America, the happy-face land of no consequences

No consequences, that is, until reality delivers them, and half a nation of delinquents awakens to the result of successfully bullying half a nation of cowards and airheads.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a column summing up why so much has gone wrong in our country. In three words, it’s this: Consequences have disappeared. The title of the column is, “Crime and Progressive Lack of Punishment — The failure to impose penalties on bad behavior, on campus and elsewhere, produces much more of it.”

Hundreds of unruly campus protesters have been arrested in recent days, but how many will spend more than a few hours behind bars, if even that?

Dozens of them are more than merely “unruly,” and plenty among that number are not really “protesters.” They’re Jew-hating Brownshirts. It’s past time to call them that, but don’t hold your breath waiting to see it in the NYT or the Washington Post.

Lawbreakers at the University of California, Los Angeles were given food as they were being booked and then released with a citation. Some said they planned to return to campus to cause more disorder. “We’re definitely not done,” one woman said. “I’ve never felt more proud of myself.”

And why not? The MSM routinely lionizes these thugs as the rightful heirs of Sixties and Seventies protesters against the war in Vietnam and decades of Jim Crow racism.

Why should they be deterred? Shoplifters and even violent criminals in America’s biggest cities repeatedly get arrested and let loose. Progressives don’t believe in punishing anyone for anything—except Donald Trump, his supporters and wealth creators.

This is a key point. The zeal for a no consequences culture is anything but new. In my area of experience, criminal law, dominant (i.e., liberal) thinking has spent decades holding up criminals as victims if not martyrs, and pushing relentlessly for “decarceration” and “compassion” and “a second chance” (never asking, a second chance to do what?, confident that whatever it is isn’t going to get done to a regular at the Manhattan Yale Club). Five years ago, the leading light of Leftist legal thought, the Harvard Law Review, published an entire volume dedicated to the idea of abolishing prison, 132 Harv. L. Rev. 1568 (2019). The idea of no consequences for crime, or as little as possible consistent with getting re-elected, is the very pillar of “progressive prosecutors.”

But I (slightly) digress. Back to our present present batch of “progressive” student leaders:

Too busy protesting to study? No problem. Columbia this spring extended its deadline to April 29 for deciding whether to take classes pass-fail. How many students who barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall last week planned to “mail it in” for their finals?

And how many professors would have the guts to fail them anyway?

Columbia administrators threatened to suspend protesters. That’s no punishment. Many would enjoy spending another semester in college since dad or Uncle Sam is footing the bill. If they don’t want to repay their student loans, the government will forgive them.

Just so. One brand of disappearing consequences meets the next: Take out a fat loan you have no intention of re-paying, and your dishonesty will be wonderfully abetted by a craven and lawless Joe Biden. Our President will use taxes his base doesn’t pay to buy off his cherished deadbeat student voting bloc that also doesn’t pay but (he hopes) isn’t too stoned to get to the polls. [UPDATE: And speaking of getting stoned, last week Biden moved to lower the consequences for dope, not that they were real steep anyway. As reported by the AP with startling honesty:

President Biden may eventually ban TikTok, but he’s moving to give something back to the young people who dominate the popular social media app — a looser federal grip on marijuana.

Facing softening support from a left-leaning voting group that will be crucial to his reelection hopes in November, Biden has made a number of election year moves intended to appeal in particular to younger voters. His move toward reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug is just the latest, coming weeks after he canceled student loans for another 206,000 borrowers.]

As the WSJ piece adds:

If [free spending young people] forget to pay other bills, the government has their backs. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has effectively capped all credit-card late fees at $8. The CFPB also plans to cap bank overdraft fees at a nominal amount, meaning spendthrifts needn’t worry about getting penalized for overdrawing their checking accounts. And if they don’t want to pay rent, cities including New York and Los Angeles have imposed regulations that make it prohibitively difficult to evict tenants.

Quietly but seemingly everywhere, in one part of our culture after the next, in ways great and small, the incentives to live an honest and responsible life are being buried. It’s all advertised as compassion. It’s actually toxic debasement — debasement of the fundamentals of character.

