In a conversation elsewhere, I was recently confronted with an amusing non sequitur: “if you want XYZ Good Thing, then I assume you also support Universal Healthcare, right?” This was a gotcha question through and through; the person knew full well, given the positions I was taking, that it was quite unlikely that I’d support an extreme-Left staple like that.
But they seemed surprised when I said that I’d prefer other policies that actually have a proven track record of improving health care quality, rather than “Universal Healthcare” which has a long track record of making health care worse for people in the real world. I think that was the last thing they were expecting to hear: yes, I actually do care about the problem, it’s just that your preferred solution to the problem is utter crap that makes it worse, not better. They didn’t really have any response to that, other than to hurl an obscene insult and storm off.
Reality is kind of important
Leftist ideology has always had a strong utopian streak to it, appealing to idealistic notions of how a perfect world “should be.” But perhaps it would benefit them to read up on Utopia sometime. It was written as a satire, with the supposed land of happiness’s name being a Greek word for “no place.” Other prominent characters and places likewise frequently have names connoting nonsense, nonexistence, or foolishness. Thomas More, the author, told us from the very beginning that utopia is nonexistent nonsense and the whole concept is one big joke.
Unfortunately, Leftists really love utopian thought. They’re always identifying problems (some more real than others) and talking about how much better the world would be without this problem, and promising that their policies will help eliminate the problem in question.
Funny how rare it is to hear them talk about how their policies actually did eliminate real problems, though, particularly recent real problems. Reality is an area that they have a pretty abysmal track record on, which is why they do everything possible to steer the conversation away from reality. But… well… those of us who live in it understand that reality is kind of important, because we’re living in it!
Promises vs. reality: School lunches
If you have kids of a certain age, or were a kid at the time, you might remember during the Obama administration, when the USDA and Michelle Obama pushed a new program to revamp school lunches for better nutrition. The then-First Lady promised students “the best nutrition that they can have.” What they got instead was smaller portions of lower-quality food, often at higher prices.
Obamacare
A few years before this, we got President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act. I remember the run-up to this legislation being forced through Congress. Everyone who took a serious look at it could tell it was going to be a disaster. Democrats promised more affordable healthcare, (even though the legislation was all about health insurance and had nothing to do with healthcare at all!) and the ability for people with pre-existing conditions to get much-needed coverage. What we got instead was an obvious mess from day 1.
I still remember the apologetic email the CEO of my then-employer, sent out to everyone about how our insurance rates were going to get worse and there was really nothing the company could do about it, all because of the bill that he claimed, in a transparent attempt at damage control, “really should be called Pelosicare.” Even he, a dyed-in-the-wool San Francisco Democrat, could see the writing on the wall. And he was right! Ever since then, the cost of health insurance has skyrocketed while the quality of coverage has cratered. (And when Republicans talk about doing away with it, Democrats challenge them with “what’s your proposal to replace it with?” As if we needed one! Simply repealing it and going back to status quo ante would be a strict improvement across the board!)
Racial equality
Frederick Douglass, a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln’s and one of his day’s best-known black abolitionists, famously said:
Everybody has asked the question. . ."What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!
His vision for his race was, simply put, the American dream: to have the privileges of freedom, and the attendant responsibilities that come along with it. And it was a pretty good plan, one that worked well as long as it was followed.
Lincoln freed the slaves and got the 14th Amendment passed, and over the next century or so things slowly got better for black Americans. It was a rough, uneven road to be sure, with Southern Democrats fiercely and often violently working to screw everything up, and progress was slow, but on the whole things were improving, and they improved dramatically after the first century. As black scholar Thomas Sowell points out in Black Rednecks and White Liberals:
Between 1940 and 1960, the percent of black families with incomes below the official poverty line fell from 87 percent to 47 percent. In various skilled trades, the income of blacks relative to whites more than doubled between 1936 and 1959.
…
Racial barriers began to erode after World War II—and before the civil rights legislation of the 1950s. Perhaps the most dramatic example was the crumbling of racial barriers in professional sports, exemplified by Jackie Robinson’s becoming the first black major league baseball player in 1947… A poll that year showed his popularity to be second only to long-time entertainment idol Bing Crosby.
…
In 1948, President Harry Truman ran for re-election on a platform that included civil rights for blacks, which some thought would doom his candidacy, but the fact that he won suggests that white public opinion had already begun to change.
He points out that after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where federal bureaucrats promised to give black Americans what they were already doing a quite competent job of earning for themselves, this progress slowed considerably. From the 40s to the early 60s, things were going great. Then Progressives started “helping” and actual progress slowed significantly.
Within two more decades it was in reverse, as Levitt and Dubner explain in Freakonomics. After describing in chapter 3 how the “liberal justice system and the criminals’ rights movement” of the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to the drug gangs of the 1980s, they continue:
By the 1980s, virtually every facet of life was improving for black Americans, and the progress showed no sign of stopping. Then came crack cocaine.
