Jonah Goldberg‘s latest column for National Review Online tackles arguments made to justify the London rioters’ actions.
Already, on both sides of the Atlantic, lots of people are sure they know why England is burning.
“The economic stagnation and cuts being imposed by the Tory government inevitably create social division,” explained former London mayor “Red” Ken Livingstone. Livingstone is joined by an intellectual mob of liberal members of Parliament — particularly members of the Labour party, which ran the country for more than a decade (the social incubation period of most of the rioters) — and left-wing pundits both there and here who insist that the new Tory government’s budget cuts have led to widespread violence, even though most of the relevant cuts haven’t even gone into effect.
Of course, they always manage to say “there’s no excuse” for violence. But there’s always a “but” that leads a long parade of excuses.
Invariably, these rationalizations amount to a license to spend ever more on the social programs that have, at the least, helped to produce the sort of “youths” who will burn homes and cars and beat people to death should the programs be even moderately curtailed. Indeed, according to liberal logic, the mere threat of reforming such programs is enough to cause wholesale violence.
In other words, the cuts don’t justify the violence, but the threat of violence justifies avoiding cuts. It’s a clever rhetorical trick, but policy-wise it’s both appeasement of and appealing to thuggery, pure and simple.
