Clinton, Biden, Obama (and Nietzsche) on Modern Crime
I have long said that Trump is just a normal 1990s liberal. (For better or worse?)
Yet it is worth remembering how the degradation of politics (set in motion centuries ago) escalated in the superpower over the past two decades.
As I wrote in the introduction to The Word and the Flame, Nietzsche has been proven prophetic in our time.
He wrote in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886 that we have been led “...to a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly.”
In a time of anarcho-tyranny, the state becomes the enemy of its own people.
Nietzsche again, from 1883’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples.
A state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”
It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.
Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.
The statists are the destroyers who hang the sword over the people and dull their spirits with a hundred cravings; the state is a sinner against laws and customs, against Life.
Here are the court politicians discussing law enforcement in 1990s America.
Hillary Clinton on locking up ‘superpredator’ criminals:
Joe Biden on how the root causes of crime should not matter to law enforcement:
And a few decades ago, Barack Obama boasted of increased deportations, stating: “Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws and they must be held accountable.”
As GK Chesterton wrote, “The past is not what it was.”
To be clear, I am no defender of modern policing and the vast bureaucratic apparatus that constitute pseudo justice systems in modern states.
I want the police to leave me alone wherever I am.
And the fact that the US even considers mass incarceration is a symptom of something deeper having gone very wrong; it is the unintended consequence of social engineering in the 60s and 70s, which in itself speaks of a lack of any kind of spirited leadership class.
Yet the contemporary pathology of indulging chaos in cities whilst regulating the citizenry to a point of suffocation must not go unnoticed and uncriticized.
(I did some further noticing here, in my anarcho-tyranny series.)
Once again, this is why Nietzsche remains an important thinker for us today. He foresaw this age of last men, where the base and the low are tolerated and even deified.
But even now, the word and the flame are within reach.
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