and AntiFa? These groups are obviously condoned by Democrats as "peaceful protesters" and activists whose hearts are in the right place. Unlike the truly peaceful protesters of the Tea Party that were deliberately harassed by the Obama administration acting through the IRS. Imagine the IRS harassing AntiFa!
So how do you make sense of this brief history of Democrats and gangs? I think the simple thing to understand is that Democrats and the left believe in the saving truth of political power, and political power spans the whole spectrum from upper-class politicians from Ivy League schools to the election-day muscle in the inner city, whether we are talking about the Irish carving out a place for themselves in the Gangs of New York period, or the KKK taking back the South from the Yankees, or the gangs that help organize and pacify the inner cities for the pols at City Hall. On this view I think that Occupy and AntiFa are just upper-class conceits, pretty boys and good little girls playing at "activism" while the dirty work is done by others lower down in the activism hierarchy.
See, if you are a middle-class professional, a businessman, or even a white working-class deplorable, you are really not interested in political power, because your life is mostly defined by your work in the market economy, and your family and work relations, and you can live pretty well the life you want by going along with the market and its prices and its trust. So, for you, there really is not point to intimidation and street action. Hey, let's work it out and make a deal. But our lefty friends believe in political power.
Here's the thing, expressed by a couple of folk today. We are going to be at war with Mexico, which is going to fail worse than usual under newly-elected AMLO. That means more gang action. And more Mexicans fleeing the violence to the US. And more violence at the border. What do we do about it? Invasion? Occupation? Exporting democracy that worked so well for Iraq? Special Forces hunting down gangs like ISIS? Yet the Democrats want to open the border and shut down ICE.
Here's the big thing that I think is coming down in the next few years. Do you notice that the law does not apply to Democrats? Hey, Occupy and AntiFa are just mostly peaceful protesters. Illegal aliens are to be protected from federal law enforcement. Hispanics in the Central Valley can strew garbage around, but don't you dare use a plastic straw. The homeless get to camp out in the cities against the law. Labor unions get to muscle workers, and it's OK. Hillary Clinton gets to expose national security secrets with her illegal emailing of classified documents, and hey, she was just careless. Oh, and diversity and inclusion administrators get to administer colleges and corporations according to race and sex in violation of the spirit of our civil rights laws.
I don't think that this lawlessness is going to end well for Democrats. And that is why I have created my maxim to explain it: "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice." See, liberals think that justice is something that their political action is going to create, and I think they have it backward. Government doesn't create justice. On the contrary, the primary product of government is injustice. Of course it is, because government is force: you want to work, to sell a product, to drive a car? First you gotta pay the government so it can reward its supporters.
And this injustice machine often needs the help from its informal "muscle," the chaps at the KKK or its modern instantiation AntiFa.
Certainly accords with my experience.
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