We now watch, aghast at the spectacle and stupidity, as so many of our major urban centers across America continue to spiral downward. The question that naturally occurs is both simple and perplexing: Why are so many (mostly Democrat) elected officials allowing their cities to degenerate into dysfunction and decay?

Simple common sense would seem to indicate that allowing felons to run free, inviting in hordes of illegal immigrants (who cost much and contribute little), and spending your city into bankruptcy while continually raising taxes are obviously really, really bad ideas. Moreover, continuing to leverage so-called “human rights” ordinances and legislation into laws that prohibit landlords from refusing to rent to people who have frightening criminal records, demand we respect individuals who are unworthy of the least respect, and allow our children to be robbed of the innocence of youth by those determined to normalize abnormality all seem more than a touch crazy.

Worse still, these soaring commitments to human rights usually land right on the necks of beleaguered taxpayers who are required to fund the lifestyles of the lazy and/or addicted while providing free needles and infinite trips to unsuccessful detox, both of which tend to drive businesses and individuals out of your cities. Throw in commitments to wildly expensive public education that does not educate, bureaucracies that serve only the bureaucrats, and Woke priorities that abandon merit and competence in matters of hiring and firing city employees, and you have a ready recipe for urban decline and collapse, which we are today seeing occur in real time all across America.

So why do these suicidal policy paths seem impossible to reverse? Why are reforms that are practicable and penny-wise beyond our reckoning?

The trap that has been created for us by those who see unending grievance as a handy pathway to power and money is this: To ever criticize the judgment or actions of another is simply impermissible, and the transgressor who thought or spoke negatively of another must be publicly and painfully punished for ideas that are, as George Orwell might have written, “double-plus ungood” and, therefore, forbidden.

The obvious problem with abandoning our values and critical thinking skills to appease our intellectual overseers is that, with apologies to the Declaration of Independence, all men (and women) are most definitely not created equal except, as our founding fathers duly noted, as regards their legal rights under a system of self-government.

As a species we vary greatly in terms of our physical, emotional, and intellectual attributes, and these differences largely determine our abilities and personal success. This has, however, been an utterly unfashionable idea among our tenured academic radicals and the radical government employees who used to sit in their classrooms, both of whom have conspired over the past fifty years to compel us to use the nexus of victimization and bigotry to explain every difference in our life outcomes.

We are now prohibited by law from ever criticizing the stupidity, criminality, venality, and immorality of another because their maladjusted behaviors are—we are constantly told—the inevitable results of being victimized by our irredeemably bigoted country. Therefore, unending cash, privilege, and forgiveness must flow to those who are unskilled, felonious, unreliable, and depraved—and any attempt to banish them from our midst is itself a crime, lawsuit, or both.

Forced to hold our public policy and private thoughts hostage to the damage inflicted upon individuals and society by the worst among us, cities have been shackled into obedience to catastrophic Wokeness by generations of indoctrination, habituation, and capitulation that has stifled debate and divided our nation into warring cultural camps. The old truism that one had to “earn respect” has been replaced by governmental mandates requiring—under penalty of law—we grant our approval to anyone and everyone with no regard whatsoever to character and behavior, a Woke Jedi Mind Trick that also erases personal responsibility and accountability from any consideration.

Pushback against this dangerous and disingenuous foolishness is, of course, impeded by the simple fact that a good portion of the Leftists in our major cities are determined to vote for their own demise because they are convinced they are protecting the oppressed from yet more oppression at the hands of those with—standards and expectations. The results, unsurprisingly, are depressingly inevitable: money misspent, residents fleeing, businesses exiting, and a resolute refusal to recognize that rolling out the welcome mat for those who define themselves by their supposed victimization is a prescription for yet more conflict and chaos.

In a strange way one must almost admire the obsessions of the political and cultural Left in America. Determined to disparage and erase thousands of years of traditional values and beliefs in favor of a brave new world of “progressive” ideas that actually cause us to regress on an individual and societal level by rewarding the most most mentally ill and criminal among us—and elevating them as role models (say hello, George Floyd!)—our loud and proud Marxists have created a lovely self-reinforcing echo chamber that serves to convince them of their virtue. Complaints about their peculiar priorities (New York Democrats, for example, are currently determined to legally rebrand women as “gestating parents”) only convince the wildly Woke that they are correct to believe that bigotry is everywhere, so no thought is given to the possibility that their efforts to remake our nation might be just a little bit nuts.

Aside from the collapse of many of our major cities due to Marxist policies (Seattle, New York, San Francisco, and Baltimore already seem prime candidates for drearily predictable financial and public safety implosions) I have no idea how we will ever manage to convince the roughly 25% of our population that angrily wallows in a self-reinforcing and self-pitying culture of victimization that their beliefs are both reductive and wrong. We might, sadly, just have to wait for the inevitable crash—and try to pick up the pieces as best we can.