I Want a "Live-and-let-Live" President

A little while ago I wrote a piece for the American Thinker titled "I Want a President That Loves America." Then came Rudi Giuliani and his right-to-the-point jab at President Obama about the president's love of America.

Of course Obama doesn't love America. No liberal loves America; they know better than that. They are, to coin a phrase, on a high horse about America. They think that nation states like America ought to be replaced by multinational entities -- like the EU and the UN. They deplore "nationalism," knowing that deploring "patriotism" would get them into trouble.

But loving America is so yesterday. Now I want something more. I want a president that believes in a "live-and-let-live" America. Let me tell you what I mean (H/T Vox Day).

A while ago back down the Yellow Brick Road, according to the London Guardian, a couple of techies, Hank and Alex, were sitting at a tech conference and swapping dongle jokes when the young woman in front of them got up and took a photo of them. Pretty soon the photo was on Twitter:

Not cool. Jokes about forking repo's in a sexual way and "big" dongles. Right behind me #pycon pic.twitter.com/Hv1bkeOsYP
— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

They found a tweet from a woman, called Adria Richards, with a photo of them: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles. Right behind me #pycon”.

One thing led to another and pretty soon Hank had been fired from his job. But that's not the end of the story.

That night, Hank made his only public statement. He posted a short message on the discussion board Hacker News: “Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have three kids and I really liked that job. She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.”

That's not the end of the story either. A bunch of guys on Hacker News decided to take Adria Richards out, and they did. Pretty soon they had got her fired. Did you know that Adria Richards is a black Jewish female?

Hey fellahs and social justice warriors! How about an America where we live and let live? How about we tell someone to their face that we are offended by their locker-room talk instead of taking our taking offense to the entire world?

Of course, we all know that this is impossible for the Left. The whole point of the Left, starting in the French Revolution, is the taking of offense, turning the personal into the political, transforming the normal frictions of life in the modern world into political issues, and getting the government involved.

We know that liberals really hate it when they are on the receiving end of the political. Liberals hated Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority. They hate government getting into the bedroom. They were practically paranoid that the openly religious George W. Bush was setting up a "theocracy." And liberals froth at the mouth when denouncing the injustice of "legislating morality."

Liberals want to be free of the demands of conventional morality. So why don't they reciprocate, and allow conservatives and others the freedom to dissent from their "social justice" morality? (I know: they wouldn't understand.)

The whole point of the modern constitutional state is to put a space between law and morality, to permit freedom of religion, meaning a diversity in ways of worshipping God or in liberal-speak addressing the ultimate questions and meanings. The whole point of the Left since the French Revolution is to collapse the separation of powers into a single political power that some people have called "totalitarian."

We see this, incidentally, in President Obama's "phone and pen" governance where he pushes the administrative power of the presidency to the utmost, as in the executive order on immigration, as in his administration's pushing of the Federal Communications Commission to implement "net neutrality" by administrative fiat rather than by congressional legislation.

We see it in all the works of modern government. It can't just let parents educate their own children according to their lights; it has to corral children into government child-custodial facilities. It can't just let people make their own arrangements for health care; it has to bully them into buying a government-approved health plan. It can't just leave people to save money for retirement; it has to bully them into a government retirement plan.

The thing is that when you decide that it's OK to bully parents over education, or bully nerds exchanging sophomoric dongle jokes, or implement a culture of "taking offense" or define society as composed of the oppressors, the oppressed, and the champions of the oppressed, you'd better think a couple of moves ahead and figure out how people on the other side will respond to your actions.

The history of warfare is full of new tactics that completely confused and demoralized the opposition -- until the opposition figured out how to counter and defeat them.

The idea of live and let live is that it's better not to start offensive operations; you never know where they may end up. The best thing to do is to  solve your problem right here and right now. Most people are pretty decent and don't want to offend or hurt other people. Government ought to concentrate on the people that don't respond to a quiet word and to be hit on the head with a two-by-four before they will pay attention.

Hmm. I guess we might as well haul in René Girard and his idea of mimetic rivalry. The natural thing to do is for humans to escalate rivalries and conflict higher and higher. Until the whole thing gets out of hand and finally solved when the whole community turns upon a scapegoat and expels the scapegoat from the community.

