I thought that article Tim F linked to on Trump supporters was quite interesting. It’s just a strange list of grievances that Trump supporters have. Many things about “things have gotten better/things have gotten worse” are hard to quantify. But the massive drop in the crime rate over the last 25 years is not. Nevertheless:
“I used to sleep on my front porch with the door wide open, and now everyone has deadbolts,” one man said. “I believe the best days of the country are behind us.”
There’s been an amazing number of crime scares started by conservatives the past few years. Not just the knockout game, but the claim that the Chicago murder rate skyrocketed under Rahm and in New York under de Blasio (it didn’t, it stayed at historic lows).
But it’s part of the right-wing narrative, numbers be damned.
Baud
News lies, and right wing news lies even more.
Hal
Kirstie Alley is on twitter reminding people she’s still alive by saying she not voting for the party that begins with D E M. She’s so clever. She also complains that there are too many one issue voters. I guess she’s going with Trump. The hilarious thing was looking at the facebook replies with all these people lauding her for her bravery. Man I hope Trump wins the nominations.
Oh, David Duke thinks he’s great too.
Scratch
Facebook just told me that Donald Trump has been endorsed by David Duke.
I really didn’t imagine that the racists would begin pouring out of the dark when Obama was elected back in 2008, but they sure have abandoned the dog whistles and just simply shout it out proudly, don’t they?
DougJ
@Hal:
Cheers really went to shit when she replaced Shelly Long.
JPL
Fear and loathing is how the republicans win. They are not going to change course now.
BTW, I mentioned earlier that MSM should call out the xenophobia,, but of course, they won’t. In fact, MSM never corrected the ebola bullshit that was spread before the last election.
JPL
@Scratch: Glenn Spencer who is single handily keeping our borders safe, is backing Trump.
Southern Poverty Law Center has a nice write about him.
It doesn’t matter because the rest of the repubs, are better with their code words so Duke and Spencer will support the eventual nominee.
JMG
Fear of crime is all that TV local news, which is where stations make their money, has to sell, except for fear of really bad weather. PS: I’m 66. There has been no time in my life when anyone I knew or ever heard of slept out on their front porch. This guy is repeating his grandfather’s bitching like it was his own.
Belafon
@JPL: Which all of the sudden dried up the day after the election. Amost as if the MSM was in on it (not just FOX).
I really do think this election is going to turn into racists vs everyone else. In the early 1900s, the racists won. Will whites who care about this turn out even if there’s nothin in it for them?
dedc79
Agreed that it’s generally a bunch of nonsense. Washington, DC has, however, seen a spike in murders this year, following a pretty long period of decline. I believe we are at or near the total number of murders for all of last year, and it’s only August.
Amir Khalid
@JMG: I thought that in America a man only had to do that if he had come home drunk and his wife didn’t approve.
By the way, I’m wondering how to work in the line, To live in this town you must be tough tough tough tough tough tough tough!
FridayNext
My parents live in the same house I grew up in back in the 60’s and 70’s. My cranky dad spends most of his days complaining about the crime rate going through the roof and I tell him that the neighborhood is safer now then when he let me ride my bike around town by myself when I was a kid. He won’t hear of it. He just KNOWS that the crime rate is soaring because he sees it on the news. It’s the most frustrating conversations we have, and he is to the right of Trump’s base.
Peale
@Belafon: And suddenly, no one cared about barbaric hordes of Central American 11 year olds on gang recruitment missions, either.
Ryan
Too bad we don’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. He’d feel at home in his party.
Elly
LOL. When I was a kid, my mother always kept a chain on the door, and we were instructed to always have it in place before answering it – even when an adult was home (when one wasn’t, we weren’t to answer the door at all). And that was in the early 1960s. In Mountain View, CA back when there were still orchards and open fields, and the place had an “everytown, USA” vibe.
Mom was born in 1920, and told me lots of stories from her own youth, yet I never heard anything about this alleged utopian past, where people slept on their porches and no one had deadbolts. She wasn’t paranoid – we certainly roamed around freely enough – but I don’t think it would ever have occurred to her to not keep the doors locked: she was a sensible woman and it was a sensible precaution – not some harbinger of the end of civilization.
