by Robert Stacy McCain
Seattle is in King County, Washington, where Joe Biden got 75 percent of the vote in the 2020 election. King County had more than 1,000 drug overdoses involving fentanyl in 2023. These two facts are almost certainly related, but which is the cause and which the effect? Or could it be that both (a) the tendency to vote for Democrats and (b) the addiction to dangerous drugs are caused by some unknown factor? Without a careful analysis of the available data to identify that unknown background factor, is it wrong to hazard a guess that the overdosing dopeheads and Democratic voters in King County are just plain stupid?
Beyond sarcastic put-downs, it behooves those interested in public policy to take a look at what’s going on in places like Seattle, where Democrats dominate and “progressive” ideas therefore advance unhindered by any effective opposition. In the case of King County’s skyrocketing drug overdoses — which increased nearly 50 percent in just the past year — local officials have declared the problem “a public health crisis.” However, fentanyl is illegal, which means that the overdoses are also indicative of a crime problem, and progressives are against putting criminals in prison.
After the 2020 George Floyd riots — caused, not coincidentally, by the death of a fentanyl user — the progressive outcry against “mass incarceration” was part of the general anti-law-enforcement rhetoric that incited “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests. It was claimed that black people were disproportionately imprisoned because of “systemic racism,” and, it was further claimed, many of those inmates were guilty of nothing more than “non-violent drug offenses.” This rhetoric has now become the basis of national policy, e.g., Biden’s recent commutation of the sentences of 11 criminals “serving disproportionately long sentences for non-violent drug offenses.” These commutations were part of “reforms that advance equal justice, address racial disparities, strengthen public safety, and enhance the wellbeing of all Americans,” Biden declared.
As a matter of public policy, this approach only makes sense to those who know nothing about how criminals operate or law enforcement works. Habitual felons are not specialists; that is to say, the person trafficking in illegal drugs is also likely to be engaged in other criminal behavior. Pimps and thieves are often involved in the drug trade, to say nothing of the gangbangers who shoot each other in disputes over urban “turf.” Once upon a time in America, cops and prosecutors knew how to deal with such activity, a get-tough approach that included what we may call the Al Capone principle of law enforcement.
Everybody knows that Al Capone and his gang were guilty of innumerable murders and other serious crimes, but Capone didn’t go to prison for those crimes. Instead, he went to prison for federal tax evasion. The principle expressed by this prosecution was simple — once you identify the habitual perpetrators of crime, it doesn’t really matter what charge sends them to prison. What matters is getting the bad guys off the street.
For decades, intellectuals and activists told us that the “War on Drugs” was misguided and ineffective. However, if recent experience has shown us anything, it’s that you can’t reduce the drug problem by legalizing hitherto outlawed substances or refusing to enforce existing drug laws. Just take a look at the streets of Seattle, where addicts crowd the sidewalks in open-air drug markets.
Is it a coincidence that Washington state was the first to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in 2012 and that now, more than a decade later, dopeheads are dying at record rates on the streets of Seattle? The criminals who were previously trafficking in marijuana didn’t decide to stop dealing drugs once marijuana was legalized. Drug dealers aren’t specialists, after all, and even with legalization, black-market marijuana sales continue, outside the taxed and regulated state-licensed cannabis shops. The same criminal who sells you weed will also be happy to supply you with fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, or MDMA.
The cause-and-effect questions about the correlations between (a) voting for Democrats and (b) disastrous outcomes like the drug problem in Seattle are matters of national consequence. The progressive policy agenda that tolerates — nay, that enables — the squalid scenes on the streets of Seattle and other Democrat-run cities is far-reaching in its ambitions. Even while urban “blue zones” turn into crime-ridden hellholes, the people responsible for these disasters lecture us about their plans to “save democracy” and, indeed, to “save the planet.”
