Continued from above...
In Seattle, the movement to “abolish the police, prisons, and courts” is not simply the dream of marginalized radicals; it has also been adopted at the highest levels of municipal government. Activists have demanded that the public imagine a world beyond justice, and the political class is trying its best to imagine it, too.
These modern remakers of society are not hoping to achieve new policies within the given social order. Rather, they are looking to overturn that social order completely. “We are preparing the ground for a different kind of society,” declared socialist city council member Kshama Sawant in a recent committee hearing. “We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism—this police state. We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it and replace it with a world based instead on solidarity, genuine democracy, and equality—a socialist world.”
Though the new revolution is couched in the language of science—its programs are “data-driven” and “evidence-based”—the real objective is a revolution in values. The activists seek to establish what might be called a “reverse hierarchy of oppression,” destroying the final remnants of tradition, law, and order, and establishing the dominance of the outcast, the minority, and the oppressed. In the leaked documents from the county executive’s office, policymakers suggest that prisoners should be seen as society’s legitimate “rights holders” and that the “government is responsible for the problem [of crime]”—society is the criminal, on this view, and the criminal is the ideal citizen. It’s a disorienting inversion of values.
In reality, the progressive revolutionaries are replacing traditional justice with street justice; they are supplanting the rule of law with the rule of the mob. The early results of this experiment are sobering: armed gangs roam downtown, while fatal shootings are up nearly 50 percent from last year.
For the first time in living memory, the police department is losing its position as hegemon of the streets. The rioters of the Every Day March have begun to descend on residential neighborhoods, demanding that white homeowners “open [their] wallets” and “give black people back their homes.” As they move down the street, they chant in a call and response: “Who do we protect? Black criminals!”
One veteran Seattle police officer told me that he thinks that the recent disorder is merely the prelude to a long and dark era for the city. “Derek Chauvin is the Gavrilo Princip of our time,” the officer said, comparing the Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd to the Serbian assassin who sparked World War I. “The tide of public opinion is on the side of the activists, and they’re pushing the envelope as far as they can. It’s not hyperbolic to say that the endgame is anarchy.” But anarchy, too, is a feature of the revolution. The activists leave no room for grace, humility, or continuity. Like their historical predecessors, they will burn down entire cities in a fevered search for utopia.
https://www.city-journal.org/seattle...d-social-order