On Saturday April 17, California Congressional Rep. Maxine Waters called for protestors to “stay on the street” and “get more confrontational” were former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to be acquitted. Some complained that the statements were inciting violence which Congresswoman Waters subsequently denied. To my eye that was not inciting to riot under 18 U.S. Code § 2102. It may have been an incitement to violence which is also illegal under federal law but that would be hard to prove. IMO it is brinksmanship.

If you’re not familiar with that term, “brinksmanship” means trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. The term may have been coined in the 1950s by Adlai Stevenson. I believe the concept derives from Stephen Potter. In the late 1940s he wrote a book called The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating followed up the following years by a number of other books, One-Upmanship, and Lifemanship.

In my view Rep. Waters remarks were reckless and brinksmanship but not actually illegal and the House should have censured her for them.

In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger declaims:

When Rep. Maxine Waters of California (Los Angeles) was asked whether she was inciting violence by telling the demonstrators arrayed around her in Brooklyn Center, Minn., to “get more confrontational,” she responded with the politician’s user-key response that she isn’t “about violence.”

Don’t bother looking, Ms. Waters, but you—like all the rest of us today in the United States—are engulfed in violence: the political violence of street protests, the violence of rising urban crime, the violence of cops either shooting suspects or getting shot by suspects, and the violence committed routinely by homicidal shooters.

[…]

It might seem like a stretch to conflate political riots, violent inner-city crime and individual shooters, but I’m not so sure they aren’t related. Obviously something is spinning out of control in the U.S. Whatever status quo exists to mitigate each of these forms of violence, it isn’t working anymore. It is failing.

There used to be widely shared boundaries on personal and public behavior. Not anymore. A lot of people no longer know how to behave or where the lines are that one shouldn’t cross.

[…]

How could the postelection Washington mob that invaded the Capitol think that was no different than attending a rally on the Mall?

Whatever happened to the thought, “Maybe I don’t want to do this?” Or shouldn’t do this.

[…]

There is a pattern here of misgovernance and misjudgments. Black Lives Matter and its advocates argue, correctly, that the criminal-justice system arrests and jails too many young black men. Their solution is de minimis policing and prosecution, explicitly to repair “systemic racism.”

This is a consequentially dangerous error of judgment. They are absolving young men of personal responsibility for acts of violence against their neighbors.

The reality across the U.S.—on the streets of protest, in the toughest neighborhoods or in the minds of the homicidally deranged—is that the simple and utilitarian concept of behavioral “pushback” has lost consensus support.

Without pushback’s demarcation of limits—whether with accepted norms of behavior, a basic police function, or the credible defense of limits by public officials (not least U.S. presidents)—the future will bring more crude violence. Which no one will condone.

This was the original meaning behind the idea of maintaining social guardrails. They’ve been taken down—again.

I have one explanation to Mr. Henninger’s implied question and one that should be disquieting. I think we are transmogrifying from a guilt society to a shame society, from a society regulated by internalize guilt to one only regulated by externalized shame. Some of that is inevitable and should have been expected, as we import an increasing number of people inculcated into shame societies. Why should it be disquieting? Because shame societies require a lot more policing to regulate behavior than guilt societies do. Another reason is that for some reason public shaming is now off limits. It’s not nice.

It is not bigotry to point out that most homicides in the U. S. are young black men killing one another. And it is not bigotry to point out that public officials need to regulate their own speech and behavior more rigorously. I said that of President Trump although I didn’t perseverate on it and I think the same is true of members of Congress. It is consistent. That is the meaning of “coequal branches of government”.

I have complained about Rep. Waters’s statements and behavior in the past. The woman is pretty obviously a loose cannon and a loose cannon that, while what she says and does may be appealing to her constituents, is inconsistent with how we should want public officials to behave, particularly in the present context. Congress’s failure to admonish her is a scandalous dereliction of duty on the part of the Congressional Democratic leadership. She cannot merely be dismissed as a back-bencher or unimportant because she is a part of that leadership, the House Chief Majority Whip and a past chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus. For Democrats it may be worse than a crime; it may prove a mistake.

