Related:
Read this long review of The Vision of the Anointed - Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, by Thomas Sowell.
Comforting Abstractions, by Kevin Williamson
Who is responsible for the mess in Minneapolis? The answer to that question is not unknowable — but it is, in many political quarters, unspeakable.Minneapolis’s municipal government, its institutions, and its police department are what they are not because of the abstract Hegelian forces of capital-H History, but because of decisions that have been made by people. Who these people are is a matter of public record. We know their names: Jacob Frey, Betsy Hodges, R. T. Rybak, Sharon Sayles Belton, Medaria Arradondo, Janeé Harteau, Tim Walz, Mark Dayton . . . the rogues’ gallery is practically inexhaustible.But, oh, the transmuting magic of partisanship! Minneapolis is a Democratic city, with a Democratic mayor and a Democratic city council (0.0 Republicans on that body), in a state with a Democratic governor and a Democratic state house; these are the people who hire police chiefs and organize police departments, who specify their procedures and priorities, who write the laws that the police are tasked with enforcing — Democrats and progressives practically to a man. (Not every member of the Minneapolis city council is a Democrat — there’s a Green, too.) That’s a lot of lefty power, hardly anything except lefty power — but, somehow, the bad guy in this story must be Donald Trump. ...
... one of the problems here is the power of police unions, which resist efforts to increase accountability and oversight of their members. There is a political party in this country that is very much committed to increasing the power of public-sector unions, that has worked hard with some success to do that, and that is enormously dependent upon the financial and political support of those unions for its campaign efforts — and it is not called the Republican Party. It’s the other one.
Oh, wait...
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