They are the joint product of the politics of grievance and the growing expansion of government. The taxes that made the mobs dependent also armed the paramilitary police that contain them. You have one government department handing out Obamaphones and another handing out MRAPs to the cops. HHS gives out Obamacare and the IRS enforces it. (…)
The only people who don’t belong in this tableau are people who work for a living. In Ferguson, schools have been closed, stores shuttered and businesses shut. Does anybody remember — or care — about the convenience store owner whose robbery was the proximate cause of this dust-up? No, because he was only the victim of a “prank” who has no spoken lines in this grand production. He is no more than a bit player, a prop even, in the inexorable drama of progressive history.
Marxism has always had a particular hatred for “shopkeepers”; the guys who cook your ham and eggs in the diner or pick up the trash in the morning. It reviles as ridiculous the people who and try and get by without being uplifted by noble thoughts of race, class warfare or the Engines of History. Yet the ordinary productive man is who actually makes the world turn; who builds the Obamaphones and who provides the cigars to steal.
The attitude “if you don’t want trouble, just hand me the cigars” is met by its fatal twin: Police Officer: “if you don’t want to get shot…just do what I tell you.“ In this universe there is no room for freedom or behavior based on shared culture. There is no room for individual responsibility or limited government. That went out of style along with the old document called the Constitution that nobody reads anymore. All that is left is an insistent crowd outside of a fortified distribution center.
