Police in Portland in 2021 – STRINGER/REUTERS© Provided by The Telegraph
Story by Zoe Strimpel | June 29, 2024 | The Telegraph
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One doesn’t always appreciate what one has until it’s too late. Cheaters look upon their wrecked families and suddenly see that their pre-affair life was comparatively idyllic. Youth is famously wasted on the young, who use their health and energy to binge on toxic substances and attempt to be as miserable as possible.
A similar phenomenon is at play in the politics of the West. We have built the most peaceful, most prosperous, most humane, most progressive civilisation the world has ever known, after centuries of battle – physical, moral and philosophical; carnage and bloodshed.
And now, just 80 years after Auschwitz and 30-odd years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are apparently already bored of our hard-won liberty and stability. The zeitgeist of the current age is to smash things up while pretending to be building a better world.
Only, as some are beginning to find out, what begins as a performative theory of progressivism ends up in murder, mayhem and misery.
An interesting case study is emerging in Portland, Oregon, where far-Left politics and hard-Left thugs meet violent alt-Righters and skinhead gangs. Once a prosperous city on America’s famously idyllic Pacific north-west coast, it’s become a nightmare that people are leaving in droves.
After the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd – and the insistence that the police were America’s front-running racism delivery service – Portland’s police force was “defunded”, the city’s top prosecutor refused to press charges for low-level crime, and, in 2021, most drug possession was decriminalised.
The result was not the paradise of “equity” that activists were demanding, but rampant homicide rates, a hugely worsening opioid and drug addiction crisis (deaths from opioid overdoses have tripled), the further sprawl of homeless tent encampments, and a general escalation in violence, with car theft having rocketed (30 vehicles a day are reported stolen, according to a report in the Times), along with car and shop window smashing.
In the name of the “safety” of promoting “anti-racism”, Portland has become such a dangerous place that businesspeople are leaving in droves. “Our stores are being broken into. Our merchandise is being taken,” a local businessman told the city council in November 2022. “Our employees can’t go into the office, even if they want to, because they don’t feel safe.”
Having had something so good, and then, through unforgivable decadence, destroyed it (with the bodycount to match), however, Portland is now changing its tune. The drug decriminalisation law has been reversed, low-level crime is once again prosecuted, and the police have been re-funded.
But I’m not just worried about the harm being done to cities and everyday life by social justice ideology – which in the UK is visible in our scaredy-cat approach to stop and search, lenient attitude towards illegal immigrants from countries known to export terror and for the mistreatment of women, and the refusal to tackle low-level crime and shoplifting.
It’s also our stupidity and hubris on the world stage – our grandstanding about meaningless utterances of “peace” and “provocation”. We are forgetting why it is that the free world managed to triumph in the 20th century.
Last week, Nigel Farage outed himself as deeply unfit for leadership by piping the same line as other populists in Europe and the United States: that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is effectively our fault because, through Nato expansion, we had “poked” the Russian bear (the accurate reading is that Putin was never “poked”, he is a bloodthirsty madman taking advantage of Western weakness to attack and colonise).
Meanwhile, the soft and useless Left that run the vast majority of international institutions have perhaps read too much postcolonial theory and – while they do tend to champion Ukraine against Russia – they also want, in general, to let rogues, dictators and repressive societies be, while opening the floodgates to an unvetted sea of people fleeing those countries.
And boy do they want the only decent, peace-exporting country in the whole Middle East – Israel – to fail.
Whichever way you look at it, the people in charge, or who are trying to be in charge, don’t get it. Too distanced from the horrors of the 20th century; too comfortable in the stable, peaceful and free societies fought for through blood and tears by their forefathers and mothers, they are embracing appeasement, in the name of a “peace” that literally translates into the triumph of those who want to destroy us.
They remain wilfully blind to the very important lesson of 1945: getting tough on baddies is the only path to meaningful peace.
Instead of shoring our civilisation up, and realising that preserving our societies is a constant battle against forces that want to destroy them, we are choosing to bring our best traditions, institutions and culture to the heel of rotten concepts like populism and isolationism (on the Right), and intersectionality (a Venn diagram of victim statuses), white privilege, equity, inclusion, and a ludicrous gender ideology movement venerating a bewildering array of identities on the Left.
The cost of all this foolery is real and it is apparent. The chickens we’ve laid at home and abroad are already coming home to roost.