Symposium: Why Do Progressives Love Criminals?

Frontpage Magazine editor-in-chief Jamie Glazov has conducted another symposium involving Dalrymple, this one in response to the recent books The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander and Are Prisons Obsolete? by the revolting Angela Davis. Be sure to click to the second page to read all three of Dalrymple’s contributions, among which:
A mixture of sentimentality and intellectual pride distinguishes the attitude of many liberal intellectuals towards crime, which almost never affects them personally. On the one hand there is a reluctance to believe that ordinary people can behave very badly; on the other they believe that it is the function of the intellectual to uncover the underlying ‘reality’ of phenomena (if he is not for that, what is he for?), so that it represents a loss of caste to express the ordinary man in the street’s horror at or revulsion against crime.
Thus crime has to become not really crime, but something else altogether more noble, which it takes nobility and intelligence or acuity on the part of the intellectual in turn to recognize. People don’t steal or rob because they want something and think it is the easiest way to get it; they are uttering a protest against injustice. Moral grandiosity and exhibitionism are the occupational hazards of intellectuals.
None of this should, of course, be taken to mean that we should not oppose injustice where it really exists.

One thought on “Symposium: Why Do Progressives Love Criminals?

  1. Terry Wall

    Most of that post is the type of thinking that is commonly heard from academically intelligent people. Unfortunately books on there own are not good educators. Intelligence also is gained from working and traveling in other countries, seeing the big picture if you will, being non religious, being open minded and widely educated as opposed to having specialized in one field.
    One group of professionals stands out in having had much of their thinking channeled and that is the medical profession. they think that prevention is related to early detection, and that correct diagnosis and disbursement of pharmaceuticals is a part of health. Whereas it is part of disease treatment and totally unsustainable without some genuine interest in true prevention.
    This is why some people can get around to the idea that crime has some higher purpose. Bloody bollocks. Crime is the result of disinterested uneducated parents dragging up sprogs with as little inconvenience to their lives as possible.

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