© AP/Craig RuttleManhattan DA Alvin Bragg
The newly sworn-in Manhattan district attorney has just made the largest in-kind contribution to the GOP in modern history in the form of the already-notorious memo he sent to his underlings announcing how his office would handle its caseload.
Simply put, Bragg's approach is to pretend crime isn't crime, that criminals aren't criminals and that punishing people for breaking the law is bad. Basically, unless someone murders someone else, Bragg is going to try to keep convicted criminals out of jail.
Perhaps I should go into the details of this document or offer some earnest arguments against Bragg's policy decision to downgrade felonies like armed robbery into misdemeanors — acts his office will then refuse to ask a judge to punish with "carceral" action.
I will forbear, though, because Bragg does not deserve to be engaged in this manner. This is psychotic policy, and you can't argue psychotics out of psychosis. It is the culmination of decades of bizarre theories that seek to explain away anti-social, harmful and violent behaviors by treating them as though they constitute a rational response to difficult life conditions.
This is looking at civil order through the wrong end of the telescope — one in which the victims of crime appear tiny and insignificant while the problems of those who commit crimes appear larger and more meaningful.
Liberals and leftists fell prey to the same sort of distorted lens view half a century ago when the national crime spike was accelerating. As public safety degenerated, liberal criminologists and judges were arguing rather blithely for more lenient treatment of criminals in general and for the elimination of the death penalty in particular.
Slowly but surely, with the urban streetscape decaying and a general feeling of lawlessness overtaking even the formerly placid suburbs, Republicans became the party of "law and order."
Indeed, the growing GOP advantage on criminal-justice issues was one of the three pillars of its spectacular rise over the three decades following the 1964 election (the others being the economy and foreign policy), in which LBJ won 61 percent of the vote while Democrats emerged with a 155-member majority in the House and 69 of the Senate's 100 seats.
What Alvin Bragg has done here must be seen in conjunction with the "Defund the police" and "decarceration" activists who have dominated the Democratic Party's discourse on criminal justice for the past two years.
Bragg's memo is the most radical manifestation of the "progressive prosecutor" movement — the systematic effort on the left to elect activists for social justice rather than defenders of the right of ordinary citizens to live unmolested by crime.
Other such prosecutors — Chesa Boudin, now facing a recall election in San Francisco, and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia — laid the groundwork. But Bragg is the DA in the most important borough in the most important city in the United States, and if he has his way, the 1974 movie Death Wish will soon seem like today's newscast rather than a piquant period piece.
And this is why he is such a gift to the GOP. Every Republican candidate at every level for every office in the United States can and will cite Bragg's memo as a vanguard document of the Democratic Party. "Today, it's Manhattan," they'll say. "Tomorrow, it's Springfield." The psychotic ideas unfolding in the Big Apple now will be dominating the Biden Justice Department in short order, they'll say.
And what exactly will President Joe Biden and the Democrats be able to say in response? Bupkis. Nada. Nothing. Because Alvin Bragg is the future unless the voters in America make sure he isn't.
Reader Comments
Whispered jokes were probably common.
RC