by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n It is a depressing characteristic of government today to loudly enact legislation and impose regulations of little utility, while neglecting to address the root causes of truly serious problems. We do not know to what degree a Sandy Hook or a Columbine is caused by improperly treated mental illness, violent video games, Hollywood\u2019s saturation of the popular culture with graphic mayhem \u2014 or access, by hook or by crook, to semi-automatic \u201cassault\u201d rifles. But we do know that the latter play almost no role in Chicago\u2019s horrific annual tally of 500 murders \u2014 and account for less than 1 percent of the gun-related deaths in the United States each year. Yet we also confess that taking on Hollywood, the video-game industry, or the mental-health establishment would be far more acrimonious and politically risky than demonizing the National Rifle Association.<\/p>\n In the case of big-city murdering, serious talk about the culture of gangs and the causes of the pathology of thousands of minority males, who are vastly overrepresented as both victims and perpetrators of gun violence, is a no-win proposition, given the politically correct climate and the existential issues involved. Can one imagine any politician decrying the violent lyrics of rap music, the culture of dependency on government, or the absence of stiff incarceration for the use of a gun during a crime with the same zeal that he has shown in going after the NRA?<\/p>\n The result of such selective and easy morality is that we are now engaging in banning certain types of guns with little understanding of how they work. Take your grandfather\u2019s semi-automatic .22 varmint gun, beef up the round a bit, add some scary-looking black plastic M-16-like adornments, and you now have a demonic \u201cassault rifle.\u201d The gun debate will cause needless divisions and acrimony, but in no measurable way will it either prevent another Sandy Hook or reduce the yearly slaughter of young males in our cities. When the next Columbine occurs \u2014 with the perpetrators using pump shotguns, or multiple ten-shot magazines, or sticks of dynamite \u2014 we will pat ourselves on the back and say it would have been worse had an \u201cassault rifle\u201d been used. And if the latter is employed, it will probably not have been legally acquired and more likely than not will be used by someone long recognized as unhinged.<\/p>\n After all the fighting over the fiscal cliff, and all the demagoguery over the rich paying their fair share, we have achieved almost nothing tangible in terms of reducing the debt. The president offered no budget freeze, no curtailment of entitlement costs, no adjustments in age or other conditions of eligibility \u2014 nothing at all that would have addressed the astronomical rate at which the government has been spending since 2009. Obama is therapist-in-chief, and he avoids any tragic admission that there are sometimes just a bad choice and a worse one \u2014 in this case, between cutting back and going broke.<\/p>\n We used to talk of going back to the \u201cClinton tax rates\u201d \u2014 a campaign sound bite that of course meant that we most certainly would not increase the once-hated but now-popular Bush rates on the 99 percent, much less return to Clinton-era spending levels. In other words, we taxed the 1 percent more, felt great about it, declared success, and now still face financial Armageddon \u2014 terrified to tell the 99 percent that either their taxes must go way up, or their entitlements must go way down, or more likely both. What we have failed to do would solve the problem and cause a national outcry; what we have actually done is as widely popular as it will do nothing.<\/p>\n Note that the war is not between the easily caricatured 1 percent, who pay almost 40 percent of aggregate federal income taxes, and the put-upon 99 percent; rather, it is a far more messy fight between the struggling 53 percent who pay income tax and mostly do not receive food stamps, unemployment insurance, or disability coverage, and the 47 percent who do not pay income tax and are more likely to receive state and federal assistance.<\/p>\n Keeping small residual forces in Iraq and Afghanistan might well have allowed the provisional consensual governments in those two countries to remain viable and not be transmogrified into tyrannies. To do so might have ensured that the terrible cost in American blood and treasure over the last decade at least had offered Afghans and Iraqis \u2014 and the world \u2014 something better than the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Yet to keep small bases there would also have angered American voters, sick of both wars and of the seeming ingratitude of those we did so much to help.<\/p>\n In contrast, packing up and going home, as we have from Iraq and will from Afghanistan, offers instant sound bites \u2014 something like \u201cending perpetual wars.\u201d When the videos pop up of Taliban lynchings or a civil war in Iraq \u2014 remember the Kurds in 1991 and the Vietnamese in 1975 \u2014 we can shrug that this was the inevitable wages of President Bush\u2019s sins, not something that President Obama could have prevented.<\/p>\n No one knows how to break the cycle of Middle East violence, much less how to address the tribalism, statism, lack of transparency and freedom, gender apartheid, religious fundamentalism, and intolerance so ubiquitous in the Arab world and so much at the heart of its wide-scale poverty and violence. To attempt any such discussion would be caricatured as neo-colonialist, imperialist, racist, na\u00efve, or culturally ignorant.<\/p>\n Iraq and Afghanistan have been too costly to serve as models; Libya is now a hushed-up embarrassment; our positions have changed so much on Syria that there now are no positions; and Mohamed Morsi\u2019s achievement in Egypt will have been to create nostalgia for the authoritarian Hosni Mubarak. No need to touch on the events in Algeria. The French, alone, are leading from the front in trying to save Mali from Islamists. Who would wish to wade into these morasses, or even talk about them with any degree of honesty?<\/p>\n It is far easier to focus on the Israelis: They are few. They have not until recently had oil or gas; the world hates them; and their government is lawful and Western. The result is that demonizing Mr. Netanyahu as the nexus of Middle East violence carries no risks, and offers no solutions, and therefore is preferable to the dangers of candidly crafting a policy to attempt to deal with the pathologies of the modern Arab world. If it is a question of attempting to deal fairly with Netanyahu or declaring jihad a personal spiritual journey, the latter wins every time.