By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
You have to give the leftists credit: They are persistent. Think back to the early 1990s, when New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton put in place the “broken windows” theory about police enforcement during Rudolph Giuliani’s time as mayor. The policy became so widely applauded that even the liberal establishment refrained from criticism.
That didn’t last. The left regrouped, and now, as we speak, the City Council in New York City is seriously proposing the decriminalization of public urination. I’m serious: This isn’t an early April’s Fool joke. It is hard to image a more dramatic turnabout from the broken windows theory. There are lessons to be learned here about what motivates the left in this country.
The broken windows theory was not Bratton’s brainchild. It was introduced by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an article in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, where they offered the following:
“Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.”
After seeing Bratton’s policies in action, support for them became widespread. It made sense. If you crack down on low-level crimes and misbehavior — broken windows, littering, graffiti, loitering, turnstile jumping, public intoxication — you create a public square where more serious crime becomes less likely. Bratton’s campaign against the infamous “squeegee men” who accosted motorists on their way into and out of Manhattan with menacing “offers” to clean their car windows, became emblematic of the policy. It worked. The crime rate went down dramatically, especially the murder rates.
The success was so dramatic that many liberal commentators spoke openly of their confidence that left-wing Mayor Bill de Blasio, whatever other changes he might consider, would never reverse this approach to law enforcement. The commentators were wrong. Not long after taking office, de Blasio began changing Giuliani’s policies. The most talked-about change was his decision to end the “stop and frisk” policy of searching young men whom the police thought potential lawbreakers to see if they were carrying guns.
But de Blasio and his allies did not stop there. We now have public urination on the agenda. According to New York’s Daily News, “City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito’s office is working on a proposal that” those caught urinating in public not be arrested, but given a “ticket to one of the city’s administrative courts, such as the Environmental Control Board,” where “missed court dates would turn into default monetary judgments.”
No one, including representatives of the NYC police department, thinks those who get these tickets will treat them seriously.
What is the argument behind permitting public urination to go unpunished? The accusation was made that arrests for public urination were discriminatory, unfairly targeting blacks and Latino’s; that the arrests would become part of their public record and affect their ability to get jobs, housing, and student loans.
I can picture many Americans sighing in exasperation and muttering, “What’s next? Will this ever stop?” It is easy to see why. Over the past few decades we have seen our laws against pornography and public indecency all but disappear, vagrancy laws stricken from the books, recreational drug use become mainstream, and same-sex marriage and transgender locker rooms depicted as American as apple pie. There has to be a point where the leftists will stop this assault against our traditional values. Right?
Wrong. I can’t predict what the leftists will campaign against next, but they will not let up. Their Marxist roots instruct them that everything we hold sacred, pious, noble, moral, and high-minded, was determined by the private property rights central to capitalism. It is what they mean by economic determinism. Their mission in life is to “liberate” us from these “bourgeois” beliefs, by “deconstructing” them (as the current generation of Marxists in the academy expresses it), by convincing us that they are illegitimate and oppressive tools of the ruling classes to make us more docile members of society.
Here’s how it works. Marriage? A construct to guarantee a man’s possession of his wife as a form of private property. Laws to discourage promiscuity, drunkenness, and drug abuse? Nothing but enforcement mechanisms to ensure productive workers for the corporate bosses. Calls to patriotism and public service? Incantations devised to make us willing to give our lives to protect the property of the ruling classes.
Religion? The opiate of the people, a con-job to convince the oppressed that God loves the poor and the hungry and those who suffer and thirst for justice sake more than the self-indulgent fat cats who live off their misery — so that the fat cats can go on enjoying their unjustly acquired wealth.
And laws against urinating in public? Restrictions to preserve an orderly atmosphere where business owners can most easily turn a profit — by charging exorbitant prices on the people like those who are arrested for relieving themselves when nature calls.
Do the Marxist deconstructionists really believe all this? (Well, you can be sure they are not going to permit the homeless to urinate outside their faculty offices.) On one level it doesn’t matter. They are going to continue to push on with their lives’ work to undermine the societal beliefs of the Christian West, even if they enjoy the nice little coffee shops and weekend cottages in the country that they frequent.
It is why the young people who come under their influence adorn themselves with grotesque tattoos and body piercings that give the impression that they have turned their backs on everything that their parents hold refined and high-minded, that they have rejected life on what Winston Churchill once called the “sunlit uplands of life.” They give that impression because they are designed to do that. They learned it from their professors.
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