In my view President Obama, with his Alinksy community organizer tactics, his Obamacare cramdown, with his executive orders à outrance, with his encouragement of "Our Loud, Proud Left," with his Obamanet "net neutrality" is stoking a mimetic rivalry between right and left that can only end in tragedy. In my view the whole point of the separation of powers, of the separation of church and state, of the civil society between the individual and the state, of the live and let live idea, is to neutralize mimetic rivalry and its escalation of conflict into open violence.

But I have a faith that the American people will stop this escalation by electing a bland live-and-let-live president in 2016 that will find a way to send the left's Offense Brigades back to their barracks where they can harmlessly squabble with each other without damaging the body politic.

Should We "Do Something" About ISIS?

The political war of words about defining the enemy with regard to ISIS and Islamic extremism is a necessary conflict. We need to understand what ISIS and radical Islam means to us, and what we should do about it, if anything.

The first thing to understand is that President Obama and the West's center-left oligarchy are in a bit of a bind. The reason that Obama (and Bush) wanted to talk about "violent extremism" is that they want to avoid facing the fact that Islam is a pre-modern religion. The notion of "jihad" is an appropriate ideology for the pre-industrial society when land was life and wealth. You need to defend your food-growing territory, and maybe expand it, because the more good land, the more of your people can live.

But the modern industrial world isn't like that. Wealth in the modern world is not in land, but in people and knowledge. The fundamental transformation of the modern world, to coin a phrase, is that you increase wealth through surprise and innovation in the exploitation of the world and its knowledge secrets. The rise of the West coincided with its invention and adoption of a global exchange economy where people do not conquer and plunder but produce and exchange.

On this view, the colonialism of the West was not so much conquest and plunder as producing and trading.

This revolution in what Marx calls "productive forces" demands a revolution in politics and culture. The rich nations of the world are the ones that have submitted most completely to the demands of the new productive forces and adapted their politics and culture to the new reality on the ground.

Right now we are in the climactic phase of this revolution as the two great ancient cultures and population centers, India and China, have recently capitulated to the new reality and are soaring in wealth and prosperity.

Put simply, India and China are submitting to the global exchange economy and the rule of the market. The rule of the market means that everyone, every single human, submits to the invisible hand of the market, and works to provide products and services that other people are willing to pay for. Government, on this view, is there to provide the legal infrastructure and defend honest producers, traders, and consumers from force and fraud.

Submission is not easy; we have seen movements of rejection all the way. The fact is that people doing fine under the old regime don't want to change, and people exploited under the old system find the experience of adapting to the new culture of work and cooperation unbearable.

Under the old regime, ordinary people were serfs and peasants and they needed to live under protection of a great patron, the local lord, the local landowner, the local cacique. When these ordinary people arrive in the city they look for a new patron, and they find it in the proto-states run by city machine politicians and national social-democratic parties where they can relate to political power in the way they were used to back on the farm.

The language that the machine politicians and social democrats use is the language that the president and his officials used at the White House Summit on Violent Extremism held in February 2015. The Obamis talked about marginalized people suffering from deprivation and lack of jobs. What was needed was the usual social democratic recipe of patronage and clientism.

Conservatives say that this misses the point. The problem is that the people of the Middle East have not made the cultural journey to life in the global exchange economy. They are still tribal; they still marry cousins; they lack a thriving exchange economy run on the principle that every stranger can be trusted unless he demonstrates untrustworthiness.

Now the problem with ISIS and the turmoil in the Middle East is basically cultural. The people of the Middle East feel trapped and marginalized by the economic success they see all round them. They need to develop, under wise leadership, a version of the culture of trust and cooperation that the other peoples of the world have painfully learned over the last five centuries of economic and cultural revolution.

Right now we are seeing a panic over ISIS and its remarkable propaganda which represents itself as an unstoppable force that will flow over the Middle East and elsewhere. There is a palpable sense that we should "do something."

But we can also see that Bush's Iraq strategy of going in an taking out Saddam-like thugs is of limited use, because it imposes a political solution from above on societies that are still pre-modern. The people of the Middle East must themselves find a cultural and religious model that gives meaning to their own cultural revolution from tribe and blood to trust and cooperation.