Rokhaya Diallo is a French journalist, TV personality, and activist. In an op-ed in the Washington Post lamenting the passage of a French law limiting the wearing of hijabs and even banning their being worn in certain circumstances she observes:

The new version of the law creates new reasons to surveil Muslim citizens and restricts their freedom of religion in a way that has never been seen before.

While the secular law in place bans hijabs in schools and for civil servants only, the senate decided to ban religious signs for parents who take part in extracurricular activities, which basically means the exclusion of Muslim hijab-wearing mothers from school life.

Lawmakers also decided to forbid burkinis in swimming pools and to exclude any person wearing religious signs from taking part in a sporting event or a competition hosted by a federation or sport association. In a context where the French Football Federation is the only international body to restrict women with hijabs from participating in sport, the senate is amplifying the pressure on Muslim women who constantly face exclusion.

concluding:

France has been discussing the outfits of Muslim women for at least three decades. In 1989, girls were excluded from middle school for wearing headscarves. Since then, France has singled itself out for an incredible number of controversies over Muslim women daring to appear covered in public. Women have been attacked and dismissed for leading a student union, being nannies, being part of a television singing contest, running for office, participating in a news show, attending a public hearing, volunteering in a charity, wearing a long skirt at school, applying for a job, being provided adequate sporting equipment, and in so many other situations. This article would not be able to name all the times when Muslim women’s choices have been violently debated without them.

The provisions received unfavorable opinions from the current government and the law commission, and French President Emmanuel Macron’s majority party in the National Assembly will probably not vote for them. But the fact that they have been approved by one of the two legislative chambers says a lot about how far lawmakers are ready to go to erase Muslim women from the public sphere. The debate, taking place without the participation of the main parties concerned, itself normalizes the exclusion of the community.

Muslim women are reclaiming their freedom over their bodies. Pretending to save them from oppression while banning them from activities is nothing more than denying them agency.

As you know it is not my practice to criticize the decisions about their own affairs of people in countries other than my own and, indeed, I hesitate before remarking about such decisions in states other than my own. I believe the French have an absolute right to determine what it means to be French as they see fit. Laïcisme has been one of the foundational doctrines of the French nation for more than 200 years and in France it extends to the public wearing of religious symbols. Similarly, égalité, equality, has been one of the foundations of the French nation for more than 200 years and goes so far as to prohibit categorizing French citizens by race. How many people of sub-Saharan African descent are there in France? Officially, the French do not know because it is illegal for such records to be kept or such a tally to be made.

Contrary to whatever impressions you might have the wearing of hijabs by Muslim women is not a religious requirement under Islam. It is a custom and a religious and political statement. If the French decide that such customs and statements are contrary to being French, that’s up to them.

And as I have said before France and the other ethnic states of Europe have a decision before them. They may continue to remain the ethnic states with more or less uniform cultures that they been for centuries or they can try to remold themselves into multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-confessional states. Each of those alternatives has consequences. It’s not up to me to decide their choice for them.

I thought that Lance Morrow’s description of the Derek Chauvin trial and its outcome in the Wall Street Journal was about right:

Derek Chauvin’s trial became a melodrama of American themes: racial grievance, rage, rebellion, justice and injustice, revenge. It became historic American theater, up there with Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, Alger Hiss and O.J. Simpson —that last one a circus and a travesty and a showcase of the idea of jury nullification, the principle that appeals to what the pioneering black lawyer Dovey Roundtree called “justice older than the law.”

During the Chauvin trial, a rumbling of the idea of jury nullification—a huge, credible threat of mayhem if the jury didn’t deliver what President Biden called the “right verdict”—passed through the streets of nearly every city in the country. Mob nullification proclaims that it doesn’t matter what the law says, not when you come down to the fiercer basics. The Ku Klux Klan also embraced the tactic; it isn’t a principle that a country can afford to indulge very often. But Minneapolis stirred a memory of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, too.

Smartphone videos were decisive in the Minneapolis morality play. Floyd had already established that he was claustrophobic. He was placed in a prone position on the pavement, pinned by knees on his neck and back, which intensified the symptom a claustrophobe most fears: I can’t breathe! That was the crux of it: the sadism—the gratuitous and, one might say, thoughtful cruelty. Maximize the suffering; test the helpless man’s limits. I once wrote a book about evil, and found that one of evil’s signature qualities is its weirdly intelligent and speculative gratuitousness, as if it were saying, “I wonder what will happen if I . . .”

