This essay by Paul Mirengoff puts as starkly a I have seen the price to be paid, in honesty and in lives, for refusing to acknowledge reality because it does not square with leftist ideology. It's hard to tell if this phenomenon is more disgusting, more tragic, or more ironic -- the latter because it's leftist academia that brays incessantly that we need "evidence-based" this or "research-centered" that. In truth, it could care less about what research or evidence shows. This is visible most prominently, in criminal law debates, in the fact that the Left denounces as racist more and more aggressive policing and increased use of incarceration -- even though overwhelming evidence shows that these things made major contributions to the decline of murder and violent crime over the last 25 years, and thus saved thousands of black lives we otherwise would have lost.
The snarling subordination of evidence to ideology is well illustrated by the race-norming of school discipline. As Paul explains:
We're screwed if we must pretend that black students in public schools are suspended and otherwise disciplined at a disproportionately high rate (including by black teachers) mainly because of their race rather than because of their behavior and, underlying that behavior, their upbringing and family structure. And if we must therefore relax disciplinary standards. Lest we be accused of racism.We're screwed if we apply the same kind of fiction to adult criminals and redefine what's a crime and what's a proper criminal sentence in an attempt to create racially equal outcomes in our (until now Anglo-American) justice system. Lest we be accused of racism.
Or, put another way, the race-norming of school discipline is not merely noxious because of what it does to disrupt the climate of learning; it is, in addition and perhaps even worse, ominous because it foreshadows what is logically next -- the race-norming of criminal sentencing of adult offenders. We can already see the precursors, as Kent discussed in this entry about New Jersey's tendentious "study" of incarceration and race.
Much to be preferred is the tamely blunderbuss insistence that our penal system is just dumb.
This "ideology-over-fact" meme has persisted for so long, and been so overtaken with racial bullying, that one must finally ask: Who are the real racists in this debate? Those who want to preserve the bi-partisan policies we know save black lives and make them better and safer, or those who want to tear down the gains we've made, knowing (from Baltimore, from Chicago, from St. Louis, and from decades of crime statistics nationwide) what will happen to black lives if we do?
Paul's remarks (his column is titled "Pretending Our Way to Decline") are worth repeating in full. His launching point is the outrage recently vented at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for saying what to any half-educated person is well known -- that the United States has an Anglo-American legal system. The fury at this remark came sputtering out in the now-typical Leftist mix of bile and mendacity.
Paul starts:
I had hoped that the idiotic left-wing outrage at Attorney General Sessions' use of the term "Anglo-American law enforcement" would dissipate without making it into mainstream discussion. The fact that former President Obama has referred to the Anglo-American nature of our justice system seemed to support my hope.No such luck. This morning, I heard NPR pretend there is a legitimate racism story here. So did ABC News and the New York Daily News. (To its credit, the Washington Post countered by trying in two stories to set the record straight.)
Accordingly, I must reluctantly agree with Charles Cooke's take on this pseudo-controversy: "We're screwed."We're screwed as a polity if we must pretend that our system of law isn't what it actually is -- Anglo-American -- lest we be accused of racism.We're screwed if we must pretend that black students in public schools are suspended and otherwise disciplined at a disproportionately high rate (including by black teachers) mainly because of their race rather than because of their behavior and, underlying that behavior, their upbringing and family structure. And if we must therefore relax disciplinary standards. Lest we be accused of racism.We're screwed if we apply the same kind of fiction to adult criminals and redefine what's a crime and what's a proper criminal sentence in an attempt to create racially equal outcomes in our (until now Anglo-American) justice system. Lest we be accused of racism.We're screwed if we must pretend that personal and cultural "identity" are irrevocably tied to skin color, and have this doctrine taught to our children as a matter of fact. Lest we be accused of racism.
Nations with a relatively robust sense of reality usually outstrip, and often dominate, nations that lack this sense. Every nation indulges in fictions, but the fewer the better, especially when they carry significant policy implications -- explicit or implied.
We have seen, for example in 2015 and 2016, the Loretta Lynch/Sally Yates future of galloping crime. For close to a generation before them, we saw the Bill Clinton/George Bush record of receding crime. For people who care about reducing drug overdoses, violence and murder, and protecting the African American community that is disproportionately afflicted by these things, the choice is scarcely a hard one. The only way to make the wrong choice is to pretend facts don't exist -- pretend our way, that is, to murder.As the world becomes "smaller" and as we face more and more competition, the risk associated with pretending things becomes more acute. And the risk of adopting positions because they don't offend rather than because they are true becomes too great to assume.
The fact that former President Obama has referred to the Anglo-American nature
of our justice system seemed to support my hope.
Very excellent article.
I can predict however, that a close family member of mine, a liberal democrat lawyer/admin. judge,will not know that Obama said this, based on the
media she consumes.
[She did not know at all until this week that Obama referred to ISIS as
the "JV team", that he set a phony Red line in Syria until CNN
defended his retraction, and so much more.]
Therefore, she already believes that Sessions,
like Trump is a racist, further retrenching her
bias and cementing her 'resistance'.
I can check and report back.