https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-really-part-four-lawlessness-and-corruption/
Corruption and lawlessness destroy civilizations. The 20th-century American ability to curb both, at least on the everyday level, explains in part the American success story. But now?
On the street level, shoplifting is being redefined in blue cities and states as something like parity or equity, or some sort of Orwellian justified adjustment in income.
The attempt to enforce the law can be far more dangerous than breaking it. We have completely politicized the legal system on the violent end, using race and ethnicity as exemptions from full enforcement of statutes—exemptions that fall most heavily upon the inner-city people of color and poor.
Will the lawlessness continue, as carjacking, car-racing in intersections, smash-and-grab, and overt theft reach the suburbs? Are we more afraid of enforcing the law and being libeled as illiberal for it, or the lawbreaking itself that we cannot always any more avoid?
In Oakland, suburbanites of every race, along with inner-city blacks, now march on government to insist on refunding the police and enforcing the law? But is such a reawakening too little and too late, in the sense that industry, business, and the middle classes now choose instead to avoid the Oaklands of America, on the theory life is too short and dangerous to be martyred on the altar of ecumenicalism?
As Livy reminds us, the remedy for our vices is now deemed worse than the malady itself. Would an attorney general attempting to clean up the DOJ have to be hated and ostracized to succeed? Where and how would an FBI director even begin?