<\/p>\n Nowhere is tokenism more manifest than in the debate over illegal immigration. No one knows whether there are 11 or 18 million illegal immigrants in the United States. It is taboo to suggest that the nearly $50 billion sent annually to Latin America from the US is largely from illegal immigrants, or that the remittances increase the likelihood that these foreign nationals must seek public assistance here, which drains local and state economies. Nor would any sane person publicly associate illegal immigration with the alarming DUI statistics in California or point out that it contributes to the record number of hit-and-run accidents in Los Angeles County.<\/p>\n Instead we talk grandly of \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform\u201d and the \u201cDream Act,\u201d but both opponents and supporters avoid the subsequent details like the plague. Everyone knows that there are millions of hard-working Latin American immigrants, who steer clear of public assistance and crime, have worked for years in the US, and deserve some sort of pathway to citizenship \u2014 contingent upon English proficiency, a trial period of legal residence, and a small fine for having broken the law in coming here illegally.<\/p>\n But we also dare not speak the truth about the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, perhaps a million or more, who are unemployed and on public assistance, who have been convicted of a crime, or who have just recently arrived. We know that unenforced laws erode respect for jurisprudence, and that simply granting open access to Latin Americans shorts those from elsewhere who wait lawfully for their turn and who may in fact have capital, education, and expertise that would allow them to contribute to the US far more quickly.<\/p>\n Given that mess, we prefer the banality of \u201ca grand bargain,\u201d without acknowledgment that the Latino elite community would hardly be willing, as the price of a pathway for millions, to agree to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegals who are unemployed, have criminal records, or have just arrived \u2014 much less to sign off on closing the border, securing it, and making legal immigration ethnically blind, contingent on skills and education, and roughly equal in its treatment of all applicants. So we blather on.<\/p>\n There are two general types of leaders: the vast majority who talk in banalities while they offer tokens in lieu of solutions, and the rare tragic statesmen like Lincoln and Churchill who tell the truth, endure odium in their lifetime, find solutions, and do not live to see the full appreciation of their courage.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, we live in a low era of tokenism and banality.<\/p>\n \u00a92013 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It is a depressing characteristic of government today to loudly enact legislation and impose regulations of little utility, while neglecting to address the root causes of truly serious problems. We do not know to what degree a Sandy Hook or a Columbine is caused by improperly treated mental […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11],"tags":[12,13],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-y","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9295,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-we-are-sick-of-washington\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":0},"title":"Why We Are Sick of Washington","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 12, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online John Kerry just announced to the graduating class at Northeastern University: \u201cYou\u2019re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.\u201d Of course, Kerry himself never believed in a \u201cborderless world\u201d \u2014 any more than when, in Trump-style, he once ripped President\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5900,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-psychodramas-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":1},"title":"Obama’s Psychodramas","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 23, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Unlike Sandy Hook and gun control, the Tsarnaev case teaches real lessons about immigration. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Barack Obama has a habit of trying to energize his legislative agenda by stoking the fires of emotionally charged current events \u2014 and in ways usually illogical and incoherent.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Immigration"","block_context":{"text":"Immigration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/immigration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5822,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-psychodramas\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":2},"title":"Obama’s Psychodramas","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Barack Obama has a habit of trying to energize his legislative agenda by stoking the fires of emotionally charged current events \u2014 and in ways usually illogical and incoherent. The shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and the horrible mass murders at Sandy Hook\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Global Warming"","block_context":{"text":"Global Warming","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/global-warming-2\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12026,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-america-becoming-sinicized\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":3},"title":"Is America Becoming Sinicized?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 21, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Alittle over 40 years ago, Chinese Communist strongman and reformer Deng Xiaoping began 15 years of sweeping economic reforms. They were designed to end the disastrous, even murderous planned economy of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. The results of Deng\u2019s revolution astonished the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6216,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/by-hook-crook-or-comic-book\/","url_meta":{"origin":34,"position":4},"title":"By Hook, Crook, or Comic Book","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Mexico continues to encourage its citizens to migrate to the U.S., even thought it doesn't need to. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online There are many strange elements in the current debate over illegal immigration, but none stranger than the general failure to discuss the role of\u00a0Mexico. 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