Why do American conservatives tend to favor less government and more individual freedom, but also tend to support heavy-handed police tactics and military expansion?
First, it isn’t true that conservatives support “heavy-handed police tactics.” (Incidentally, it would have been helpful to define that term more precisely.) Rather, conservatives are realists. We recognize that in areas of high crime police tactics have to be aggressive. There’s been plenty of hand-wringing over the shooting of Michael Brown and the accidental death of Eric Garner—but none that I know of over the countless victims of crime in those blighted urban areas where such incidents typically occur. The victims of black criminals are almost always black. Who speaks up for them? Certainly not left-wing anti-police demonstrators.The NYPD tactics that are now being decried by anti-police activists have, over the past twenty years, brought about a dramatic decrease in New York City’s crime rate. To put it another way, people living in the city’s toughest neighborhoods are now much less likely to be robbed, assaulted or killed. Unfortunately, since the cop-bashing leftie Bill de Blasio became mayor, violent crime in NYC has been on the rise. No surprise there! What else is to be expected when the major of a major city reviles and demonizes his own police department? And who are the principal victims of this rising crime rate? Certainly not well-to-do progressives living on Park Avenue!Personal safety is the sine qua non of individual liberty. Your rights are valuable only if you’re alive to enjoy them. Elevated rhetoric about individual rights is all well and good—until you read about the thirteen-year-old girl who got caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting and died with a bullet through her head. Things like this happen with depressing frequency in Chicago, where light-minded notions about progressive policing prevail. It appears to me that Bill de Blasio prefers the Chicago method and intends to apply it in New York City.If lefties and progressives are more concerned about the rights of criminals—well, criminals who happen to belong to favored minority groups—than they are about those criminals’ victims they should say so frankly. Then we’ll all know where we stand.
Why would you not move to Little Rock, Arkansas?
There are plenty of reasons not to move to Little Rock if you're looking for them.Frequent property crime, like burglary and theftInconsistent and almost nonexistent night lifeDepressingly high numbers of homeless people on the streetsToo many dogmatically conservative people in the stateToo many dogmatically liberal people in the cityThere aren't nearly enough healthy food optionsThere aren't nearly enough good barbecue optionsThere are also reasons to move here if you're looking for them.The city has a haunting beauty, if you're into an urban aestheticIt's surrounded by natural beautyThe people have plenty of that famed southern hospitalityTons of museums for a city this sizeTons of live theater for a city that's not New York or Los AngelesTraffic could go in either list, depending on where you'd be moving from, but as a former navigator of southeast Pennsylvania’s highways and byways, I often say there is no traffic here. People familiar with driving in Arkansas’ smaller communities fervently disagree with me.