The revelation of cruelty and sadism on the streets of Minneapolis seemed to connect to several centuries of American history and thus acquired a representative moral power.

What if Derek Chauvin had taken the stand? What if he had wept and begged forgiveness? Would that have been enough? Would it have persuaded the jury, or the public?

In an earlier America, I saw a morality play of something like forgiveness unfolding in Alabama when I covered George Wallace’s last campaign for governor, in 1982. By then he had been in his wheelchair, in great pain, for more than a decade, having been shot and paralyzed by a would-be assassin while he campaigned for president in Maryland.

As I went among the Wallace supporters, I was amazed to find not a few black people, who—because Wallace had apologized, sort of, for his earlier racial politics, and because he had suffered, and because they said he had done a lot for Alabama’s blacks by way of community colleges and such—were inclined to forgive him his earlier sins. I remember coming away from a sweet Labor Day picnic among the Wallace people in Noccalula Falls—the crowd numbering many blacks as well as whites—with a feeling that there was hope in that sort of transcendence.

But then again, Wallace had suffered, had been through the fire. That is a sort of theological necessity. In the eyes of those who would be asked to forgive him, Derek Chauvin doesn’t qualify.

The country in 2020-21 has the worst case of the American jitters since the late 1960s—with mass shootings, riots, Covid, creeping civic hysteria. I sometimes think that the famous final words of “The Great Gatsby” have their most pertinent application in reference to race in America: “So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.”

When, we wonder in the 21st century, will the past ever end? And aren’t we sick of it by now?

I don’t think that whether we are “sick of it” matters a great deal. As Faulkner put it, the past isn’t prologue—it isn’t even past. As long as people are willing to ignore bad cops in the name of some supposedly greater good, as long as police officers maintain a culture in which cruelty of the sort that Chauvin rather obviously employed is not only tolerated or accepted but assumed, and as long as there’s money to be made from stirring up old fears and resentments, we will continue to be “boats against the current”. Which is to say forever.

While I found Joel Kotkin’s discussion at UnHerd of what he characterizes as “a looming Democratic civil war” interesting and largely agree with his analysis of the various factions that comprise today’s Democratic Party I think there are a few things he’s missing. Here’s a snippet or two from the piece.

Take the Democrats’s newest supporters: America’s tech oligarchs, Wall Street financiers and urban real estate speculators. They may act “woke” on issues surrounding gender, race and the environment. But such “virtue signalling” is no substitute for the drastic policies pushed by the party’s Left: the confiscation of vast wealth, the break-up of monopolies and the introduction of ever-higher taxes. Big business, after all, is the clear winner in the status quo that the Left, with good reason, despises.

But the impending Democratic civil war is more than, as some conservatives see it, a two-dimensional conflict between “the establishment and the radicals”. Largely ignored in this narrative is the most unappreciated, least articulate yet arguably the largest Democrat-voting bloc: middle and working-class moderates who make up roughly 50% of the party. These voters may often favour populist economics, but remain threatened by the cultural, economic and environmental policies pushed by the other two factions.

and

Certainly, parts of Biden’s program — expanding health coverage as well as investments in basic infrastructure and manufacturing — could appeal to these voters, who are now generally supportive of an activist government. But Biden has also backed measures on cultural and environmental issues that are unlikely to win over the traditional working and middle classes. For example, fracking bans, already endorsed by Vice President Harris, could, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, cost 14 million jobs, far more than the eight million lost in the Great Recession.

Belying his regular guy image, Biden has also expressed support for programmes that would force suburban areas to densify. It is likely few suburbanites, the majority of all Americans, would welcome federal overseers deciding how their communities should be changed. Meanwhile, attempts to force residents out of their cars and into transit, something they were abandoning well before Covid, seems quixotic as well as politically stupid. The President’s Transportation Secretary has even suggested a tax on “vehicle miles” travelled, a measure almost calculated to alienate middle and working-class families outside a few dense urban cores.

and

Biden has already delivered on one of tech’s biggest concerns: the restoration of HIB tech workers — essentially, relatively cheap short-time servants from Asia. The Bay Area economy, for example, depends on for as much as 40% of its workforce from non-citizens. It’s no surprise that the travel ban and Trump’s often crude policies on immigration helped transform Silicon Valley into a virtually one-party state .

