When America sneezes Britain catches a cold. So they say. Which is why we need to remain vigilant here in the UK.
In his Letter from America, Douglas Murray paints a shocking picture on the political and cultural rot which appears to be eating away at the very fabric of the country. From Washington to San Francisco, the smell of corruption and decay hang heavily in the air:
“In the nation’s capital, the homelessness problem is visible from the moment you enter the city. Arriving into DC used to be a great pleasure, with the visitor immediately thrown into the centre of the grand capital. Today the lawns outside Union station that greet the traveller are covered with tents.
It is just the first of the homeless encampments which visitors are now confronted with throughout the city. Almost every green space in DC is now covered with tents, a constant reminder that America seems to be rotting from the centre outwards.
Though DC may be the most painful example, the ground zero of this experiment in urban degeneration has been San Francisco.
There was a time when San Francisco could be counted among the most beautiful cities in the world – blessed by its position on the bay and its glorious weather. But as Michael Shellenberger chronicled last year in his book San Fransicko, the city was run into the ground by a succession of appalling policies. Left-wing policies, in particular, destroyed this nirvana.”
Legalising drugs was intended to remove the criminals from the streets and solve a whole host of other social problems.
“In fact it has exacerbated them. Marijuana use was initially permitted for “medical reasons”. Then doctors could be found to “prescribe” it for any and every ailment. Then it was legalised. Today the city is covered with adverts for delivery services that can bring marijuana straight to your door. As though ever-easier access to the drug was what the city needed.
The stench of the drug is everywhere, as it is in other American cities. The Left regards this as an issue of “rights”. But they ignore the fact that it clearly exacerbates the mental health problems on painful display across America’s streets. They also ignore the fact that people smoking the drug are effectively incapable of carrying out a normal day’s labour in almost any profession.
So the drug abuse and the homelessness end up encouraging each other.”
And rather than face up to these policy failures,
“they double down on them. Instead of rethinking the subsidies and other policies which have led to the homelessness, they claim that the problem doesn’t get enough money thrown at it. And even as curfews for young people are put in place in cities like Chicago to try to stop the spikes in gang violence, they try to pretend that it wasn’t their policies that led to this but “institutional racism.
America is suffused with problems. But if the whole place is not going to end up one giant homeless encampment, the Left will have to recognise where it has gone wrong and address this. Sadly, it is still waiting for the politicians who could.”
A time of reckoning is at hand.
The full article in pdf can be read here with a link to the original beneath it:
NBC News
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