Once upon a time, children were taught that choices bore consequences. No more. Don’t want to study or finish your homework? Schools are adopting “equity” grading systems, the Mercury News reported last month, with “some choosing to eliminate D’s and F’s, while others move away from zero grades or eliminate late penalties.”

And eliminate the honor roll because, ya know, not making it might damage the “self-esteem” of those who don’t.

Forgive a personal indulgence: When I was a kid, my parents didn’t give two hoots about my self-esteem, believing (correctly) that it would have its ups and downs — up when I made the track team or finished first in English, down when I got the usual answer from the girl I wanted to take to the movies. I think they wanted to teach me an unpleasant but essential lesson. “Kid, it’s not all going to be smooth but you can handle it.” My parents, did, however, give lots of hoots about the honor roll.

Dublin Unified School District in California’s Bay Area will “remove extra credit and bonus points that elevated grades, and provide students with multiple chances to make up missed or failed assignments and minimize homework’s impact on a student’s grade.” Many school districts have banned homework altogether. Pedagogues wonder why kids spend countless hours a day on TikTok. Cause, meet effect.

Do any of the people pushing to eliminate consequences ask themselves what kind of future we are building with this? Or is is worse than that?: That they ask themselves, know the answer, and want it because they think it’s what a wretched America deserves.

Here’s another example of causality. A Gallup and Institute for Family Studies report last year found that children whose “parents invest heavily in discipline, monitoring, and loving support” have better mental health than those who don’t. No surprise. Yet disciplining children has recently fallen out of liberal fashion too. Parents instead are told to encourage their children to reflect on why they misbehave [instead of getting grounded]. Our 77-year-old former president probably couldn’t explain why he acts out. Good luck getting a 7-year-old to do so.

Teachers unions and progressives oppose tough school-discipline policies, arguing that they discriminate against minorities. There’s scant evidence of that, but the Obama administration nevertheless told schools to drop their “zero tolerance” policies. Many did. The Biden administration has even threatened to investigate public schools that impose tough discipline for violating civil-rights laws.

Many conservatives like to argue that these no-consequence policies harm the very people — black children — they seek to protect, because by tolerating disorder in schools, they damage whatever may remain of black kids’ chances to get an actual education. That’s a sound argument, but not the most important one. The most important one is that kids must obey teachers because obedience to those legitimately in authority is a virtue per se, and failure to honor it, sonny, will exact a price higher than you want to pay.

[W]ould so many protesters be flouting the law if they had been disciplined more as kids? The Catholic school I attended in the early grades forbade children from playing during lunch break unless they had finished the frequently nauseating cafeteria meals. Students dutifully shoveled down the grub. Perhaps colleges ought to hire nuns to bring their campuses under control.

I’m not Catholic, but at this point, what’s left to lose?

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said he didn’t call police in sooner to dispel protesters because he wanted “to discuss options for a peaceful and voluntary disbanding of the encampment.” Administrators at other colleges have similarly expressed fear of “provoking” protesters—only to see them escalate their rebellion.

Appeasing them never, ever works. This is so well known that’s it’s not debatable. The reason it’s tried so often is not that any of these administrators thinks that, this time, it will work. The reason is cowardice — but well-earned cowardice. They spent years preaching breezy moral relativism, thus forfeiting their right to make, and still less enforce, rules.

It’s reminiscent of the feeble Obama and Biden foreign policies. Both presidents failed to enforce sanctions and their own declared “red lines,” which resulted in adversaries’ becoming more belligerent….

When your “red line” becomes a late night television joke, what do you think is going to happen next?

Last week the State Department said Russia has used chemical weapons in Ukraine, and that it wasn’t “an isolated incident.” The department vowed to impose sanctions on entities linked to Russia’s chemical and biological weapons programs. Why not do so earlier? Perhaps for the same reason college administrators refrained from clearing encampments sooner.

The failure to punish bad behavior is a failure of deterrence. Only those living in the Ivory Tower could have been surprised when protesters, after facing little resistance to their take-over of campus yards, [moved on to seize] and vandalize buildings.

The elimination of consequences is more than just a failure of deterrence. That’s the corollary. The cause is a fatal breakdown of moral confidence, something that sets us on a road with only one, very dark, ending point.