If This Goes On … Then What? – Part 1

A plethora of disturbing phenomena envelop our world.  You know the list of problems.  Cultural, economic, psychological, medical, legal, military, academic, artistic, esthetic issues, even the definition of what a man or a woman is have become areas of societal turmoil.

And these are not just ideological conflicts.  We have almost every major city descending into mayhem and rampant theft.  The stability of our largest corporations is threatened by turmoil in the banking industry caused by enormous shifts in interest rates.  Intentional government targeting of hydrocarbon fuels has caused the price of fuel to increase substantially and with it the price of almost all commodities has also increased drastically.  And going along with these economic upheavals the personal finances of ordinary Americans have been severely negatively impacted.

And yet nothing happens.  At any other time in our history a mid-term election during such a crisis would have severely punished the incumbent president’s party.  Both houses of Congress would have flipped and a mandate would exist to fix these problems.  But the House barely went to the Republicans and the Senate stayed with the Democrats.  I won’t address the why of this anomaly.  Whether it’s hatred of Trump or changing demographics or voter fraud, the reality is the Democrats are running things in Washington.

The question I’m asking is, how does this end?

Of course, I don’t know the answer.  But I can look at the trends and extrapolate.

As an example, let’s look at the urban crime problem.  What are the possibilities?

The worst-case scenario is that nothing changes and crime is allowed to increase along the current lines.  At some point it will reach a threshold where the majority of working- and middle-class citizens are forced to flee out of fear for their lives.  That is the Detroit scenario.  But imagine this is all of the big cities in the United States.  It is almost unimaginable.  And yet I consider it one of the actual outcomes.  This scenario would lead to great changes in the social fabric of this country.  The urban/rural polarization would mimic the Left/Right divide in the populace.  And witnessing such an outcome would harden the opinions of both sides as to the blame for such a catastrophe.

The middle case is a slight moderation of the crime problem.  This entails a partial restoration of law and order.  But not back to the heyday of effective policing that held sway in the 2000’s and 2010’s.  Instead, it would be similar to the criminality that existed during the mid-1990’s.  This is imaginable because we’ve already seen it.  It’s possible that this outcome could be a stable situation with cities able to attract enough immigrants willing to brave the hazards of urban life to keep the whole show going.

And finally, the best-case scenario has the Democratic voters caving in to fear of crime and voting in a Republican “law and order” administration.  This would mimic what progressive New York City did in the late 1990s by electing Republican Rudy Giuliani as mayor on a platform of restoring law and order to that crime-ridden metropolis.

My guess is the second scenario.  I can see Democrats learning to live in fear as long as they can consider themselves good people for rejecting the law and order of the evil racist Republicans.

But which scenario do you think will prevail?

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I’ll address other facets of our current crisis in subsequent installments of my “If This Goes On … Then What?” series.