But this corporate Leftism extends well beyond Silicon Valley. Where the Democrats once ruled mining and manufacturing towns; today they represent 41 of the 50 wealthiest Congressional districts. Wall Street and the tech oligarchy can afford not to see Biden’s “green agenda” as raising living costs or threatening jobs. Instead, Valley oligarchs and Wall Street financiers salivate over the potential killing to be made from subsidies for their renewable fuels investments and electric car schemes, as the radical filmmaker Michael Moore, among others, has documented. The green economy has already spawned its first mega-billionaire, Elon Musk, whose core businesses feed largely on regulatory and tax policies that favour his products.

One of the things I think he’s missing is the “take it or leave it” attitude that has infected both political parties. Elected officials haven’t actually represented their home districts in years. By and large they actually represent the consensus in Washington, DC. Some blame that on the electorate but not I. I attribute it to huge, unwieldy gerrymandered districts which inevitably yield winners much like their predecessors. Those districts are neither competitive nor representative in any meaningful sense. In the last four elections a ridiculously small number of seats have changed parties and in some states 2/3s of candidates ran completely unopposed. The candidates represent themselves and the party leadership because they can. What’s the alternative when a candidate runs unopposed?

Another thing I think he’s missing is the affiliational nature of voting. Many people vote for the Democratic candidate because she is a Democrat. What he may believe or stand for other than party affiliation makes relatively little difference.

The third thing I think he’s missing is that however fractured or dissatisfied Democrats may be Republicans may not be able to capitalize on their disaffection. There may be some shifts at the margins but no truly tectonic change. As Adam Smith observed 250 years ago, there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.

It takes Laura Tyson and Jan Mischke quite a while to get around to “however” in their article on the prospects for increasing productivity in the U. S. economy at Project Syndicate but they get around to it ultimately:

In the US and other industrialized economies, the largest negative impact of the pandemic on jobs and incomes has been in food services, retail, hospitality, customer service, and office support. Many of these low-wage jobs could disappear altogether if pandemic-induced reductions in professional office time and business travel diminish demand for myriad services such as office cleaning, security and maintenance, transportation, and restaurant and hospitality services. Prior to the pandemic, these occupations accounted for one in four US jobs and a growing share of employment for workers without a post-secondary education.

Weak investment poses another demand-side risk to potential productivity growth. Business investment rates overall were already in long-run decline before the pandemic (hence the post-2008 productivity slowdown), and investment has since contracted further, owing to a decrease in private non-residential investment from its 2019 peak. That said, the decline in investment during the COVID-19 recession has not been as large as that of the 2007-09 financial crisis.

All of the improvements they categorize earlier in their piece require substantial amounts of business capital investment and such investment faces substantial headwinds. While a reduction in capital investment is not inevitable when business taxes increase it does seem likely and what’s more uncertainty about the requirements to pay additional taxes will itself reduce investment. Additionally, the lag between passing President Biden’s trillion dollar stimulus package and the funds actually being disbursed is substantial, another disincentive to investment. Finally, the areas in which improvements are likely and those in which the funding will be spent are not the same and boosting employment and improving productivity are in competition with one another.

It may ultimately come down to priorities. Which is more important? Improving productivity, creating better jobs, or employing people who are out of work? Doing all three at the same time is pretty darned unlikely.

In his regular Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley remarks on President Biden’s policy on immigration:

Beltway elites are reluctant to acknowledge it, but Mr. Trump had his ear to the ground on immigration. Voters didn’t always like his tone—and polling suggested they didn’t share his wall fixation—but his prioritization of border security resonated with millions, including many who typically vote for Democrats. Even Democratic strategists have acknowledged that deference to progressives, who by the way are now raising state income taxes to finance five-figure Covid-relief checks for undocumented workers, played a role in the party’s underperformance among Hispanics last year. Mr. Biden ignores all this at his peril.

