Every action has an equal and opposite reaction
Many may wonder what a physical law set forth by a scientist who died in the late 1720s could possibly have to do with contemporary Chicago politics.
Democratic socialists and other leftists might be particularly puzzled, Jacobins that they are, since they think time makes ancient good unspeakably uncouth. In their brave new world, anything asserted by dead white males not from the global south, from Ancient Greece and Rome and the following annals of Western civilization is prima facia canceled.
Conservatives know better, understanding as they do that there are eternal verities, immutable laws of nature-human and otherwise-that govern the course of events, laws such as supply and demand, and Newton’s Third, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
An analog of this law applies to the perhaps the basest of human affairs: politics. We’ve seen many examples over the centuries. The excesses of the French aristocracy triggered those of the French Revolution. Those of the Romanovs triggered the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. In both cases, excesses on the part of the extreme left resulted in counterrevolutions of equal and opposite intensity.
So it goes. One might categorize these phenomena under the rubric of the political derivative of Newton’s Third Law.
In the so far terrible 21st century, some conservatives have become pessimistic to the point of despondency. True, in Chicago, it is hard to keep the faith. It’s difficult to shake the blues as we suffer under "blue" government from top to bottom, from the White House to the State House to the two-headed monster of the County Building and City Hall.
But there is hope. To quote an unlikely source, the notorious Vladmir Lenin, the worse the better. The further the far-left strays from respecting the immutable laws of nature, the worse things get.
Campaigning in radical poetry is easy. Knaves and fools can use the seductive siren song of socialism, social justice, oppressor vs. oppressed narratives, and other demagoguery to get elected by a gullible, naïve, and ill-educated (largely by the public schools they control) electorate in low turnout elections.
Then comes the challenge of governing, not in poetic sophistry, but cold hard prose. The worse the results, the more the absurdity of their policies becomes obvious, flying in the face of common sense of the voters. This arouses the emotions of voters, most of whom normally have a very low level of interest and engagement leading, most importantly, to low turnout.
This has become apparent globally. Most recently, many European governments have suffered crushing defeat at the hands of their conservative adversaries — France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain for example. The European Parliamentary elections were one forum where this equal and opposite reaction to leftist schemes manifested at the hands of what mainstream media characterize as “far right parties.” In the U.S., convictions on what are viewed by arguably most conservatives as trumped-up charges (pun intended) resulted in a $400 million fundraising windfall for the presumptive Republican nominee, and had just a barely perceptible impact on the polls — which show the race to make Biden a one-term president basically a dead heat.
Closer to Sweet Home Chicago, despite the fervent efforts of Toni Preckwinkle and her Chicago Teachers Union cadre, Eileen O’Neill Burke, the cleanest shirt in the dirty Democrat laundry, emerged triumphant in spite of an unfortunate St. Paddy’s Day gaffe which prompted allegations that she had been overserved on parade day. (Imagine a person of Irish heritage imbibing a bit under such circumstances-shocking!) Burke claims teetotaler status, but that’s all Guiness under the bridge, and the electorate has a choice between her and Bob Fioretti, running as a Republican.
So, it appears certain that Cook County and thus Chicago have reacted oppositely to the scourge of Kim Foxx. Is the reaction equal in intensity to the reign of terror perpetrated by Foxx and her puppet master Preckwinkle? Perhaps not. Does it address the problem of the permissive Cook County judiciary under Chief Judge Tim Evans? No. But it’s a start.
Does it begin the turn of the tide in Chicago’s abysmal government, led by Brandon (he of the $30,000 grooming tab) Johnson? No.
But even The Chi has shown signs of pushback. The recent extension of the ShotSpotter system (which the left hates because it works) beyond the Democratic National Convention, and the subsequent assertion of power over the decision-making process by the City Council are encouraging, if all too rare, evidence of horse sense, particularly welcome in wards with the highest concentrations of homicides and shootings. It is increasingly evident that people of color are tired of getting shot and not nearly as empathetic toward the shooters as their democratic socialist fellow citizens.
Will the actions of the DSA and their fellow travelers continue to obey the political derivative of Newton’s Third Law of Physics, producing an equal and opposite reaction to the madness that has (hopefully) temporarily driven City Hall insane? Time will tell.
But to some extent it’s up to us. We must resist the temptation to give up. We must have the courage of our convictions to speak up and speak out, to logically point out the contradictions of the DSA platform, to draw attention to the paradox many of these policies harm those they ostensibly are intended to help, to advocate public safety as the foundation of the free enterprise that made Chicago great, We must work at the grassroots level, online as well as in the real world, using well-honed arguments that gently but firmly poke holes in and thus raise doubts about conventional left wing doctrine. We must not expect agreement or capitulation. Rather, we must seek to plant a seed of uncertainty that will cause apparently hardcore leftists to question their assumptions in their own hearts and minds.
Perhaps most importantly, we must vote. Despair depresses turnout. Show up at the polls for every local election. Vote strategically rather than symbolically. Seek to move a leftist regime toward the center.
It’s a start.
