The woke, or progressive, fantasy is that idealistic motives can and should underlie all government policy. By this thinking, progressives feel sorry for criminals, particularly criminals of color, whom they perceive as the victims of “systemic racism” and predatory capitalism. Therefore, punishment for criminals of color should be minimized, no matter how heinous or frequent the wrongdoing has been. Only in this way, progressives believe, can “systemic racism” be combated.
One frequent meme of the far left is that America has ignored its poor communities, which are largely communities of color. Government, they argue, should invest massive amounts of money into rehabilitating poor communities; the money can be had by reducing defense requirements and, locally, by defunding police departments, as well as by raising taxes on what the left considers “the rich.” This point of view is well illustrated in an essay published by the leftwing online publication, Next City.
The author is a man named Cody Tuttle, who has an M.A. in sociology and is pursuing a Master’s in Public Policy at the University of Minnesota. He claims, “We as a society choose not to invest in poor communities.” He goes on the explain, “We can invest in affordable housing construction and maintenance… We can flood schools with resources to attract good teachers and enable students to succeed… We can invest in jobs and local businesses and make it easier for minority-owned businesses to do well… We can clean up vacant lots and replace them with parks and green space… We can build grocery stores and subsidize the outsized cost of nutritious foods…” And, of course, being a progressive, he adds, “We can shift police practices to be more community-oriented and preventative [sic] rather than punitive and reactive…”.
That is quite a to-do list. It all sounds reasonable, but where does the money come from? Oakland is broke. Stone-cold broke. There’s barely enough money to keep basic services going. Every item on his list is expensive, in some cases enormously so. Does he think “we” (whoever that is) can just mint money to build and maintain affordable housing? Does he think we can “flood schools with resources”? Does he think that cleaning up vacant lots and replacing them parks is free? Does he really believe that it’s the city’s responsibility to “subsidize” the cost of things at Whole Foods? I mean, get real, Mr. Tuttle.
This is the biggest problem with wokes. They have zero sense of economic reality. They think that, just by identifying a need, the money will be there, or can be produced. It’s magical thinking. I can’t even remember how many times I’ve pointed out the cost of building a single unit of affordable housing in the Bay Area. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. (I’m not talking about tiny homes but actual buildings with apartments.) But I’ve never heard a woke say where the money should come from. Their only answer in the past has been the raise business taxes, impose parcel taxes on already over-burdened homeowners, and hold out their hands to Sacramento and Washington, D.C. for grants that are drying up faster than grass in California summer.
You’d think at some point that people like Cody Tuttle would snap out of their coma and come to grips with reality. Politics is the art of the possible. Politics was never designed to help fantasts achieve their wildest dreams. So when Tuttle accuses “we as a society” of having “chosen not to invest in poor communities,” he’s dead wrong. No wonder people increasingly distrust colleges, especially schools of liberal arts, where woke academicians in ivory towers churn out solutions to all America’s problems with no regard to possibility or reality. Here in Oakland, we have the most progressive, woke government in our history, and if they can’t find the money to do all these things, then no one can, and for a simple reason: it’s not there.
We see this kind of magical thinking in the case of Pamela Price. I was heartened to hear that the plea deal she offered to a murderer was decisively rejected by a judge, who rightfully blasted Price for allowing a triple murderer to receive only a light prison sentence. Price, of course, holds the view that criminals, including murderers, are simply misunderstood and misguided individuals who need society’s help and understanding, so that their lives will not be upended by long prison sentences. We, at the Coalition for a Better Oakland, hold precisely the opposite view: that some criminals are so dangerous, so hardcore, so irredeemable, that they must be isolated from society for a long time. Otherwise, how is society to function safely and justly? Price, like Cody Tuttle, is a fantast—a victim of her own daydreams. She envisions a society without prisons, without police, without a criminal justice system. But, unfortunately, such a society will never exist, as long as crime exists. But this is a conceptual step Price is unwilling, or possibly unable, to make. In imposing her fantasy on the rest of us, she raises the risk to all of us by a considerable margin.
We have to stay focused on the real and the possible, which means: holding criminals accountable. Protecting our communities with greater numbers of police, and lifting the barriers on letting cops perform their jobs. We have to understand, as a society, that we are always going to have poor people, and that it is intolerable to suggest that people are poor because they’ve been ignored by the government. We have to understand that the only solution to poverty is to prevent it in the first place, which means: raising children correctly, making sure they stay in school, teaching them skills to hold jobs, and inculcating them with a system of moral values that precludes criminal activity. These things are both real and possible. Lifting everyone into some kind of progressive middle class comfort is not real, and we should reject politicians who claim they can perform magic if only you will elect them.
Steve Heimoff