John Pepple on the Need for a Cultural Revolution

I drew your attention to John Pepple's weblog, I Want a New Left, a few days ago.  Pepple identifies himself as a leftist, but what's in a label?  If he were characteristic of leftists, which he isn't, I would  have little or no problem with them.  I find myself wholly in agreement with his post, We Need a Cultural Revolution.  His topic is violent crime among the poor, and how the rebellious attitudes propagated by the 'Sixties Left have had terrible consequences for the poor without harming the well-off who spread the pernicious attitudes and who, after sloughing off their rebelliousness, slid comfortably back into the establishment.  Excerpts, emphasis added:

The problem goes back to that cultural revolution called the Sixties, because this sort of thing [extreme gang violence] did not happen before that decade. Part of that decade was the rise of the left’s cultural dominance, and the left (whether the old left or the new left) has always been soft on crime. Pushing poor people into crime makes sense to the left because such criminals are seen by them as heroes against the evil capitalists. But in fact poor people who turn to crime basically rob other poor people, which means that the total gain for the poor is zero. Moreover, once businesses in poor neighborhoods realize they have to deal with criminals, they raise prices, either because they have to hire more security people or because they have to compensate for the goods lost through theft. Once again, this doesn’t really help the poor.

That is spot on.  Leftists coddle criminals and the unproductive while penalizing productive behavior via taxation and regulation.  But by attacking those who create wealth, they make everyone poorer.  Fetishizers of equality, leftists would rather have everyone poor and equal rather than tolerate inequalities that benefit the worst off.

While being a rebel is one of the strongest themes of Sixties’ culture, in fact it too hurts the poor. Rebellion is really nothing but a game for rich kids. This was inadvertently shown in a New Yorker cartoon from the late 1970s. The cartoon showed an enormous office with an executive sitting at an enormous desk. His secretary, standing in the doorway, is saying to him, “It’s your son. He’s giving up living in a teepee and wants to join the firm.” The message couldn’t be clearer: rich kids who rebel can be reabsorbed into society rather easily once they get tired of rebelling.

With poor kids, the situation is different. It is hard to have a decent life or get a good job when one is a rebel. [. . .]

So what happens when the poor come to their senses? They find that it is nearly impossible to get their lives back. To begin with, they have no manners. Wealthier people know when to turn on the manners and when to turn them off, but poor people don’t. They use inappropriate language at the wrong times, and they pay for it. Or they have offputting tattoos that make any advance into a decent management position nearly impossible. Even if their manners are tolerable and their tattoos are hidden or nonexistent, their rebellious attitudes toward their employers may make it impossible for them to advance and may even get them fired. [. . .]

For blacks, the situation is even worse because the Sixties spawned the horrible “acting-white” syndrome, the mentality that swept through the inner city in the late Sixties that said that wanting a good education was acting like whites, and one must rebel against that. [. . .]

And so we need a cultural revolution to change things, a revolution that will tell the poor that it is not in their best interests to rebel or engage in crime, but I see no evidence that any such revolution is coming. Such a revolution would attempt to roll back or to transcend the Sixties, and that is a huge undertaking because so many people have invested their identity in the Sixties that resistance will be enormous. Expect, then, that the bloodshed will continue, and that the worthless calls to end the bloodshed will also continue.

The above is standard conservative analysis, which makes me wonder why Pepple wants to hang onto the 'leftist' label.  I have only one caveat to offer: the 'Sixties  were not all bad: there was the Civil Rights movement, and there was the music . . .  For example, the Crystal's He's a Rebel!