While crack use was hardly a black-only phenomenon, it hit black neighborhoods much harder than most. The evidence can be seen by measuring the same indicators of societal progress cited above. After decades of decline, black infant mortality began to soar in the 1980s, as did the rate of low-birthweight babies and parent abandonment. The gap between black and white schoolchildren widened. The number of blacks sent to prison tripled. Crack was so dramatically destructive that if its effect is averaged for all black Americans, not just crack users and their families, you will see that the group’s postwar progress not only stopped cold but was often knocked as much as ten years backward. Black Americans were hurt more by crack cocaine than by any other single cause since Jim Crow.
And then there was crime. Within a five-year period, the homicide rate among young urban blacks quadrupled. Suddenly it as just as dangerous to live in parts of Chicago or St. Louis or Los Angeles as it was to live in Bogotá.
And then we get into the 90s, where saw a push under the Clinton administration for lowered standards in home mortgage lending, specifically to help out blacks and other minorities. We all know how that ended up, and the hardest-hit by the 2008 crash were blacks and other minorities — the very people these policies were supposed to be helping! — who ended up economically devastated by the implosion of bad loans that they never would have had in the first place without Leftist policies.
Crime
Unfortunately, not all of Freakonomics is as rigorous in its analytical standards. The fourth chapter is the home of the infamous argument that legalized abortion through Roe v. Wade created the dramatic drop-off of crime rates seen 20-odd years later in the 1990s. This notion has been quite thoroughly debunked over the years, shown to be based on both bad data and bad analysis, but perhaps nothing has demonstrated it to be incorrect as succinctly as the recent resurgence in violent crime across America. It’s not like Roe v. Wade was reversed 20-odd years ago in the late 1990s afterall — on the contrary, that’s when legalized abortion was reaffirmed in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — but ever since the Obama Administration, and especially since the riots of 2020, we’ve seen huge spikes in violent crime, especially in large Democrat-controlled cities.
What changed? In a word, policy, both times. In the 1990s, crime had gotten so bad that the Left could no longer ignore it, so they temporarily pretended to be champions of law and order. Remember when Joe Biden used to be proud of the federal tough-on-crime legislation he sponsored? And at more local levels, we saw stronger policies deployed across the country. Crime-ridden hellhole New York City elected Rudy Giuliani as their mayor, and his signature “broken windows policing” policy sent crime rates plummeting.
…and then with the problem of crime so largely diminished, unfortunately it stopped being a noteworthy issue to many people, and the Left turned on the gaslighting in full force. In any large group, you’ll always find statistical outliers, and they went looking, pointing out an incident of police officers getting something wrong here or there and reporting them as if it were the norm.
The result was, well, precisely what you’d expect. Gullible media consumers saw reports portraying criminals as victims, and pushed for more “compassionate” laws. (Notably absent from the narrative: any discussion of how compassionate soft-on-crime policies are to the victims of these crimes!) A few sympathetic judges started finding excuses to strike down successful policing policies, progressives started running District Attorney candidates who would not prosecute crimes, and lawmakers began to lower penalties or decriminalize certain crimes altogether. And the result of that was also precisely what you’d expect: spiking crime everywhere. (And who have been the biggest victims of resurgent crime? Say it with me, folks: blacks and other minorities, the very people these policies were supposed to be helping.)
For extra fun, mention this problem around Leftists and you’re very likely to hear a suspiciously specific rebuttal: “this is just conservatives making up problems where none exist, because crime rates aren’t as bad as they were in the 1990s.” Two things there. First, that’s refuting a claim that was never made. No one’s saying that crime is as bad as in the 90s; we’re pointing out that after decades of decline, it’s trending upwards again, and sharply so. And second, when your argument is literally “things are not as bad as they were during the worst crime wave in living memory,” the fact that that’s what you end up having to reach for doesn’t provide nearly the strength for your position that you seem to think it does!
Although, come to think of it, I didn’t hear about things being nearly as bad in back in the 90s as they are on a lot of West Coast cities today, with organized-crime gangs of shoplifters terrorizing stores with impunity and homeless people leaving used needles and feces all over the sidewalks. I grew up in Seattle and I can promise you, that kind of insanity simply was not a thing back then!
Same Old Story
I could give plenty more examples, but this article is getting long enough already. Everywhere you look, you see the same thing repeated over and over. Leftists push some policy of sweeping social change in the name of “caring,” “compassion,” or “[adjective]-justice,” and then when it gets implemented, the results it produces consistently end up being the opposite of the stated goals. The people who they claim to want to help, instead get hurt, over and over and over again.
And yet they keep on producing new ideas for sweeping social change with admirable-sounding goals. They keep on telling everyone how they just care soooooo much, and unfortunately people keep on falling for it. We have been given a better way, though:
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
— Matthew 7: 15-20
Leftists always clamor to be judged (and to judge conservatives as well) on aspirations, and then to dress up their aspirations in the noblest language possible and make ours sound ugly and cruel. But by judging by results instead, we see the truth: conservative policies work. They bring about desirable outcomes, and they even do a far better job of bringing about the social outcomes that Leftists claim to desire. Meanwhile, their own policies produce nothing but filth and societal decay.
We know them all too well by their fruits. It’s long past time to start hewing down the destructive social institutions they have created and casting them into the fire.