Wanting nice cities isn't Nazism
, and we should marginalize the people who say it is.
Yesterday, a likely homeless, passed-out woman, who was set on fire by a Guatemalan migrant, burned to death in front of onlooking NYC F-train riders.
The failures of Liberalism that sentence contains are many, yet it is true — as true as that The Gods of the Copybook Headings will return. We will talk more about that in the New Year at great length. For now, let’s speak at shorter length: wanting nice cities isn’t Nazism, and we should marginalize those who say it is.
Something strange I have noticed in my Geriatric Millennial old age is that very frequently ideas which are perfectly obvious to me, which I assume that everyone knows or would understand immediately are considered by ‘the crowd’ to be bizarre, esoteric, insightful, many-layered, stunningly novel, etc. whereas things I personally find to be quite interesting, need time to fully appreciate, murky, or non-intuitive are often regarded as boring, uninspiring, irrelevant, etc.
Even stranger is that when asking other people about this experience, they mostly say “Oh yes, of course, that happens to me all the time.” In that spirit, here is something I consider totally banal and simple, which may arrive as a shock:
We must marginalize those who have defamed honest, decent people as Nazis, just because they wanted or proposed serious solutions to urban chaos.
The use of italics should be a big clue that I am not, in fact, covertly encouraging everyone to put on brownshirts and jackboots and start goose-stepping around.
What I mean is that the only way to have nice cities in the US is to physically round up all of the drug-addicted and/or mentally ill vagrants, the homeless—as well as the criminals (including the merely anti-social menacing, ‘street urchin’ types who cause problems as essentially school-skipping non-employable persons)—and put them somewhere else to appropriately deal with them later.
Maybe not in the same facilities, and maybe with different levels of supervision vs treatment vs rehabilitation vs penalization—on and on one could go with policy provisos—but, that is the only way New York City, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, or Detroit (and on and on one could go…) get any better.
We don’t have to live like this. There is no good reason that the New York City subway should be disgusting. There is no good reason it should be unsafe. There is no good reason it should even be unpleasant after we make necessary changes, except perhaps for its inherent use at scale which would increase post-necessary changes, during morning commutes and rush hour.
But are there bad reasons it’s disgusting and unsafe? Are there a lot of bad reasons almost every major US city has increasingly greater numbers of crazy, drug using, criminally behaving, smelly, dangerous people? Indeed, there are!
In fact, there is one bad reason.
That reason is: We have tolerated those who defame anyone serious about law and order with comparisons to the Nazi Party and the crimes of the Third Reich.
That is it.
It is the sole reason US cities are worse than in the wonderland of East Asia.
It is the only reason that US cities, which were so much more modern and developed (if less historically elegant) than European cities, in the years after War Two (where Americans *fought* the Nazis, by the way) became so comparably crappy and backwards as time went on. In fact it’s also why so many European cities themselves have now started to resemble (and even, occasionally, darkly comically exceed) US cities in their crime and disorder.
We—‘the West’, the OECD, the Anglosphere Hot Taking and Policy Making machine, the developed world, the Wayward Children of Francis Fukuyama, whatever you like—have tolerated those who make negative Nazi comparisons.
Not two weeks before yesterday’s Street Meat Inferno, former U.S. Marine and college student Daniel Penny was acquitted after a ridiculous almost two-year-long trial filled with racial venom against him for the crime of being a white man who felt he had to protect women from an insane person (who had in fact, repeatedly assaulted women in the past) who happened to be a black man.
Now, yes, strictly speaking, sometimes the venomous, irresponsible, terrible people who defamed and demeaned (and even prosecuted) Daniel Penny for putting an insane man in a chokehold, inadvertently causing his death, only used the word ‘racist’, or mentioned the KKK, or the Confederacy—or in fact in moments of lurid honesty they actually would say “white”— so I do not write all this to imply that the Liberal mind is particularly fixated on German National Socialism as it existed between 1920 and 1945 (part of writing anything on the internet is anticipating spurious objections from deliberately obtuse people).
I do assert though that the general milieu of atrocious, loud, civilization-negative people who stand against any kind of effective political organization which would bring law and order to American cities (among other things) have as their final resort the invocation of Jews being rounded up and herded onto cattle cars by the Nazis, to be taken to camps to be gassed and cremated by the millions.
At the outset of this very essay I wrote:
…The only way to have nice cities in the US is to physically round up all of the drug-addicted and/or mentally ill vagrants, the homeless—as well as the criminals (including the merely anti-social menacing ‘street urchin’ types who cause problems as essentially school-skipping non-employable persons)—and put them somewhere else to appropriately deal with them later.
I wrote it because it’s true, but I also wrote it ‘provocatively’ because every meaningful policy prescription today—which would substantially point towards doing that—either shies away from saying it explicitly or doesn’t say it at all, and thus goes nowhere. Why? Because the most common objection is “if you do this, you’re a Nazi”, and there’s nothing worse you can be for the purpose of being an employed, bank-account-having, member of American society than to be publicly regarded as a Nazi. Even pedophiles have advocates in the United States.
By the way I also think we should then do things like scrub the subway cars and stations, and have police around to guard them, enforce fare payment, patrol for criminals, and be photographed by tourists. What might that program look like?
In the Liberal telling, it apparently looks something like this:
Right? Why else would they scream that everyone who wants nice cities and disagrees with their ‘diversionary’ sentence reduction programs or ‘safe injection sites’ or not harassing the ‘unhoused’ and ‘justice impacted’ as they exhibit ‘emotional disturbance’ on New York City subway trains is a ‘fascist’?
It should be pretty clear at this point that the words these people say, the meanings attached to them, and the political and social outcomes they elicit, are hugely dishonest and basically morally depraved. Can’t we simply ignore them?
I think we cannot. For one, they are in control of a substantial proportion of still-somehow-taken-seriously news media, academic authorities, and government offices from lawmaker’s seats to governor’s mansions to police chief’s desks.
But on top of pushing society towards doing stupid things which harm everyone in the long run, they also marginalize and sometimes ruin people who may otherwise be the leaders, thinkers, policy makers, and police chiefs who make our policies good, our trains clean, and our cities safe, efficient, and prosperous.
And even if they aren’t smearing anyone, they’re basically just dumb:
(By the way, Noah Smith in particular is not only basically dumb [it’s taken him…20 years? to figure out that arresting criminals is good], he’s also someone who smears normal people who disagree with him as Nazis: https://x.com/search?q=from%3A%40noahpinion%20nazis&src=typed_query&f=live)
These people, who have dominated American political discourse for at least the last two decades since the first George W. Bush term, have to be told to shut up.
Treat them differently. Treat them worse, than you otherwise might, for saying dumb, anti-civilizational things and making good things less possible for everyone. You don’t need to light them on fire. But be rude to them. Be much less accommodating. Noah Smith is just one guy, but he and others should be required to disavow his stupid views and not pretend he believed what he says now all along if he wants to attend your magazine launch or go on your podcast.
Maybe we can have good policy in the future (example: psychotic drug addicts are taken away by uniformed men in PPE to a psychiatric facility to be compelled into treatment, instead of raging as they lope from subway car to subway car) but we won’t so long as a nuts-o propagandized worldview persists.
Wanting nice cities isn’t Nazism, and we should marginalize those who say it is.
I do think it would be very funny though, to just do good/pro-social things with the *aesthetics* of a tyrannical Fascist regime. Like, the police can be completely normal and respectable, but they're in all black uniforms with helmets and gasmasks by default and such.
Kids being gently told not to egg houses by the heavily armed stormtrooper, etc. That sort of thing. I think the effect would be highly endearing.