About 30 years ago, a defense attorney asked if I would stipulate to the expertise of a proposed witness, a local community college professor. The proffered expert’s only memorable qualification was that she had authored (but not yet published) an academic paper that posited low self-esteem as the principal cause of criminal behavior. For a variety of reasons, I told her, The People declined. I didn’t share the most compelling reason with her: the premise of the proposed expert’s work simply didn’t pass my smell-test.
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To her client’s misfortune, the timing of the defense attorney’s request was coincident with the retelling of one of the vilest utterances I have ever been privy to: a judge had recently spoken of a juvenile who confessed why he had shot and killed a man. “He looked at me,” the ward explained. “He doesn’t get to look at me.”
Unlike the would-be expert’s appeasing opinion, the “youth’s” testimony was consistent with much that I had observed about the criminal class, particularly among career offenders. Knowing my intuition did not amount to legal authority, I decided to search for informed voices who would support my gut-formed theory. As luck would have it, I stumbled upon a then-new study that not only refuted the proffered “expert” opinion, but found the opposite to be true. The incarcerated tended to have an exaggerated sense of self-esteem, according to the research, and the defense bar was horrified. It has been 20 years since I’ve seen mention of the findings.
In this space, I recently suggested that public shaming was never about rehabilitation; instead, it was and remains a tacit threat to the rest of us to eschew the alleged misconduct of those “shamed.” A thoughtful reader took me to task for what he perceived as my lack of appreciation for the concept of shame. Among people whose value systems are aligned, I agree that shame can be a useful tool. It’s susceptible to abuse, obviously, but can be powerful in a community of the close-knit. To expect it to work, however, requires projecting the values of the community onto the alleged scofflaw. In my estimation, that is a bridge too far.
Over the course of a career — 25 years of which was spent in the justice system — I found less convincing evidence of a contrite heart than of any other human quality or state of mind in the countless miscreants who crossed my path. In large part, those accused and found culpable of wrongdoing were either upset with a system that viewed their behavior as wrong, or insistent that in their particular circumstances their conduct was not merely defensible, but constituted the proper administration of the right kind of justice. These were not people who were vulnerable to shame, at least when it came to their own actions. They were people who would “tsk-tsk” at my investigators, scowl and shake their heads at me, and file pro se appellate briefs that castigated judges and alleged a conspiratorial corruption on the part of their accusers and the authorities.
The Bad News
The Democratic Socialists of America are bolder in their nihilism than their forebears, but any political Darwinist would have predicted this evolutionary stage. Many did. While some conservatives warned of slippery slopes, others suspected the ones we generously mislabeled “liberals” were far more nefarious (Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill were liberals, George McGovern and Barack Obama were not). The American left has largely been composed of patient incrementalists whose design was always something beyond higher marginal tax rates and lavish government spending.
Why, though, are “liberal” pretenders and DSA Democrats, alike, hellbent on adopting policies that are anathema to American tradition?
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While it isn’t essential to anarchism, nihilism is a useful wingman for its kissing cousin. First, take down the walls — the traditions, morals, customs and practices — of civil society. After that, collapsing the political structure itself is a fait accompli. Consider nihilism a post-Apocalyptic geologic map, anarchism a chaotic overlay of political boundaries sitting atop the geologic decay. You only get to the overlay, of course, where the geology is accommodating.
Is anarchy the goal? No, communism is. Anarchy creates the void that must be filled, for civilization, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
The Fake News
“Communism has never been properly implemented,” went a popular trope when I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s. To hear it resurrected 50 years later is appalling. Worse, their revisionists now claim victories it never won. Their Weltanschauung has a decidedly East German pronunciation. Viewing the visage of the politicians, professors, journalists, and other useful idiots of 2026 is informative. Aside from Bernie, their faces rarely bear a line, the hair is invariably dark, and their gait is easy. These may be enviable qualities, but they betray a people who, if they were even yet born, were babies when the USSR fell, collapsing with it the entirety of the Iron Curtain. They are to be forgiven their youth, but not their concerted effort to remain ignorant of the ravages of communism.
The Big News
Statists seem to finally understand that, as the Mainers like to say, “You can’t get there from here.” That is, as long as our constitutional republic functions as designed, the artery that feeds into communism can never be discovered. It’s not that it’s been hidden or overgrown with capitalist paraphernalia. It’s that there is none: no headwaters for that stream, no trailhead for that hike, no junction for that train. This is why their tactics have changed. They see their only way to win is to blow things up.
For decades, they sought to change America from within, by way of “long march through the institutions.” They enjoyed plenty of success, too, quickly capturing faculty lounges, newsrooms, and not a few boardrooms. But America, they found, possessed an invisible force with real stopping power. They discovered that in the long march through them, “the institutions” includes more than government and academia (or even media, including the social variety). It includes the English language itself, and the ways we speak and write about our culture — the religion, literature, folklore, customs, traditions and practices that have been passed down to us. And within all that, they discovered, resides a love for freedom.
The Good News
So whether the issue is gender theory or territorial integrity, a bicameral legislature and three branches of government, or DEI, federalism, or the abolition of crime, ultimately, the “institution” we have greatest need to protect is us. I recently urged that prayer is essential to that protection. Christians should understand that we are to pray continually, that we have “the full armor of God” (truth, righteousness, readiness, faith, the hope of salvation, and the word of God) in our reach and on our side, and that by using what has been given us, we are more than conquerors.
And in all this there is no shame.
Paul O’Brien, a retired California lawyer, lives — and sometimes writes — in Eagle, Idaho.
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