The Price of Eliminating Consequences
By Victor Davis Hanson
Magnanimity demonstrated to those harming us at home and abroad is interpreted as American weakness, if not decadence to be further exploited.
Recently there were some remarkable online videos of a Portland, Oregon good Samaritan confronting shoplifters and forcing them to dump loads of their pilfered goods.
More stunning, however, was the sheer outrage—of the thieves!
They pouted. They screamed. They resisted. How dare anyone stop them from stealing anything they wished.
The criminals entertained no fear of any consequences for walking out with bags of things that were not theirs. They had no care that mainstreaming their habits would undermine the entire fabric of society.
What is common to the pandemic of smash-and-grab, carjacking, fighting on airliners while in flight, and deadly Saturday night shoot-outs is this same apparent assurance there will be no consequences.
That expectation of exemption is why the Antifa thugs in Atlanta were so bold in their latest violent attacks on the police.
And why not, after the 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, and assault in summer 2020 which resulted in few Antifa indictments, fewer convictions, and almost no imprisonments.
The “broken windows” theory of policing in the 1990s and 2000s showed how the failure to punish even minor infractions soon leads to escalation to more violent crimes.
The homeless take for granted that ancient rules forbidding urination, defecation, fornication, and injection on the sidewalks do not apply to them. Is it any wonder that they increasingly are not victims of circumstance but victimizers of innocent passersbys?
Yet deterrence is not just eroded from the bottom up, but also from the top down—and by an elite who assume it will never be subject to the chaos it wrought.