In the prosperous West this cultural revolution involved the growth of an ideology of responsible individualism, typically associated with the Protestant Revolution.  People began to see themselves as responsible for their lives, and stopped relying on powerful patrons to provide for them. Notoriously, people like the Mayflower Pilgrims decided they couldn't take the old ways any more and sailed to America to make a new life in the new way.

Egypt's president Al-Sisi has tried to begin the process for Egypt by issuing a challenge to its cultural leaders.

"We have reached the point that Muslims have antagonized the entire world. Is it conceivable that 1.6 billion [Muslims] want to kill the rest of the world’s population of 7 billion, so that Muslims prosper? This is not possible.” Sisi continued, to faint applause from the religious dignitaries assembled before him, to call on them to bring about a “religious revolution.” Barring that, the Muslim community “is being torn apart, destroyed, and is going to hell.”

 But of course, it is not the job of a politician to tell imams what to think and do, any more than in the US it is the job of the president to issue marching orders to the nation's churches. Politicians pick up what the cultural world creates and adapt it to the demands of political power. Right now the cultural leaders of the Middle East are caught up in the cultural aftermath of Sayed Qutb, who went to Colorado in the late 1940s and was horrified.

In the West we have the illusion that cultural change can be and ought to be conducted without heartache and without violence. This, of course, is rubbish. There will be turmoil in the Middle East for a century and more, and there will be blood.

The question for the West is whether we should "do something" about the Middle East, and if so, what that "doing something" should be.

Don't expect any brilliant solutions any time soon.

The Entire Left Adrift in Denial

Peggy Noonan, America's intelligent aunt, usually tells us where the zeitgeist is. This week she calls out the Obamis as "An Administration Adrift on Denial." She writes about "willful denials and dodges" and mindless talk about "root causes" and "lack of opportunity for jobs."

Actually, I get it. As the airline safety guys say: when aircrew experience an emergency, they instinctively follow their training.

Same thing with community organizers and lefty activists. "Root causes" and relative deprivation is what they learn in activism school. Their silly shibboleths explain everything for them. So this week the Obama administration stages a White House Summit on Violent Extremism opening with a Muslim prayer.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Look, I get it. The left, since its inception with the Communist Manifesto has been pushing an impossible idea.  The left argued that the working class in 1848, then in an epochal transition from rural indigence to urban prosperity, were the most outrageously exploited group in human history. Under the flawed exploitation of the bourgeoisie the workers would sink into "immiseration."

So of course when the going gets tough the left looks like idiots.

Since the 1840s billions of peasants have made the transition from rural poverty  to urban competence, and still the left insists that our times are the worst thing since the Crusades and the Inquisition.

Right  now the folks making the transition are the world's Muslims. Achieving strategic concentration in the cities of Europe they are enraged, as groups before them, with their backwardness and the shame of their situation as struggling immigrants.

So time after time, the left encourages a group recently arrived in the city with approval for tribalism and clientism, assuring them that they can continue their tribal ways in the non-tribal world of the city. The young men form criminal gangs and the left whines about police brutality. Eventually it all works out in spite of the left as the young men get jobs, get married, and learn how to thrive in the city.

Look, I get it. We middle-class whiteys don't want to get too rough and tough with the Muslims in our cities, and we don't want to have to sweep across the Middle East cleaning out nests of crazed rapists and beheaders. Meanwhile the huge dust-pile of the welfare state with its benefits, its taxes, its credentialism, its crony corruption, its regulations makes it hard for the new immigrants to make a new life for themselves.

Here at home President Obama and his supporters look like idiots for denying the obvious, that the West has a problem with Muslims enraged by their backwardness and their marginalization and their failed states.

And I couldn't be happier.

That's because the world is working the way it should. The ruling class screws up yet again and eventually, at the last moment, the people vote for a new administration to clean up the mess. Because this is America, and in America we do the right thing, but only after trying everything else.

The confusion, the mess, the denial, the lies, the evasions, the stupidity: they are all necessary stages on the way to a solution.

The glorious destiny of Barack Obama is to screw up in such an epic scale that nobody except a mind-numbed Democratic partisan will fail to see that in 2016, it will be Time for a Change.

