Antinomianism in the American Cities: a Soros Blunder
Antinomianism is, in Christian theology, the rejection of God's law. It is an accusation which has been levelled at the adherents of Martin Luther by the high church for centuries, which would make it a thoroughly obscure concept, relegated to the backroom debates of church elders. But in attempting to describe what I have stumbled upon in the secular world, I can think of no comparable epithet. The direct meaning of the word itself is "against law". It is an idea so radical, that only drug addled lunatics like the sorts who would call themselves "anarchists" could possibly believe in it, or so one would think.
And yet in the past few years, several District Attorneys and mayors in the United States have decided to stop enforcing the law, and disempower the police from from enforcing it. The cities where this has occured are all Democrat-run, and have all seen a dramatic increase in petty theft, vagrancy, violent crime, political violence and common assault. These cities are Boston, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Orlando and more recently Dallas. These officials are radical in their application of their powers, and have categorically ended the prosecution of several kinds of crimes. The main points of similarity are a refusal to charge people for petty crimes, drug possession, assault of police officers, vagrancy, squatting, loitering, vandalism or common assault by left-wing political protesters.
The documentary which first drew my attention was Seattle is Dying. To be fair, the city had it worse in the 1980s, but the recent policy changes have reversed the downward trend in crime, and ignored alternative solutions. While NYC focused on broken windows and petty crime, chasing the public crime figures down to less than a third of Seattle's, Seattle's crime decline stagnated years ago, and the rates of petty crime, police assault, vagrancy, drug addiction and all the other things associated with it have gone up in inner-city areas.
Now, I do not believe in maximum penalties, nor am I emotionally interested in punishment. I even agree with James Gilligan that it is an unhealthy, revenge-based social impulse to take satisfaction from punishment. But to maintain a civil society, we need deterrents against crime. And for a deterrent to function, it must be consistently applied, and must be taken seriously. For a crime to be taken seriously as a crime, it must be treated seriously by all those agencies who have the mandate in the situation. The entire process which an individual goes through of confronting their crimes does not work unless their behaviour has a tangible impact.
Frustrated, reactionary policeman have voiced the opinion (supposedly backed up by evidence) that those who get shot in the commission of a crime are less likely to repeat the offence. Obviously, the sentiment the police in this case were conveying, that we ought to use a maximum quantity of violence, is outrageously stupid, and the accompanying racism which these police engaged in is an indictment of the team's working culture. But to pull us back to the realm of reason, it is quite clearly the presence of unpleasant consequences, be they social judgment, physical pain or deprivation of freedom which causes a criminal or budding delinquent to reassess their life choices. It doesn't always work, that's for certain. But that is no justification for legalising criminal behaviour.
The core reason, repeated by every DA in these cities, is their aim of reducing the number of people incarcerated, particularly poor and coloured people, at any cost. As admirable as their concerns may be, the unfortunate reality is that the poor will always represent the lion's share of violent crime. The less fortunate corollary is that those who bear the brunt of the consequences of the crimes of the poor are the poor. By refusing to arrest poor criminals, you expose the poor to more crime. You reduce the likelihood of extreme criminals reforming themselves, and you deny justice to victims while exposing them to greater risk of violence and loss of property.
And there is evidence that this is not merely speculation. DA Rollins of Suffolk County (Boston, for the non-Americans out here) will pardon almost everything if the perpetrator has enough oppression points:
"some of the “low level” defendants Rollins let walk after plea deals including, for example, a man who bashed a young woman’s head in while she was walking her dog at the Navy Yard in Charlestown causing brain injury." [Source]
There is some debate around what effect enforcing the prohibition of drug possession has; I am on the side of strict enforcement, but I am not the word of God. However, not prosecuting people for thefts up to $750 or even $1000 is about as unreasonable as it can get. Pretty much all existing criminological research will tell you that this is a terrible idea, but this is not what these district attourneys are basing their policy on. They simply consider using any serious deterrent as a harm too great to weigh against the harm of the individual infractions. This is a moral argument, and one that would be sound, if we were dealing with abstract humans, made entirely of ephemeral idealium, people who never engaged in repeated interactions, situational learning or learning by example.
