Yes, But Also...What?

 Yglesias has published his blueprint for Democrats coming off the 2024 loss. He is then elaborating on his points and today he looked at the crime and public disorder issue.

In some ways, this issue really is a perfect distillation of the headwinds facing Democratic politicians. Crime has fallen under the Biden administration after a Covid related spike (more on that in a bit). Democrats did not embrace "defund the police" and they have made a good faith effort to balance public order with civil and legal rights. 

However, the "vibes" around crime and disorder (which I think Yglesias helpfully uncouples a bit) were bad. If you want a party that's "tough on crime" you elect Republicans, even though their standard bearer is a convicted felon. The reason is that Republican crimes take place in the C-Suite and Wall Street, which impose a hidden cost on America, as opposed to having homeless people on the street and drug stores locking up their wares. Democrats err on the side of civil liberties, while Republicans rely on the opacity of financial crimes to shield their "constituents". This is leaving aside the numerous alleged instances of sexual assault committed by Trump and his Cabinet nominees.

The idea of "Back the Blue" where it comes to Blue States improving their daily governance would be part of this solution. When we visited Portland, we certainly saw the homeless issue, but it's just such a normal part of urban life today that it hardly seemed as bad as the people who live three hours east of Portland imagine that it is. 

Homelessness is the central issue of public order that cities struggle with. Yglesias actually never really talks about that, but it strikes me that if you were reduce the number of homeless by 50% the overall sense of public order would increase by leaps and bounds. It is also true that there is a segment of progressive politics that seems to prioritize calling them "people experiencing houselessness" rather than ameliorating both the misery of the homeless and the degradation of public spaces that follows. 

There is no direct policy solution for murder or rape, crimes that are too common yet not regular occurrences in people's lives. Homeless policy - some combination of voluntary and coercive assistance - would have an immediate impact. Not addressing that has proven to be political malpractice.

There is - and I can only shout this so many times - a huge gaping hole in Yglesias' argument: Covid.

The underreported story of 2021-2024 has been how we emerged from the acute crisis of Covid into a fractured, fractious world of politicized public health, denigration of experts, and most importantly an unexplored and underappreciated state of trauma from those years.

March 2020 was intensely scary and disorienting. We were sequestered in our homes, hoping that we left our groceries outside long enough to kill whatever germs threatened to enter our homes. We were denied the segmentation of our lives into "work" and "home" while our children were stripped of their schooling. This isn't an argument about policy, which did the best it could. It's the fact that all the old rules and norms - rules and norms that Trump had already eroded - seemed moot. Throw in the George Floyd movement and a "rules-based" society seemed obsolete.

That moment was a period when some of us were following myriad rules about masking and distancing and struggling to make a normal world in an abnormal time. Meanwhile, people started drag racing on the nearly empty interstates. Police pulled back from the streets in the face of protests to let people see what "defund the police" might look like. For one set of Americans, rules were for suckers. For another, they were tyranny. 

We are about to enter a smorgasbord of corruption under Trump. He is going to sell government functions like his shitty gold sneakers. What's more, I think the idea that Republicans are soft on White Collar Crime is the sort of "brand" that people instinctively understand, in the same way they brand the Democrats as coddling petty crime. 

So, my response to Yglesias' road map on public disorder would be for Democratic cities to directly address homelessness to alleviate the sense of overall disorder. Meanwhile, national Dems need to hammer and hammer and hammer on the coming instances of corruption. The most inexplicable aspect of Trump's appeal is the idea that he's a "fighter" for the working class. Democrats need to destroy that brand by pointing out Trump's Cabinet of Broligarchs and Billionaires. When the coming Crypto Bubble explodes, they can lay the economic catastrophe at the GOP's feet.