Maverick Philosopher

The Latest from Michael Anton

Thorough, penetrating analysis of the . . . what? state of the Union? No, the state of the dismal disarray, unstable and pregnant with disaster, in which we find ourselves.  

They Can't Let Him In

 

Willie Horton Revisited

I posted the following on my Facebook page this morning. Go there for my political linkage and 'rantage.' 

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I have a confession to make. I voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988! Do I have an excuse? If I have one, it is that my 'default setting' is apolitical. I'm a metaphysician by inclination, and I remain so inclined. I was a registered Democrat until 1991. But when I started to think concretely about social and political matters with the help of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the classics, I realized that there was very little to keep me among the Dems, a bunch that was increasingly moving in the direction of hard leftism and identity politics.

 

One thing that stuck in my craw and still does is that libs and lefties have a disgustingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. You can rely on them to take the side of the screw-up, the criminal, and the underdog even when the underdog is responsible for his sub-canine status. And this while making it difficult for the decent citizen to protect himself by Second Amendment means from the criminal element that liberals coddle, excuse, and now let off scot-free.

 

Is there one prominent Dem nowadays who supports the death penalty? No. (Correct me if I am wrong!) This is clear proof that this 'woke'-controlled party is bereft of moral sense. Capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain well-defined cases.

 

William Voegli on Willie Horton:

. . . identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bush’s presidential campaign raised the “Willie Horton” issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate.