The Jungle Always Wants to Grow Back

Losing focus on criminals doesn't mean they lose focus on us.

On Monday night, I had the good fortune to attend the Manhattan Institute’s Hamilton Awards celebration in New York City. I was especially fortunate because one of the award recipients was Sen. Tom Cotton. If you want a quick definition of “patriot,” read his bio. (And amazingly, he escaped Harvard Law School with his mental acuity still intact).

Sen. Cotton gave a dynamite acceptance speech. Because it covers important ground in the battle against crime, and is not widely available (oddly, the NYT didn’t cover it), I want to quote a number of excepts from it:

It’s fitting that this Manhattan Institute award bears [Hamilton’s] name here in his adopted hometown. For your scholars very much walk in Hamilton’s footsteps, defending…national advancement through quality education, the rule of law, cultural sanity, and—maybe standing out above all else—the Manhattan Institute’s work to revitalize America’s great cities.

Regrettably, some conservatives today would write off our great cities. They mock their struggles. Now don’t get me wrong: progressives like Alvin Bragg and Lori Lightfoot and George Gascon deserve mockery. But our fellow citizens in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles deserve much better than these failed ideologues.

The fine people of this city, and Chicago, and Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and so many other great American cities are suffering under the weight of disastrous politics. Schools are failing, infrastructure is crumbling, and businesses and families are fleeing.

And underneath it all is a breakdown in public safety and order. Here again, the Manhattan Institute is leading the way, as it always has. And here again, you share Hamilton’s concerns. He knew that public safety was the very first object and responsibility of any government. Without safety, there can be no education, no prosperity, no culture, no beauty. He warned that if free government proved incapable of providing safety, then a people might abandon freedom sooner than they would tolerate unending fear and danger.

This is a key point, although often overlooked. Without safety, nothing worthwhile is going to get done. And when the authorities do nothing, vigilantism will come knocking.

Hamilton had no illusions about human nature. “Men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,” he wrote. He understood that a fundamental duty of government is to restrain man’s violent passions and establish public order.

Such notions may seem quaint and outdated to the progressive left today. But their enduring truth is sadly seen every day on your city’s streets and subways.

When I was a kid on the farm, my father and I had to bush-hog the fields each summer. A bush-hog, if you don’t know, is a large mower pulled behind a tractor. While my dad bush-hogged, I cleared the fence rows that he couldn’t reach. This was dirty, unpleasant work. You might ask, “Why cut the grass that your cattle grazed on? Why not turn it into hay?” The answer is, we weren’t cutting the grass, we were cutting the new growth of bushes and saplings. Because, you see, the jungle always wants to grow back.

And the jungle will always grow back without intervention. That’s what we see happening in too many of America’s cities as progressive politicians elevate their warped ideology over tried-and-true policing and prosecutorial methods. George Soros-backed prosecutors simply refuse to enforce the law, or even see a depraved criminal as their actual client, instead of the law-abiding public.

In Philadelphia, murder is up 63 percent. In Baltimore, 60 percent. In New Orleans, 40 percent. Houston, 71 percent. All since Soros-backed prosecutors took office. And the numbers are even worse for other crimes.

The Left wants us to believe it’s all the fault of someone or something else. This is their standard dodge. And it rings just as true here as their urging us to believe that Joe Biden is on top of things.

Here in the Big Apple, you have not only a Soros prosecutor, but also the ideologues in Albany who ended the cash-bail system. Murder is up 37 percent, robbery 30 percent, burglary 46 percent, and auto theft 150 percent since 2019.

I would say that the residents of these and other cities are scared to walk out of their homes. But that would understate things when moms and grandmas fear stray bullets passing through the walls of their homes and hitting a sleeping child.

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[One crucial step in restoring safety] is to return to the wisdom of the ancients—by which I mean the Manhattan Institute’s work of twenty or thirty years ago. In most of our living memories, New York was viewed as dangerously unsafe and ungovernable. But tough, law-and-order leaders like Rudy Giuliani, Ray Kelly, and Bill Bratton, along with America’s finest police force, turned it into one of the nation’s safest cities.

They did so in part by implementing the common sense of the Manhattan Institute.

If you stop squeegee men and fare-jumpers, you don’t just restore order, you also bust a lot of career criminals with outstanding warrants.

If you stop suspicious persons on the street, question them, and frisk them, you drive gun-carrying criminals off the streets.

If the police investigate and arrest quickly and prosecutors charge firmly and go to trial promptly, lowlife criminals will fear the consequences.

Again, these are common-sense ideas. Why did so many abandon them? What happened?

In some ways, we were victims of our own success. Crime fell so dramatically in the 1990s and [early] 2000s that liberals began to claim that these methods were unnecessary, unduly harsh, and (of course) racist. Unfortunately, some Republicans got in on the act too, accepting the left’s premises and passing misguided soft-on-crime laws like the First Step Act.

This shortsighted way of thinking brings to mind an old story. After several motorists died on a dangerous mountain road, the village elders agreed to post a road sign. “Danger: Winding Road Ahead.” Years passed with no more accidents. Then, one night, a storm blew the sign away. One elder proposed to replace the sign, but another said, “why would we pay for a new sign when there hasn’t been an accident up there for years?”

This is exactly the level of intelligence we’re dealing with.

The Manhattan Institute didn’t merely post the proverbial sign years ago, but also pleaded to keep the sign up, even when it wasn’t fashionable to do so. Too many politicians didn’t heed your warnings. Now, too many of our great cities again seem dangerous and ungovernable.

Yet we know that’s not the case. We’ve seen streets, subways, and parks reclaimed from criminals.

We’ve done it before; we can do it again.

Even though Sen. Cotton will not seek the Oval Office next year, I have to think he’d look mighty good sitting where Merrick Garland is sitting now.