The Bright Side of Obama's "Strategic Patience"

Everyone is worrying that the 2010s is the 1930s all over again. They want to get up and deal with the Islamic menace before it gets any worse. And maybe they are right.

President Obama, of course, advocates "strategic patience," which means what, exactly?

Should "the West" follow a forward strategy, and whack the Islamic State right now? Or should we stand back from the Middle East and let the chips fall where they may?

I'm a conservative, so I've tended to support the forward strategy, memorably enunciated by Ronald Reagan at the time of the Cold War: "Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."

But the funny thing about Ronald Reagan is that he won the Cold War with hardly firing a shot. He talked a good game, he cranked up the Defense budget, he got the spies helping the Lech Walesas behind the enemy line, he got the US economy out of its stagflationary Keynesian slump, he whacked the dime-store Commies in Grenada. And the rest is history.

One of the things that liberals harped on about during the Cold War was US support of right-wing dictators. It forced US apologists like Jeane Kirkpatrick to insist that there was a difference between right-wing authoritarian dictators and left-wing totalitarian dictators. And maybe she was right, in the bipolar days of the Cold War.

The reason to support authoritarians is usually "stability." We support right-wing dictators because they are a lot better than lefty totalitarians. But what about the Middle East? Should we support, e.g., Saudi Arabia, because they are a bulwark against radical Iran?

The problem with "stability" according to the Black Swan guy, Nassir Nicholas Taleb, is it tends to freeze things in place. What happens in the spring when the ice breaks up? You get a world war.

Now the West has basically kept the Middle East in a fast-frozen mode for the last century, ever since the Ottoman Empire broke up at the end of World War I. And the reason, of course, is Oil. The Middle East, ever since Winston Churchill switched the British Royal Navy from coal to oil, has been the source of the world's cheapest oil. So the West has wanted to dominate the region to make sure that the oil keeps coming.

That's why we were meddling in Iran in the early 1950s. That's why we've supported the Saudi family dynasty since whenever. That's why we cared about the thug Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile the Middle East has been seething under the western knout. One day it will explode. And then what?

President Obama recommends "strategic patience." We conservatives assume that this is merely a cover for the left-wing argument that the West is to blame for everything, because of its racist colonialism and imperialism. For Obama, we assume, the West has it coming, and has no moral right to interfere in the Middle East.

But suppose President Obama is right for the wrong reasons. Suppose that the best strategy is the good old Cold War strategy of "containment." Let the Middle East become a cauldron of hate and blood, but establish a clear perimeter, starting at Israel, at the Bosphorus, at the border between Pakistan and India. We will contain the fire at the borders: thus far and no further.

This is a good time to switch strategies, from the Bush forward strategy to the Obama strategic patience, because of the fracking revolution. Instead of the left's prophecy of "peak oil" it looks like there is an ocean of hydrocarbon out there from natural gas to oil.  That means that we don't care as much about Mideast oil as we used to do.

Right now, it looks like there is plenty of fracked hydrocarbon at $50-60 per barrel, and it puts the "stability" regimes and the radical regimes of the Middle East in a quandary. They can use the oil weapon, but in doing so and raising the price they will just make it easier for Big Oil and little oil to do more fracking. But if they cut production they get less money and they need the money. All the big oil-producing nations, from the Saudis to the Iranians to the Venezuelans "need" the oil price up at $100 per barrel or more.

Various critics of Islam argue that it is ill adapted to the modern age. It retains a pre-trading mentality, a philosophy of global conquest in jihad that doesn't work any more than the nostalgic global totalitarianism of communism and socialism can work. Since it was impossible to convince the true-believers of the left that socialism could not work until communism crashed and burned in 1990-91, there is no reason to believe that the Islamists will abandon their jihad for world domination before its catastrophic collapse.

It's at this point that I like to invoke the Chinese Christian from David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing. Here is what he said.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. 

OK. So what is it about Christianity? I suggest, following Rene Girard, that Christianity, more than any other transcendental or secular religion, has articulated a philosophy of human comity. It directs every human to serve before they collect. It tells people to love their enemies. It tells that that in service is perfect freedom. This goes against the basic human instinct to strike first before the other guy gets his chance. It goes against the ancient instinct of the border war, the escalating feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. And of  course it goes against the modern totalitarianism of basic conflict of interest between the races, between the sexes, between the classes, between religions.

