Trump Has Maneuvered Democrats Into Supporting Crime

In a trip to Minnesota, J D Vance asked a question:

Why is it that you have mayors and governors who are angrier about Donald Trump offering to help them than they are about the fact that their own residents are being carjacked and murdered in the streets?

Other remarks are reported elsewhere:

We were having lunch yesterday and the president said, ‘JD, I don’t know how I did it? I have actually gotten the Democrats to come out in defense of crime.’ If Donald Trump came out tomorrow and said he really likes puppies, you would have AOC come out and say ‘Puppies are terrible.’

Actually, I think there's an answer. Let's recall that at least since Dukakis ran against Poppy Bush, the Democrats have represented an alliance between the upper class and the Lumpenproletariat, Marx's urban criminal underclass (Clinton made himself a deliberate exception). Marx had the instinct to recognize that the criminal underclass was not a reliable ally of the working class, but that's just a special case of the more general principle that crooks, pushers, adddicts, and hookers aren't reliable allies of anyone.

This impulse was first detected by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s:

In fact, this sort of nostalgie de la boue, or romanticizing of primitive souls, was one of the things that brought Radical Chic to the fore in New York Society. Nostalgie de la boue is a 19th-century French term that means, literally, “nostalgia for the mud.” . . . Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society. New arrivals have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated “middle class.” They can take on the trappings of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact, they are always used in combination.

On one hand, an ostentatious display of sympathy -- not for just the "lower orders", which covers a lot of ground, but for the urban criminal class in particular -- has social cachet among the wealthy, but I think there's an additional factor, which stems from the motive behind Fabian socialism, the wish to bargain a postponement in the world revolution, which in turn stems from the Enlightenment notion that man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

The upper classes in the mid to late 19th century hoped to avoid expropriations and massacre by implementing social insurance, although the Great War and the Depression did a great deal to undo these reforms, eliminating the constitutional basis for the aristocracy in Germany, Austria, and Russia, as the Revolution had already done in France. But another specter arrived in the 1960s, the Helter Skelter race war:

The Helter Skelter scenario is an apocalyptic vision that was supposedly embraced by Charles Manson and members of his Family. . . . {Manson trial prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in a subsequent book] presented evidence that, in a period that preceded the murders, Manson prophesied what he called Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war that would arise from racial tensions between black and white people.

I think this vision drove those who attended Leonard Bernstein's "radical chic" party much more than fear of a proletarian world revolution, but their motive wasn't too far from the 19th century European elites -- they wanted to postpone, or even forestall, the inevitable, insofar as it was possible. They did this by inviting the Black Panthers into their homes and holdiong parties for them, as Tom Wolfe explains it:

That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.” And now he is out on bail and walking into Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue. Harassment & Hassles, Guns & Pigs, Jail & Bail—they’re real, these Black Panthers. The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone.

The implicit deal: when the race war comes, do what you like with the white suburbanites, the middle class, even the working class in your own neighborhoods, just leave us alone. In return, we'll support politicians who'll treat you leniently if you're caught and look the other way over your criminal enterprises.

The problem is that the working class in places like DC has gotten wise to the deal: the Lumpenproletariat has gotten a freer and freer hand in all but the swankiest areas of the District, and the people interiewed in the video clips at the top of this post are recotgnizing that Trump's crackdown is in their very visible, immediate interest.

Nevertheless, the politicians who've had the support of the upper class in the post-1960s alliance with the Lumpenproletariat aren't changing their stance: the reason is that the upper class, via figures from George Soros to Laurene Powell Jobs to Bill Gates is still donating to their campaigns, while payoffs from drug syndicates still enrich inner-city politicians. They're all in favor of crime, because they're still geting money from big donors and baksheesh from the hood.

Right now, their problem is that they still have money, while the middle and working classes in both the suburbs and the inner city are beginning to recognize they have votes. The DC crime crackdown is turning out to be a major win, and it's forcing the upper class to admit they've bought off the Black Panthers and their successors by turning them loose on the working and middle classes.