Pollak: To Democrats, Governing Is Someone Else’s Problem

The chaos in America’s cities today is, unfortunately, not new or unique. Many cities suffered riots in 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — riots that left scars that have lasted. The difference: Democrats in 1968 wanted to restore order.

Robert F. Kennedy — who would himself be assassinated by a crazed Palestinian later that spring — wrote of riots:

A violent few cannot be permitted to threaten the well-being of the many, and the hopes of their fellows for progress. Those who lead others to burn and loot must feel the full force of the law. The full force of the law means just that: the swift apprehension and punishment of law breakers.

He added that enforcing the law “does not mean senseless and unnecessary killing by those who act in the name of government.” And he also described what the left calls “systemic racism” today — social problems that resulted from the legacy of slavery, “a condition that has been with us for 300 years, now worsened and intensified under the strains of modern life.”

But Kennedy, like other Democrats of an earlier generation, understood that disorder was the undoing of the inner city, that riots and violence would condemn the next generation of minority youth to poverty, poor education, dependence, and social misery.

Today’s Democrats treat governance as if it is somebody else’s job. In Chicago, successive mayors have failed to do anything to stop the murders of black youth on the city’s south and west sides. Instead, under pressure from Black Lives Matter activists, they have pulled the police back. They back more gun control laws, deflecting blame and hoping that somehow making some 300 million guns disappear nationwide will prove to be easier than keeping children in their own cities away from stray bullets.

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