Inner-City Violence Is a Natural Outgrowth of Liberal Policies

Riots that started in London’s Hackney neighborhood last week spread quickly across London and to other large British cities as rioters saw policemen standing back as they looted and burned.

Meanwhile in major American cities a new phenomenon is surfacing: “flash mobs” of black teenagers utilizing social media to organize (like the London rioters) who suddenly appear to terrorize whites or loot stores. The Chicago police had to close the city’s most crowded beach on a holiday weekend because they could not ensure the safety of bathers.

“We want to show the rich people that we can do whatever we want” two teenage rioters told a London reporter.

British welfare policies have created a “layer of young people with no skills education values or aspirations. They have no ‘life ’ as we know it; they simply exist ” writes Max Hastings. In particular they lack the most basic moral sentiment of empathy — for example for the hardworking immigrant storeowners whose stores they scorched.

Theodore Dalrymple who knows the British underclass from his work as a prison psychiatrist describes young people who have never tasted a morsel of food or worn a garment paid for by money earned. Six hundred thousand Britons have reached 26 without ever working a day. Dependence has not bred gratitude only a sense of entitlement to more.

Both the anger and the lack of moral restraint of the mobs reflect the declining culture of big-city ghettos. In the last decade New York City Chicago and Los Angeles have shed 700 000 jobs between them leaving an ever higher percentage of inner-city populations dependent on government welfare. Those jobs will not soon return.

As Walter Russell Mead explains the progressive impulse for a more orderly nonpolluting bureaucratic society requiring licenses and permits for everything has resulted in fewer and fewer of the metal shops and small businesses that formerly employed poorly educated immigrants and blacks — admittedly in noisy unpleasant conditions and at low wages but at least providing first-rung jobs towards future advancement.

Black economist Walter Williams points out that at the turn of the twentieth century unemployment for blacks was of shorter duration than for whites. Black unemployment rates were lower until 1930 when a federal minimum wage was enacted destroying in the process many of the lower paying jobs blacks had filled. The Davis-Bacon Act which required the union rate to be paid on all federal construction projects further disadvantaged blacks who were denied access to many unions.

Though more intensive cop-on-the-beat policing has brought inner-city crime rates down in recent years the result has been increasing numbers of young black men behind bars. Apart from crime inner cities have degenerated considerably since the 1970s by almost every measure: unemployment graduation rates achievement on standardized tests teenage pregnancy and drug use.

There will be no more Great Society programs to ameliorate the decline because the money is not there. The evidence is mounting in any event that the whole panoply of social welfare programs contributed to the social breakdown. Support for single mothers helped black men avoid responsibility for their children; 70% of black children today are born to single mothers. Welfare further broke the connection between effort and advancement that comes with even the most menial entry-level job.

The social disintegration of the ghettos is not just the legacy of slavery. The “yobs” in England are primarily white. Thomas Sowell another prominent black economist writes that the Harlem of his youth was far safer than today. Black children were far more likely to be raised in stable two-parent families. And there were jobs for black teenagers who wanted to work.

The average black child born today starts so far behind that nothing within the power of a non-totalitarian state unwilling to claim each child as belonging to it at birth can compensate. As Mead puts it “All the social workers in the world can’t [provide] a nine-year-old child who has never seen a healthy family ... with the kind of psychological balance and strength children get from growing up in a loving and stable home.”

Nothing less than moral regeneration can save the slums. But who will repair the impact of being born to a teenage crack-addicted mother? Decades of government Head Start programs for preschoolers have shown little impact. By then it’s already too late.

Unfortunately as Torah Jews know the hardest changes to make are those that must come from within. That is precisely what makes the downward spiral of inner-city neighborhoods so terrifying.

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Moral Smugness Replaces Growth

“Everybody wants social justice but no one wants to help Mom with the dishes” writes University of Haifa economics professor Steven Plaut of Israel’s current social protests. Left-wing politics do not a better person make. Indeed they often serve as a salve for a guilty conscience: Witness President Obama’s 2008 fundraising triumphs among rapacious Wall Street executives. The great thing about bumper stickers like “Save the Whales” or “Justice for Palestine” is that they proclaim one’s moral grandeur while requiring one to do nothing.

Many years ago my Dad a”h taught me this lesson. During my senior year in high school I organized a large fundraising campaign for starving Biafrans (the proceeds of which I promptly gave away to a con woman from Chicago’s South Side). One Sunday during that campaign I mentioned to my father that I had been late for a class at our synagogue that morning. He was pouring batter into the waffle iron at the time and without even looking up he said “You are busy saving the world but you can’t show someone the common courtesy of getting to his class on time.”

For the first time in my life I was furious with my father and I ran out of the house and didn’t return for many hours. Soon however I realized that my fury came from the fact that he was absolutely right. I was a very self-righteous teen — in my high school graduation speech I lambasted my classmates for their lack of social consciousness. But I was not given to doing the dishes without being asked or particular about not keeping others waiting.

My father’s offhand comment had stripped me bare and no one likes to stand exposed especially in front of oneself.

The lesson that there is no necessary overlap between a particular political position and being a good person has been reinforced by empirical studies showing that residents of conservative Red states give a far greater percentage of their income to charity and are more likely to volunteer their time than residents of Blue states. To the latter voting for ever higher taxes substitutes for reaching into one’s pocket and directly giving to someone in need. The redistributive welfare state tends to break down social bonds and feelings of mutual responsibility by delegating to the government what neighbors once did for those less fortunate.

Meanwhile Israel’s “social justice” protestors combine the worst of “old Israel” with the worst of the “new Israel.” They seek a return to the statist economy of the early days of the state when the Histadrut labor federation was the largest employer but without any of the willingness to engage in bone-crunching labor and live in extreme simplicity — with shoes worn for years clothes patched with the burlap from bags of sugar etc. — of those days.

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The Breivik Within

Has anyone ever done more damage to a cause he claimed to support than Anders Behring Breivik the Norwegian mass murderer? He discredited every right-wing European party that has made Muslim immigration an electoral issue. And he provided all those who claim that the real threat to the continent is from Islamophobia not from Muslims with “Exhibit A” for their case.

It occurs to me that there is a bit of Breivik in all of us. Not Breivik the mass murderer chas v’shalom but the Breivik who chose a course of action tailor-made to bring about the opposite result of what he sought.

Breivik I assume is nuts and we will never understand the demons that drove him. But how many times do we seek a particular result and then proceed to act in way more likely to have the opposite result?

We decide that a loved one must make certain changes for his or her own good — or more selfishly for our own. But we give little thought to how to facilitate those changes. Sometimes our need to be right or our anger at the supposed beneficiary of our attention causes us to lose sight of the goal entirely. We let our impatience or our ego distract us from the goal and end up only encouraging a hostile response. Other times our insistence on perfection and refusal to praise incremental changes along the desired path deprives us of our most powerful tool of positive reinforcement.

Breivik the metaphor can serve as a potent reminder of the need to match means to ends.