Matt McIrvin
@dedc79: Baltimore too, and in that case I suspect part of the rise was a sort of work-to-rule slowdown by cops pushing back against the Freddie Gray protests.
Anoniminous
A system does what it does and the GOP Base Messaging System has to keep up’ing the the ethnic hate because that’s the system they’ve got and all they got. They can’t Message on policy because their policies have been disastrous. They can’t Message on ideas because they don’t have any. They can’t Message on change because their whole point is anti-change. Not a war going on, at the moment, so they can’t Message jingoism.
jon
I don’t know what world of magical thinking and dumb those people once inhabited, but back in the 70s in my Minneapolis suburb, I was smart enough to lock the doors and didn’t leave my bicycle unchained and even made sure to keep the garage locked when no one was home. And that was before the black family moved into the neighborhood.
Fair Economist
In the past, people may not have slept with their doors unlocked, but now they do, and safely. How do I know? For several years, I had a roommate who simply did not understand the concept of “locking the door”. I frequently came home to or woke up to an unlocked door. What happened? Nothing. This isn’t even a particularly nice neighborhood – it had an average crime rate.
FlipYrWhig
So if there was this time when nobody locked the door, why were there locks installed on the door in the first place?
Seanly
I have a veritable gold mine of Simpson’s quotes in my head, but I can’t place this one. Anyone know what episode that’s from? Oh, wait…
Frank Luntz needs to stop forming his focus groups out of the stupidest people on the planet.
On a related aside, when I worked in Harrisburg, PA, some of my fellow structural engineers were pretty conservative. The more conservative they were, the more they spouted off their idiot opinions. I was legitimately relieved that their political power was limited to their single vote. Trump seems to be a Frankenstein formed from all their horrible, racist idiot opinions. Sigh…
Gin & Tonic
@efgoldman: It reminds me of NYC in the 70s
Some time in the late 70’s, I think, my wife left her keys in the car while at work. The car was parked in the street, in Crown Heights. All day. She came out at the end of the day, said, “oh, there they are” and drove home.
Well, it was a really crappy car.
dedc79
@Matt McIrvin: In DC, they’re blaming it in part on the departure of 500 cops over the past 18 months.
JPL
@Belafon: It appears that way.
Helen
@efgoldman:
Also – his Twitter feed is GOLD. The @dick_nixon one. Pure GOLD.
sam
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but a big part of the problem has been that the news shows just as much, if not more, of the existing crime even though there’s way less of it. So if there’s only 1 murder a day in NYC (about the average these days), 100% of the murders get reported. Whereas in the bad old days, only a small fraction of the murders even made it onto the news. Same 30 minute local news to fill (or worse, 24 hour cable news which didn’t exist back then), so each individual crime gets significantly more attention. No one spends time talking about all of the crime that doesn’t happen anymore.
I distinctly remember the news during my childhood (in the suburbs of NYC, where we got the NYC news), where one of the nightly news shows actually did a “countdown calendar” to see if the city would get to 100 murders in a month. A MONTH. We did. It was almost like they were daring criminals to go out and kill more people. That memory always sticks with me when people talk about how “dangerous” new york city is now and I look at them like they have three heads.
I was on vacation two weeks ago with people from all over the country at a photo workshop, and one of my classmates was talking about how he’s never been to NYC, and his wife refused to go because it was “too dangerous”. a sentence later, he was talking about how they go to Chicago all the time. The cognitive dissonance was kind of amazing. Chicago’s not as dangerous as it’s portrayed in its most stereotyped ways either, but I’m pretty sure NYC’s still got the lowest crime rate of all the big cities, no?
redshirt
I sleep with the door unlocked now for the thrill of it.
