Time to Call Conservatives Out For Their Weakness

A bunch of crying little babies are too afraid to set foot in the city? Please.

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When confronted with the latest lawless and authoritarian move from America’s mad king and the band of thugs with whom he has surrounded himself, there is no single perfect answer to the question “How should we react to this?” Outrage, warnings, correction of misinformation, lawsuits, organizing, community support? Yes to all.

But let me put in a word for good old-fashioned mockery. Trump’s insistence that he has to send in troops to patrol the mean streets of Washington, D.C. should be countered with all of the above. But one of the main assertions of authoritarianism is that it is strong, which is something a great many people are attracted to. So if you want to undermine it, one fruitful strategy is to convince people that it’s actually weak.

Before we get to the lily-livered conservative babies and their terror of urban density, let’s start with some facts, because while liberals like to flatter themselves that they are the rational ones and conservatives are emotional, the truth is that we all respond to both facts and feelings. So yes, it is important that everyone understands that despite the lies Trump tells, crime in Washington is way down, as it is in most of the country. Here’s a chart showing the long-term trend, from Jeff Asher:

The basic story is that crime peaked in the early 1990s and has been on a long decline since. While there was a spike during covid — which happened in both urban and rural areas (though nobody talks about the latter) — the decline has continued. But as a general rule, people don’t believe it. Significant numbers of Americans always say that crime is going up:

But as that chart shows, people are influenced by what they hear. Why was there an increase in Republicans saying crime was up in 2016? Because their presidential nominee was going around the country telling everyone that we were all living through The Purge, except instead of one day a year it was every day. Then when crime actually did increase in 2020, he and other Republicans told people it wasn’t just bad, it was the worst thing anyone had ever seen, that every American city was in flames and the streets had become rivers of blood.

Behold the hellscape that is Washington, D.C. (Photo by BeyondDC, CC BY-NC 2.0)

How to fight back against the fear-mongering

The reaction of most Democrats to Republican fear-mongering is usually to say “We too are concerned about crime! We too are tough! Which we will demonstrate by advocating policies that are, while not quite as draconian as what Republicans suggest, still pretty darn tough!” This is seldom a compelling argument.

It’s also not particularly successful as a policy matter; the cities that have had the most striking recent success in reducing violent crime, such as Baltimore and Boston, have done so with comprehensive strategies built on deep community engagement, which is much more labor-intensive than just telling cops to go out and crack some skulls.

What Democrats usually neglect is the emotional component of the issue. When Trump says, as he did Monday, that “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people,” he’s not appealing to the rational part of people’s brains.

So one effective way to counter that messaging is to begin defining Republican fears about urban crime and the Republican rhetoric meant to make everyone afraid of it as the product of weakness. Let’s say you hear something like this:

You can say that Congressman Burchett is misguided about crime rates, but you can also say that he’s a sniveling little candy-ass hiding in his office because he’s afwaid of the dark, while America’s liberals happily enjoy the fruits of urban living. Or this, from a testosterone-fueled hunk of man-meat who works at a right-wing legal organization:

I’m not a big fan of people zooming around in groups on ATVs, but I have it on good authority that ATVs are quite popular in rural America, and some of the people who ride them there even pop the occasional wheelie. So what might be different about the ATV riders — pardon me, “gang of youths” — that master Chamberlain witnessed in D.C. that made him shout “Crime!”, tears of panic streaming down his face as he cowered behind a mailbox? Hmm…give it a moment, it’ll come to you.

Folks like Burchett and Chamberlain are getting dragged with the appropriate vigor on social media, but what I’d really like to see is mockery of Republican weakness become the norm from a wider variety of voices on the left, including Democratic elected officials. Imagine if every time you saw a Democratic member of Congress talk about what’s happening now they said not just “This is an unacceptable authoritarian power grab,” but also “If Donald Trump and the other whiny fraidy-cats in his party want to tighten up their diapers and come visit America’s vibrant and dynamic cities where millions of us are living fulfilling lives every day, we’ll be happy to show them around.”

A little childish? Sure. And I’m not begrudging anyone’s decision to live in a suburb, a small town, or a remote mountain cabin; everyone has different tastes and different things they value in a place to live. But these people are weaklings. And they ought to be mocked.