Myron Magnet has this article at City Journal. The title is "The Anti-Cop President," but I think the points he makes about culture are even more important than the points about the police.
Any hopes that the nation's first black president could uplift the nation's black underclass went up in smoke Sunday when Barack Obama doubled down on his blaming of America's police for the recent cop massacres that amount, as Heather Mac Donald rightly says, to a war on cops.* * *The same spirit of elite racial contrition made generous welfare payments, with virtually no questions asked, seem like appropriate reparations for the long mistreatment of African Americans. In this way, government ended up enabling the spread of out-of-wedlock childbearing, which the culture had legitimated. But those fatherless welfare families proved far from ideal for raising successful, law-abiding children. What came to be called the cycle of poverty--single parenthood, school dropout, drug use, crime, non-work, welfare dependency--went into overdrive.
This was a cultural problem, a problem of beliefs, worldview, values, and attitudes. Elite culture had defined the ghetto underclass as victims and validated self-destructive attitudes and behavior. Ultimately, that inner-city culture took on its own inventive life, with rap music dismissing women as mere sexual objects, glorifying drugs and the conspicuous consumption that drug dealing could finance, celebrating gangsta behavior, and rejecting all authority. The anthem for this impulse, so to speak, was N.W.A.'s 1988 track [the title of which will not appear on this blog]."Disappointing" does not begin to describe it. President Obama is the epitome of the failed leadership that Juan Williams decried in his 2007 book , Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It. Unfortunately, the optimism of the last part of the subtitle proved to be excessive. Nothing has been done about it.
It seemed to me that Obama had a unique opportunity to speak about values and virtues to this minority of African Americans--to tell them that his own life exemplified how in twenty-first century America you could get an education, work hard, get married, be an attentive husband and father, and maybe even become president of the United States. How disappointing that he chose the other tack, stoking grievance and resentment over supposed victimization by all authority, whether from teachers, cops, or potential employers.
Government should operate on the Karma Principle. If you do good, that should come back to you; if you do bad, that should come back to you as well. Government policies should seek to insure that the people who do the right thing are always better off than the people who do the wrong thing. When youngsters see that principle in operation, they will grow to be better people, and our society will grow to be a better society.
President Obama is the epitome of the failed leadership that Juan Williams decried in his 2007 book , Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It. Unfortunately, the optimism of the last part of the subtitle proved to be excessive. Nothing has been done about it.
I would say "apotheosis" rather than epitome. Obama takes faux-intellectualism, moral preening and sheer ignorance to appalling levels.
I cannot agree with the proposition that, "Nothing has been done about it."
A good deal has been done about it. Obama has stoked racial grievance and resentment at every turn. It energizes his political base, no matter how poisonous it is for the country.
We have gotten something for his trouble -- frayed racial relations, increasing violent crime, and a race-tinged war on the police.
We have had a race tinged "War on Cops" in the past. Never has it been validated and received the imprimatur of the Commander in Chief.