In one of the all-time great moments in the history of televised political debates, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently confronted California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom with what instantly became known as the San Francisco “poop map”:
“This is a map of San Francisco. There’s a lot of plots on that. You may be asking, what is that plotting? Well, this is an app where they plot the human feces that are found on the streets of San Francisco,” DeSantis said, holding up the geographic depiction of the city smeared in shades of brown.
Democrats don’t seem to mind if the streets of their cities are littered with discarded hypodermic needles and other detritus. They have more important priorities, like making sure restaurants don’t provide plastic straws to their customers. This is not a joke. In 2018, Seattle became “the first major U.S. city to ban single-use plastic straws and utensils in food service.”
Think about that for a minute. Police in Seattle are patrolling restaurants to enforce the city’s plastic utensil ban, even while the city’s “progressive” policies require cops to ignore the junkies shooting up on the sidewalks. Peddlers of fentanyl go about their deadly business unmolested, but a restaurant owner could go to prison for giving his customer a plastic straw.
How many exclamation marks do you want me to put after a sentence like that? It is difficult to express in words how crazy Democrats have become. What can explain this madness? Thomas Sowell once outlined it as The Vision of the Anointed — the belief that what matters in public policy is not practical consequences but rather the expression of good intentions. This vision turns politics into a narcissistic competition in which support for “progressive” ideas is considered symbolic of one’s moral and intellectual superiority, without regard for the efficacy of the resulting policies. Even when progressive policies produce disaster — e.g., the squalor in cities like Seattle — the people who vote for such policies still cling to the vision that tells them they are more enlightened and caring than their opponents and critics who point out the failures of their policies.
It would be bad enough if these failures were merely local in their impact. Watching once-prosperous cities turn into crime-plagued nightmares — whether in Seattle or Portland, Chicago or Baltimore — is unpleasant, but people who want to avoid local disasters perpetrated by advocates of “social justice” can simply move away from Democrat-controlled cities. What happens, however, when urban progressives gain control of entire states? This was the point DeSantis was making in his debate with Newsom, namely, that the former San Francisco mayor has presided over California’s startling decline since becoming governor. We may stipulate that Newsom himself is not entirely responsible for this decline, which was underway long before he became governor in 2019. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the progressive agenda is the basic cause of most problems in California, a state where a majority of voters have chosen Democrats in every presidential election since 1996. Democrats control the state legislature and every statewide office in California, where Joe Biden got 63 percent of the vote in 2020. Is anyone surprised to learn that (a) the state now has a record $68 billion budget deficit, and (b) it is now losing population as fed-up residents leave the state?
Eventually, however, as the cancer of progressivism spreads, destroying cities and states, the health of the nation is threatened — which is, after all, why Joe Biden is in the White House. Go through the 2020 election results state-by-state and a pattern becomes clear. In every “swing” state that tilted to Biden, Trump would have won were it not for the overwhelming tsunami of Democratic votes in major cities. For example, in Georgia, where the official margin of victory was less than 12,000 votes (0.23 percent of the approximately 5 million votes in the state), Biden’s margin of victory in Fulton County (Atlanta) was more than 160,000 votes. Which is to say, the Democrats in Atlanta won and the rest of Georgia lost. Something similar was true regarding Philadelphia versus the rest of Pennsylvania, Milwaukee versus the rest of Wisconsin, and so on.
Democrat-controlled cities exercised a decisive influence in putting Biden in the White House, and, therefore, the preferences of urban progressives control the policy agenda of the administration. No matter how much Biden tries to portray himself as a blue-collar “regular guy” favoring commonsense policies, his election was the result of the Democratic Party’s urban dominance, and the agenda of the Biden administration owes much less to common sense than to the kind of ideologues who think it is good policy to legalize drugs, ban plastic straws, and turn loose violent felons in the name of “social justice.”
What is really at stake in this year’s election is whether the American people will wake up and stop this insanity before it destroys our nation.
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Robert Stacy McCain is the author of Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature. He blogs at TheOtherMcCain.com.