The modern totalitarianisms are cunning. They understand how to get people riled up. First, in the 19th century they got the working class all riled up against the bourgeoisie. Then, with "cultural Marxism" they got all kinds of other groups riled up: the blacks in Ferguson, the women in college, the gays in their urban ghettos.

From a tactical political point of view, these totalitarianisms are brilliant. But there is a problem. These political tactics wall up groups into resentful ghettos. They prevent people from surrendering to the market and making the profoundly social and altruistic decision to find something in this world that contributes to other peoples' welfare, and then doing it.

That is what the Islamists are doing to Muslims worldwide. They are telling Muslims that the way to the future is to conquer the world, not to serve it.  Maybe they are right, but if they are the whole history of the past 500 years has been a terrible mistake.

The only way to demonstrate who is making the mistake is to step back from the Middle East and let the chips fall where they may, except in Israel. Sorry, jihadis, no messing with Israel. And in the rest of the world, we enforce our Judeo-Christian doctrine of service. Muslims that want to thrive in the West are welcome. But they must show by their actions that they accept the fundamental principle of the modern economy. They must seek to serve before they demand to collect.

On my theory of the world, the history of the last two centuries has been the story of various foolish attempts to rebel against the new world order of markets, exchange, and service to others. On this view, radical Islam is merely the latest and hopefully the last such rebellion.

Obama Leads Dems into the Wilderness

The original narrative for the Obama years came from Judis and Teixeira and The Emerging Democratic Majority back in 2002.  The idea was that the Dems were forming a majority coalition of minorities, women, youth and the educated, and that they'd rule for ever after.

I feared it, but not after the Obama administration got started. I feared that the Dems would incrementally move the country in a liberal direction by finding bipartisan majorities on issues the Republicans couldn't refuse. Kinda like Medicare Part D which Bush passed in part to defuse a Dem "issue."

But Obama turned out to be the wrong president to consolidate and extend the Emerging Democratic Majority, because he pursued a divisive and partisan strategy to implement as much as possible of the liberal agenda by any means possible as soon as possible. So we have the Obamacare cramdown, the endless executive orders, the revising of statute law by fiat.

He violated the Moynihan Rule, that you want a 70-30 vote in the US Senate to pass big items like Medicare.

The result of Obama has been the most Republican Congress since before the Great Depression. And huge gains for Republicans in the states.

Now comes John Kraushaar in the National Journal to argue that "Obama Changed His Party, Not the Country." He's gotten remarkable support from his base and from the Democrats in Congress. But what does it matter if he hasn't brought the country with him too?

By ignoring the electorate and steering the country in an unmistakably progressive direction his final two years in office, he's ensuring that his presidency will be more of an eight-year mirage for liberals, rather than one known for winning lasting support for policies that would move the country in a leftward direction.

And so now John B. Judis is writing about an Emerging Republican Advantage.

Back in 2012 Chief Justice Roberts was the deciding vote to allow Obamacare to proceed. You can see why he did that and angered Republicans and conservatives. He knew that for the Supreme Court to roll back Obamacare in 2012 would be dangerously divisive, and would be viciously attacked by liberals and Obama. But not any more. Obama's a lame duck and Obamacare is unpopular. My nickel goes to say that the current Obamacare issue before the Supreme Court, the question of whether subsidies can be applied in states that didn't set up their own health exchanges, Chief Justice Roberts will be on the side of those that cut Obamacare down.

And the problem with all those executive orders is that they can be reversed by the next president.

It is said that Abraham Lincoln advised us to fight only one war at a time. We might revise and extend his remarks to say that all governments look for a war to fight. But they'd better not get caught in a two-front war. Now it is clear that the war Obama is fighting is the war against conservatives and Republicans. For his and his liberal base, the real enemy is racism, sexism, homophobia. So for them the problem with Islam, or the aggression of Putin's Russia are distractions from the real war.

But conservatives and Republicans are different. We don't really want to crush our domestic political opponents; we just wish they weren't so determined to wreck America and all it stands for. Enemies, if any, can be found beyond the borders of the United States and North America. The enemy used to be the Soviet Union; now it is radical Islam.