Ruckus
@JMG:
A 5 min nap in the chair on the porch is still sleeping. But no one will ask him why he stopped. Because his answer is not important. Sheep need sheep dogs and sheep dogs need to work and be fed. If you do this then it is relatively easy to raise sheep. Said sheep provide meat and wool. Think of it as sheep=the great masses, sheep dogs=MSM, and meat and wool=profit. Yes you won’t keep all the sheep in line but all you need is 50%+1 and you are golden in this democracy. Keeping that 50$+1 in line is easier if you can convince them that the wolves are always just on the other side of the fence and very hungry. But you can’t actually have too many wolves on the other side of the fence, too many wolves getting through=reduced profit. Therefore you have to kill or imprison a lot of the wolves and of course you aren’t going to do that yourself so you hire lions to do that. A small price to pay for more profit. But if the number of wolves is reduced or well fed even then the sheep won’t be bothered, so you have to make sure the sheep dogs rile up the sheep, to keep them running even if only from nothing.
elmo
It’s probably dumb of us, but my wife and I got out of the habit of locking doors when we lived in Mammoth Lakes (little ski town in the Sierra), and never got back into it. It helps, of course, that we are active dog rescuers focusing on large breeds, and we haven’t had fewer than six dogs in the house since 1999.
Once in Mammoth, I heard the front door open at four in the morning. My first, immediate concern was to make sure that the dogs were in the bedroom and the bedroom door was shut – for the safety of the intruders. At the time we had six adult German Shepherds, only one of whom was at all friendly to strangers.
Sure enough, the dogs were secure, and the intruders were a pair of young women, appallingly drunk, looking for a local weed merchant. I shooed them out without difficulty and had a knee-trembling adrenaline reaction about what the dogs might have done.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@JMG:
Here in Los Angeles, the TV news is so desperate for scare stories that they ran one about some people who were attacked by a gang of raccoons. No, that’s not a euphemism:
sfist.com/2015/08/24/pack_of_raccoons_swarm_richmond_dis.php
Sorry, pasted the wrong link. Also notice that IT DIDN’T EVEN HAPPEN IN LA.
terraformer
The only things that have gotten “worse,” from the standpoint of these folks, is that:
–They don’t always get away with saying derogatory and/or racist words.
–They can’t always discriminate without pushback.
–They can’t always assume that everyone is pretty much on board with the rebel flag.
Or generally, there is a little voice inside their heads or coming from their friends that makes them feel anywhere from a bit uncomfortable to distressed when they reflexively punch down.
Is our racists learning?
Diana
I grew up during the 70’s in a smallish town in Pennsylvania. Every house but ours on our block was robbed at some point, and since my father worked for Legal Aid, he joked the burglars left our house alone out of “professional courtesy.” I went to Yale & moved to NYC in the 1980’s, was mugged three times – once at gunpoint at Yale, twice without a visible weapon in NYC, all three junkies looking for cash for a fix who didn’t try to hurt me.
Since then, nothing. No burglaries, no muggings, not even a broken car window.
I’m sure lead was the ultimate culprit, but facts will never make any difference.
How many Republican fear waves have already been spun out of nothing? There’s no evidence of voter fraud. There seems to be no evidence of illegals having anchor babies. They’ll have no problem spinning a phantom crime wave out of nothing too.
Joel
@Fair Economist: I had a roommate in Pacific Beach, San Diego — the epitome of a high petty crime neighborhood — that insisted on leaving the door unlocked so that he didn’t have to bring his keys while surfing. Despite this, we were never burglarized. However, his car was stolen from our carport.
ninja3000
The only reason I don’t sleep on the porch is because of the mosquitoes, bears, coyotes, and other night critters. My upstate NY town has virtually no crime. The house and cars are unlocked when we’re home, and in 20 years we’ve had nothing happen in our neighborhood at all. And we’re within easy commuting distance of NYC…
Ruckus
@Gin & Tonic:
Back in the late 60s we had a guy at work, couldn’t find his keys at the end of the day. They were in the car with the car running and the door unlocked. About half way between Watts and East LA, in a neighborhood with active hookers on the street and just a couple of miles away from the 65 riots. A neighborhood where one of the truck mechanics down the block had his entire toolbox rolled away, during the day.
Bill Arnold
@FlipYrWhig:
When such people go away for a day or more they lock their doors. (E.g. insurance companies like to see evidence of a break-in.)
(I am such a person, living in a semi-rural area. I do have a few webcams that email motion detect stills to a gmail account though.)