But we instead live in a society. Criminals and the community at large learn and change behaviour in response to the setting they find themselves in. If there are no prosecutorial repercussions for theft, then the only true cost of the good in the stores is a touch of play-acting and a night in the cell with a free meal. What this also amounts to is the DAs overriding state legislature, and writing the criminal code themselves. For example, they will set their own thresholds for prosecution of possession, despite strict legislation determining precisely what is considered "dealing" and what is "possession" quantities. This is a radical violation of the separation of powers which America uses to keep the oozing abuse of power from drowning it. This is placing a partisan philosophy above the oaths of office.
So what the bloody hell is going on?
The shameless ideological dogmatism is undeniably aggravating. But at the risk of pleasing the antisemites in the audience, there is undeniably a financial origin of this wave of mutilation. As several of the above-linked articles indicate, George Soros has been funding these DAs as part of a "#resistance" manoeuvre, pouring over a million dollars into the campaign funds of each candidate. Of course, it's too soon to tell exactly how bad the results are going to be, but looking at the existing problems the police are facing, and that the residents are complaining about, (if you haven't followed the links above, go back now and do yourself a disfavour), the prospect is not a good one.
All of these DA's and mayors have acquired their positions as a direct result of the massive cash injections provided by George Soros. In Philadelphia, as in Orlando and elsewhere, these radical progressives use their first days in office to purge ideological opponents. This has led to major disruptions in criminal trials, and long backlogs. For anybody who has ever read a book by George Soros, this seems to be an utterly bizarre streak of behaviour for him to endorse. A dogmatic, ideologically driven political purge, and a refusal to listen to the protests of ordinary citizens runs entirely counter to the philosophy which Soros claims to espouse. But it is in fact an inevitable unintended consequence of Soros's principled beliefs, and his inability to control how his benefactors express them.
In all of his essays and books, he expresses a desire to pursue maximally liberal policies, in the sense of maximising freedom and openness, to create and preserve what Karl Popper calls the Open Society (hence the Open Society Foundation) for instance, the Harm Reduction approach to prostitution, drug abuse and birth control - which means maximum permissiveness of all forms of these activities. He firmly believes that moralistic laws are anathema to the Open Society, a concept he borrows from his far more patient and nuanced mentor Karl Popper. By funding these DAs, Soros, I believe, was pursuing a Harm Reduction approach to homelessness and drug abuse. He is also attempting to reduce racial disparity is criminal statistics.
But in blindly pursuing anything that looks Liberal, Soros is failing to learn the central lesson of his own philosophy. In The Age of Fallibility, he talks about the need to recognise "reflexivity"; that effects in the social realm have complex, unseen feedback loops, and that action in a system changes the way the system works. This means there can never be certainty in society. But Soros has been backing the same ideas for decades, with cast-iron moral certainty. These are the ideas of the global Western ruling class - what the socialist left tend to call "neoliberals" (though frankly, that term can mean anything neither-fascist-nor-communist these days). While he may be a bright thinker, he is thoroughly blinded by the contemporary consensus on what constitutes freedom and equality and the brotherhood of man in the eyes of liberal, elite-university graduates.
Running such a massive multinational organisation as he does, Soros has to rely on this class of blind, haughty self-important "experts". Many of these are not the rosy-cheeked idealists they look like. As a result, a huge number of political entrepreneurs from Ukranian neo-nazis to child-grooming, and financial censorship advocates and regular old communist whackjobs have managed to play his Open Society Foundation for the loose fiddle that it is. His attempts to reach in and assist Harm Reduction strategies come at a time when humanities departments have begun to churn out even more detached and ideologically frenetic leftists than ever before.
To be perfectly clear, the Open Society Foundation has done plenty of good, even here in South Africa. But the massive naivete, the dogged attachment to left over heft, to liberalism at the expense of liberty, reinforced by the arrogance of elite expertise, has resulted in Soros financing a world he will not live long enough to see, but would likely be horrified by if he could. As a young holocaust survivor, he railed against totalitarianism, and later racism and authoritarianism, his energies have turned against authority itself, and are summoning the destruction of the rule of law. As a man who build his financial career around exploiting disequilibrium, and his life around avoiding experiencing it, it seems a bitter irony that the gyroscope he believed he was operating is in fact a see-saw, and it has taken him from fighting tyranny to funding chaos.