So, from my conservative perspective, the idea that Obama has led his party into the wilderness without getting the rest of the nation to follow him is a beacon of hope. It will be much easier for the next Republican president to lead the nation to sunny uplands of economic growth and social peace if President Obama has flown the Democratic Party up a box canyon and wrecked it on the canyon wall.

But, as I have already written, I expect the Democrats to break and run before they get too far up the box canyon. Politicians are not fools; they can see the writing on the canyon walls.

But usually the rank and file in an army wait to desert until it is too late. They are only human, after all.

Women Changing the Public Square

My friend Stephen asked about women presidents the other day, and I responded with waffle about the Empress CiXi in China, about whom I'm reading in Jung Chang's The Empress Dowager CiXi: The Woman Who Launched Modern China. So yeah, women can be amazing heads of state, although that doesn't mean that the failed Hillary Clinton should be our First Woman President.

And, of course, there is the problem that five years after the death of CiXi China descended into 30+ years of civil war.

But now comes an interesting piece promoted by Instapundit that touches the question of women faculty in law schools. The article is about the proposed merger of two Rutgers law schools, one in Camden and one in Newark. It appears that the law schools are heavily in into law-and-social-justice.

Not surprisingly for a school that emphasizes race, gender and philosophy and has a history of misleading employment statistics, the Camden law school has had trouble attracting students.

This provoked a commenter to comment:

I was wondering when someone was finally going to address this issue. A large number of junior ranking faculty are trying to transform law schools into something completely different. These professors, who are largely female, want to talk about anything but traditional law. Their focus is instead on abortion, parenting, racism, sexism, human rights violations and the environment. I get that there will be some overlap between these topics and the law, but they should be restricted to when the topic actually comes us and not woven mercilessly throughout the general curriculum. Since traditional topics still need to be taught for the bar exam and some business courses need to be offered, schools end up with a bloated faculty just so that they can have a strange panoply of socially progressive seminars that fit each faculty member’s niche interest.

That's interesting, and I get it. It is much more congenial to be talking up liberal social justice issues than the uncongenial hard work of teaching law which is, after all, a patriarchal concept that men have worked out over the last several millennia with very little input from women.

Now, I've written that, as George Simmel the German sociologist put it, women in the modern age are in the middle of adapting the public square to "a more feminine sensibility." When liberal women law faculty are moving the law school curriculum from law to social justice, is that a case of women adapting law "to a more feminine sensibility" or is it just mind-numbed liberals doing their thing?

Government is force; social animals deal in pecking orders and hierarchy. Men are fighters; they reduce everything to a battle. Women are lovers; they reduce everything to manipulation and persuasion.

So if you ask me we have an unholy mess with the current liberal administrative welfare state, staffed mainly by women. Government is force, yet its practitioners are women that instinctively want to move the culture towards manipulation and social shaming.

Marxists had a good way of understanding this sort of thing. They liked to talk about the "internal contradictions" of capitalism. But think about the "internal contradictions" of liberalism, and the internal contradiction of having women, the manipulators, winkling away at law, which was men's way of resolving fights into agreed-upon rules. And the even bigger internal contradiction of having women, the manipulators, in charge of government, the enforcers.

I suspect that at the end of the modern era, women will retreat from the public square where it requires male-style combat and head-banging, and specialize on areas that require loving attention and relationships. But we are going to get there by learning the hard way, and the journey is going to be hell.

The Real Problem "Ghettoside"

We've all gotten used to the liberal "police brutality" meme, where police target minorities for abuse. That's when the police are not ignoring murders and concentrating on arresting minorities for minor infractions.

Now comes Jill Leovy with Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (H/T Steve Sailer) and she's getting a soft-focus interview on NPR's Fresh Air in "'Ghettoside' Explores Why Murders Are Invisible In Los Angeles:" as in

Our guest today, journalist Jill Leovy, argues that black communities suffer deeply from too little law enforcement, or at least law enforcement of a certain kind.  

You see, murders in the black ghetto get very little coverage in the media, and so Jill Leovy decided to sit down and document every murder in Los Angeles in a blog, The Homicide Report, and now she's written a book about it. Murder in the black ghetto may be routine, but it shatters the lives of families on the receiving end. And to compound the agony, very few murders of young black men are "solved."