By the time Mr. Trump left office, he had limited to 15,000 the number of refugees admitted annually to the U.S. In February, President Biden said that he would increase the cap to 125,000, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken later reduced to 62,500. Now the administration is having second thoughts about even that lower number, and for good reasons. The number of apprehensions along the southern border in March, more than 171,000, was the highest since 2006.

Now those statistics are somewhat miselading. “Encounters” as they’re called were reduced to 15,000 per month or thereabouts during a pandemic in which the U. S. was faring worse than Mexico. And various explanations have been put forward for the jump in encounters. We’ll kn9ow better in a month or so.

According to the U. S. Customer and Border Protection agency, the number of encounters in 2021 so far has exceeded those in 2019 on a month-by-month basis and jumped sharply in March. We’ll know in a month or so what’s actually happening but to all appearances it does appear as though something had changed. Whatever the cause of the jump, the number of unaccompanied children and teenagers has caused the Office of Refugee Resettlement to exhaust its annual budget and we’re only six months into the fiscal year.

Mr. Biden is already getting pushback on his approach to immigration from all sides—not just the nativists and restrictionists but immigration activists as well. Mr. Filey continues:

At some point, Mr. Biden will have to decide if his interest in immigration policy goes beyond political posturing. Our immigration laws need updating. Should the U.S. de-emphasize family ties and put more weight on the education and skills of newcomers, and how do you strike the right balance? What should we do with the millions of undocumented people who already live here? What are the economic and humanitarian costs of deporting them? And if you let them stay, how do you do so without encouraging future illegal entries or making immigrants who play by the rules look like saps?

These are questions worth debating openly and in depth, but serious debates are less likely to happen while hordes of foreign nationals are exploiting our laws or attempting to force their way into the country, and while the White House pays little more than lip service to trying to stop them.

It probably hasn’t sunk in yet, either for the president or Democrats more generally but the common experience of presidents is that, whatever their hopes, dreams, or goals, they are inevitably overtaken by events. We won’t end up judging the Biden presidency based on his promises or aspirations but on how he responded to those events.

Two concluding observations. Unless the teenagers and adults who cross the border illegally already speak. read, and write English fluently the odds are that they never will. That’s not judgmental; it’s just stating the facts. And public money will be lavished on them from the CBP to the OFRR to public schools, public safety, and health care and the jobs they’ll be able to secure will never be able to defray those costs.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Chicago community activist Jasson Perez takes Mayor Lori Lightfoot to task for her dodging accountability in her remarks about the shooting of Adam Toledo:

Last week, shortly before the public release of body-cam footage showing the police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) said at a news conference: “Simply put, we failed Adam.”

No, “we” didn’t.

[…]

Some of us work to keep youths alive and give them a better chance at life. This is the we who have protested, held vigils and demanded that Lightfoot do better by passing policies our city needs. People elected Lightfoot to make real change. When she and other politicians point to a collective failure in the wake of a wrongful death, it minimizes their responsibility for the tragic circumstances and broader pain. It also obscures actions she and other mayors have taken against policies or initiatives Black and brown communities have sought to keep their neighborhoods and cities safe — and even thrive.

The factors that led to a police officer shooting a 13-year-old are complicated, but the path to a better future is not. Working-class Black and brown communities in Chicago have been fighting for them for years. We need a mayor who has the political courage and will to make necessary change happen.

To place those remarks in some context Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor, running for office for the first time against experienced pol Toni Preckwinkle based on just two campaign promises:

• Reform the Chicago Police
• Don’t raise property taxes

She hasn’t followed through on either of those.

As you have probably heard by now former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all counts in the killing of George Floyd.

What’s next?

I think we’re all waiting on tenterhooks to see if there’s civil disorder in Minneapolis or anywhere else. Tensions are visibly running pretty high here in Chicago. I also don’t see how the other officers involved in the incident will escape indictment.

I recommend reading a piece at City Journal by Rafael A. Nangual about the death of Adam Toledo in Chicago. Here’s the conclusion:

In the end, Adam Toledo’s tragic death was caused not just by a police officer’s bullet but by the forces that introduced him to gang life—influences that won’t go away unless steps are taken to target the incorrigible violent offenders who reduce the chances of kids like Toledo living long and productive lives. That mission will require a groundswell of support to carry out.

Read the whole thing.