Ruckus
@ninja3000:
Knew someone when I lived in OH that would leave his car running when he went into the store in winter, to keep the heater going and to make sure his POS car didn’t have to start. The cops towed his car once as it was against the law to do that, to keep down the possibility that someone would steal it. This was about 15 yrs ago. I think the cops were having a slow day.
Ruckus
@efgoldman:
Thank you. Could you please send another keyboard, this one seems to be not working as before.
Woodrowfan
1. Kristie Allie is still a Scientologist, so her judgement has already proved to be crap.
2. At least 2 of the DC local news stations are Fox-News clones. They’ll always play up any crimthat involves a black man as the perp.
Don K
@JMG:
Right, way back in the mid-60s my dad was bitching how everybody used to sleep with the front door unlocked or open, or some such shit.
Omnes Omnibus
@Helen: It’s awesome.
Don K
@sam:
True that about NYC. But having said that, once while on a business trip to Chicago I took a longish walk from my hotel to the original Morton’s where we were being taken for dinner. Wonderful dinner, and the street scene was great!
Don K
Oh, and I love NYC too.
sam
@Don K:
Not to get into a privilege discussion or anything, but that must have been nice for them. I’m pretty sure my widowed single-mother grandmother and my dad and his brother, living in a public housing project in the south bronx during the same time period, were locking their doors. A heck of a lot more than my dad does now, living in a fancy doorman building on central park west (yay, upward mobility!)
The housing project was a step up from when the three of them were living in a tiny two bedroom house off of Crotona Park together with her parents, her brother and her sister (8 people total). That street (Wilkins Ave) is described in the AIA guide to New York City as the place that Jimmy Carter compared to Dresden post-bombing when he visited.
sam
@Don K:
OH – I like Chicago – I’m just noting the irony of someone talking about NYC being “too dangerous” to visit and then less than a minute later talking about how they love going to Eataly in Chicago.
Frankensteinbeck
It only takes a little bit of racism to feel a momentary touch of anxiety when you see a brown (or especially black) skinned young man on the street, a flicker of instinct that he might be a petty criminal. You can’t spot that level of racism knowing the person. They may have no problem with other ethnicities in person, and be generally liberal. But over the years, they’ve been getting that touch of fear more and more and more, so it’s awfully easy to convince them that the crime rate is rising.
EDIT – I know that growing up in the 80s, TV and movies trained this into me. I think I only overcame it because regular life taught me that I was in much more danger from young white men than blacks.
satby
@FlipYrWhig: I never locked my doors in my house in Chicago unless I was leaving town, and that was up until 8 years ago when I moved. I seldom lock the doors here either, but I do have a noisy pitbull mix who scares people. I grew up in a neighborhood where doors were generally unlocked. I’m 60, so it was a while ago.
C.V. Danes
Actually, it’s part of the NRA narritive, which I guess is the same thing.
Uncle Cosmo
@Ruckus: True story follows:
In the mid-80s I was living on Charles St. in uptown Baltimore in a 3-story 1890s-era townhouse that had been a rooming house during the war & later subdivided into 3 apts (I had the “penthouse”). One cold winter morning I brought the trash down with me on the way to work. Instead of the usual crossing guard at the nearby corner, a very tall police officer (VTPO) was seeing the school kids across, so I thought, No one will dare to steal a car with a cop right there & before carrying the garbage around the corner to the alley I started the car up.
When I came back around & got into the car the motor was off & there were no keys in the ignition.
I jumped out of the car & started looking around wildly & found them on the sidewalk up against the wall of the building. When I turned back to the car the VTPO (6’6″ at least) was in my face screaming that it was illegal to leave a car unattended with the motor running. I said, Did you turn the motor off? & he said yes. So you threw my keys onto the sidewalk? Another yes. As I tried to explain to him that his presence was the reason I started the car, he wrote me out a citation. (A moving violation–for a car that never moved from its parking place. Go figger.)
I called the State’s Attorney’s office & asked them if it was legal for him to throw my keys onto the sidewalk. It was not. (He should’ve put them in his pocket & then given them back to me, not toss them where a third party could’ve picked them up.) They asked me if I wanted to register a complaint & I did.