Well, looking at numbers from LAPD from about '88 through the early 2000s, around 40 percent, if the victims are black men.

And injury shootings have an even lower "solved" rate, at 25 percent. What is going on here? Here is what is going on:

[Leovy:] I spoke to a mother, once, in South Bureau - black woman - her son had just been murdered. I think this was maybe a couple of days after the murder. I had gone to her door. And it was one of these cases where the police just had no witnesses. The case wasn't going anywhere. The mother told me that since the murder, the killers, who she knew, who were, I think, the gang members who lived on her street, had been knocking on her door and taunting her and laughing at her - her grief.  

Here's the black grievance: on the one hand, police are too heavy handed. On the other, they don't bother to solve the big stuff, the murders.

[Leovy:] [A] a standard black grievance against police that you hear in South LA, that has to do with the generally understood problem - too much consent searches, we say, in LA, too much stop-and-frisk, too heavy of law enforcement, too much presumption of guilt when you take stops.

What I hear, when I'm in these neighborhoods, is a combination. It's a two-pronged grievance. There's another half of that. And the other half is, I get stopped too much for nothing, and the police don't go after the real killers. They don't go after the really serious criminals in this neighborhood.

Then there's the intimidation:

[Interviewer:] You know, you write that most of these cases are made not by physical evidence, you know, fibers or that kind of thing, but by witnesses and a phrase that you hear a lot in some of these communities after a homicide is, everybody knows who did it. But it's the reluctance of witnesses to cooperate that is such a huge barrier. You want to just explore that for a moment and talk about what fears witnesses have and why?

LEOVY: Well, witnesses I think justly fear retaliation. There's a lot of kind you might call it soft retaliation - signals, hard stares. I had one witness on a case who a couple days after she - the perpetrators clearly saw her at the scene, woke up in the middle of the night, and they're banging hard on her windows, bunch of guys walking slowly around the house banging, banging on each window for a long time. And they didn't hurt her, but that's terrifying. And it's very clear what that's saying. What that's saying is, think about what we will do to you.

You can see why the police are running around harassing the homeboys. They can't get any witnesses for the murders, but knowing who the culprits are, they can at least get them for the small stuff.

End of facts, beginning of analysis.

Many years ago, I read a policeman that said that the dirty little secret of policing is informers. If you don't have informers you don't know what is going on and you can't prosecute urban crime. And that's what we just read about above. "Everybody knows" who did it, but nobody is willing to testify.

And, of course, these urban killings are, really, combat deaths in the contests for turf, the border wars, between rival urban gangs.

Now my theory of government is that every government is an armed minority occupying some territory and defending it from enemies, foreign and domestic. It supports itself by taxing the inhabitants of that territory. Period.

On this theory, urban criminal gangs are proto-governments that carve out territory within the territory of a larger national government. They defend that territory from other proto-governments and they tax the inhabitants for their "protection," And the larger national government tolerates it.

This has been going on in the United States for at least a century and a half, ever since the Irish came over in their "coffin ships." First it was the Irish gangs, then the Jewish gangs, then the Italian gangs. Now it's the black gangs and the Latino gangs.

But why? I think the main reason is that the immigrants on the lowest rung of the ladder don't have the connections and the credentials or the skills to enter the formal economy (which today taxes labor at up to 25 percent, including payroll taxes, unemployment, workers comp and mandatory benefits). So they have to operate outside the law. So they are vulnerable. They may work "off the books" or they may aim higher at the risky trade in illegal or highly taxed substances. But they have to work outside the law because they don't have the education, or skills, or experience, or connections, or whatever, to be competitive in the formal economy.

Remember the cruelties, Voltaire is supposed to have said. He was talking about the cruelties of the ancien régime. We too have our cruelties, and the poor have their grievances.

And so we can see a two-point program to solve this problem. Point One is to reconquer the urban ghettos and smash the gangs. Point Two is to abolish the cruel "helping" state interventions in the economy that make it impossible for unskilled people to work in the formal economy.

Otherwise, the problem of "Ghettoside" is insoluble. But maybe the ruling class likes it that way.