I showed up for trial with some apprehension. When we were called the VTPO told the judge it was all a misunderstanding & asked that the charges be dropped.
I talked to the cop later & he wasn’t at all hostile–he admitted he’d screwed up but that he knew better now. I think his superiors decided to drop the charges if I showed up & hope that I wouldn’t pursue the complaint. I told him so did I, & figuring we’d both learned a good lesson, let it go.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@satby:
I’m super paranoid about locking my doors, but I used to read about serial killers a lot. ;-)
MobiusKlein
You know, you folks should learn more history. For example, there was a serial killer from Mexico that hacked up at least 25 people all over California.
Oh yeah, it happened 45 years ago, in the golden age of low crime. Never mind.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Corona
pluege
this may not be quite what it seems. trump supporters, at least a good many of them are likely people not handling the explosion of information blasted at them from every angle because of today’s communications technology. They cannot process it. Many are not handling the information age well. For those who aren’t, the reaction is to retreat because everything seems horrible when in reality it’s that they hear a hell of a lot more about things even though there may be less bad things than there used to be.
the good old days = ignorance is bliss.
Villago Delenda Est
All these stupid people know they see on the teevee, and the teevee lies.
“Home of the brave” my ass. Cowards, the lot of them.
FNWA
I first heard the “We used to sleep out on our front porches” story from an Anne Arundel Count bus driver in the mid eighties. My first thought was, I understand if you can’t afford to air condition your house, but, really, you can’t come up with a fan?
boatboy_srq
@efgoldman: DC infotainment (I refuse to call it journalism) falls into two categories: WaPo VSP moaning about how Evil Soshulism is Coming, and the local TV stations graphically illustrating why Those People can’t be trusted to run their own city. Now Presenting Republicans is taking Walton Family Fndn money, and it shows in the stories it runs. I haven’t decided whether all this is for the benefit of the Congresscritters, or for K St and the Mil-Ind powerhouses in NoVA.
boatboy_srq
@FNWA: My grandmother grew up in Bowie. 110 years ago. They didn’t sleep with the doors unlocked – never mind on the front porch – back then. I wonder where this mythical “golden age” or trust and naivete ever existed, and how it’s come to permeate US politics.
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman:
I was thinking that Nixon, Reagan, and Goldwater would all have both renounced and been unwelcome in today’s GOP.
boatboy_srq
@sam: Working in LA in the mid-90s, driving in to the office with the radio on, and the morning news/traffic/weather would read off body counts by district. The news never made it out of the bowl. (And yes, I have said this before, and been reminded that the victims were all Other People so don’t count…)
J R in WV
@JMG:
Well, you’re wrong. People have been sleeping on screened porches ever since screens were invented, until Carrier Air Conditioning became common.
I’m 64, and I know people who slept on porches at their camps where they didn’t have electric enough to run an AC unit, who slept on porches because they couldn’t afford an AC unit, etc.
I slept in a tent with cousins visiting my Grandma, because it was cool as soon as the sun went down, and no one then had AC where we lived.
But people in WV didn’t lock their doors when I was young, and we don’t lock our doors now because we live up a holler, and no one would see if someone breaks out a window or a slider door. When we’re home, at night, the dogs will go off if anything makes a sound outside, even just a possum. If they go off enough, I’ll open the drawer and get the .45 I keep next to the bed.
My dad used to say, back when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s that no one could steal anything in our house that was worth more than the picture windows they would break to get in the house. He didn’t lock his doors back then, and the crime rate since then has dropped a whole lot.
Sherparick
@FridayNext: Yep. I always tell people the best thing they can do about their fear of crime is stop watching Fox and the local “Eyewitness News.” Except for the idiots with guns walking around, this is a very safe country.
Sherparick
@SiubhanDuinne: Nixon, Goldwater, and Reagan created today’s GOP. Read Rick Perlstein’s histories of the sixties and seventies (Before the Storm, Nixonland, and The Invisible Bridge). rickperlstein.net/# See also: jeetheer.com/politics/lukacs.htm