Crime Issue Reveals the Real Source of Nation’s Political Divide — Guest Post by ST Karnick

Karnik is more in touch with “normies” than the author of this blog/Substack, and I thought it would be interesting to bring us that perspective. For instance, I look with horror upon the GOP that pushed us over the line into the Civil “Rights” era, given “rights” are the result of the egalitarian impulse, and how destructive that impulse and those “rights” have been. But it has to be admitted that pride in these “rights” is the perspective that is shared by the great majority of GOP voters, voters who may well put Trump over the line. We need them on our side. Insulting them won’t help us. But we absolutely have to figure a way to bring these good people to our way of thinking. –Briggs

Violent crime is one of the top issues in the current presidential election campaign, with 61 percent of registered voters saying that it is “very important.”

The two parties differ greatly in their reported levels of concern about violent crime. Less than half of the surveyed voters who support the Democrat candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, said violent crime is very important to them as an issue in the upcoming presidential election, at 46 percent. Meanwhile, more than three-quarters of those supporting the Republican candidate, former president Donald Trump, reported violent crime as a very important issue, at 76 percent.

Those highly contrasting numbers reflect a fundamental difference in worldviews between the two political parties, a dividing line that has been obscured by continued attention to the issues and alliances that dominated during the twentieth century. By indicating a seeming conflict among the attitudes within the two political parties and their allied political movements (widely characterized as the Left and the Right), the current political opinions about violent crime reveal a basic difference between the two political movements that explains the political realignment that has occurred in the United States since the last three years of the Obama administration.

Given its obvious salience to the public, the amount of violent crime has evoked a variety of conflicting claims about crime rates and their changes over time. Democrats and the Left generally say that crime is decreasing, and Republicans and the Right are apt to reply that it is not. Statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tend to support the Left’s claims. Numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention support the Right’s version of events.

I’ve noted before that the FBI’s numbers are inaccurate because of a variety of problems (see, for example, issue 59 of my Heartland Institute newsletter, Life, Liberty, Property). Major police departments fail to report their crime data to the FBI, cities supply faulty data which the FBI then “corrects” through “estimation” of what the real numbers should be, arrest rates have plummeted as cities greatly reduced the number of police on the streets, many crimes have been downgraded into lower offenses or effectively legalized (such as shoplifting), and people have stopped bothering to report many crimes because the police do nothing about them.

There are significantly more-reliable numbers available, and they tell a very different story from the FBI’s claims of falling crime rates. The latest National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Justice Statistics and released this month, found that “urban crime is far worse than it was in the pre-George Floyd era,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

“The NCVS report for 2023 finds no statistically significant evidence that violent crime or property crime is dropping in America,” the story goes on to report. “Excluding simple assault—the type of violent crime least likely to be charged as a felony—the violent crime rate in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019, the last year before the defund-the-police movement swept the country.”

The numbers “aren’t pretty,” the Journal story states:

According to the NCVS, the urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.

The urban property-crime rate is also getting worse. It rose from 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2022 to 192.3 in 2023. That’s part of a 26% increase in the urban property-crime rate since 2019. These numbers exclude rampant shoplifting, since the NCVS is a survey of households and not of businesses.

Making our way back toward an understanding of the political divide, there is an enormous difference between the crime rates in big cities and less-populated areas such as suburbs and rural America, with crime in the latter well below one-tenth what it is in the cities, the Journal notes:

In contrast, violent-crime rates in suburban and rural areas have been essentially unchanged since 2019. In suburban areas in 2019, there were 22.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons 12 or older, compared with 23.3 in 2023—a statistically insignificant change. In rural areas, the rate was 16.3 in 2019 and 15.3 in 2023—again, not a statistically significant change. Our recent crime spike is essentially limited to cities.

Even the FBI’s numbers are ominous if you look at the trend over the past decade, as social researcher Steve Sailer notes: “the FBI’s count of the total number of homicides in the U.S. was 41.9% higher in 2023 than in 2014, the year when Ferguson unleashed the catastrophic Black Lives Matter movement, and up 43.8% in the CDC data. (The US population was up around 5% over the same period.)”

Given the enormous variation in crime rates and the ability to choose one’s statistics, the difference between the two major political parties’ voters in levels of concern about crime is highly instructive. As noted above, 76 percent of Republicans say the amount of violent crime is very important to them, whereas only 46 percent of Democrats say so. Among Trump supporters, crime is the third-most important issue, behind only the economy and immigration. For Harris-inclined voters, violent crime was rated second-lowest among the ten issues covered in the survey, with only immigration being deemed less important.

This suggests, of course, that Trump supporters feel more threatened by violent crime than Harris-favoring voters do. That seems an odd finding in light of the common observation of Republican voters as more likely to be rural or suburban and male than Democrats, among whom females and urbanites are more dominant, which opinion polls confirm. Republican voters are also on average a few years older, 10 percentage points less likely to have a college degree, and far more likely to say they are Christian than Democrats are.

With Democrats more likely to be urban, single, female, and well-educated, one might expect them to be more worried about crime than Republicans, given the concentration of crime in urban areas. Yet that is not the case. Republicans tend to be more supportive of law-and-order policies, and Democrats much less so and far more suspicious of state and local police.

Perhaps the higher incomes of Democrats can explain much of the difference. As John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center has noted, 5 percent of U.S. counties “contain 47% of the population and account for 73% of murders. But even within those counties, the murders are very heavily concentrated in small areas.” These are generally low-income areas. Well-educated, single, female, urban Democrats are less likely to live in those neighborhoods. That frees them to be more able to feel concern for the welfare of criminals, even violent ones, whom they may see as victimized by social inequalities.

Republicans, by contrast, tend to gravitate toward suburban and rural areas, where the gun ownership rates are 38 percent and 79 percent higher, respectively, than in the nation’s cities, as Lott notes—which may help account for the much-higher crime rates in the cities, where the risk one takes on in committing a crime is much lower than in these more-Republican places. In short, urbanites rely more on the police to protect them than do suburbanites and those in rural areas.

These observations suggest two important factors: one’s predilection for self-reliance versus reliance on government, and the expectation that governments should intervene in favor of some groups of people over others to equalize their positions in the world.

People’s attitudes toward violent crime indicate that an important political divide today is between people who want the government to manage relationships between different social groups, where Democrats tend to reside, and those who want the government to protect individuals from harm by others and leave them generally on their own otherwise, a more Republican position.

That hypothesis would explain why major positions of the two major political parties and their supporters seem to vary in their implied level of trust in government and willingness to rely on government and substitute its decisions for people’s free choices. It is not a simple matter of one party generally approving of government intervention in individual choices and the other preferring a more hands-off approach.

For example, while Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to support having the government go easy on crime, Democrats strongly advocate gun control, which means heavy government intervention to remove firearms from private ownership (either over time or rapidly), relying on a government monopoly of firearms to keep people safe. Republicans promote gun ownership as a self-reliant approach to personal safety. In this issue area, those on the left seek to make it impossible or at least very difficult for people to do wrong, a group approach, whereas those on the right want to impose sanctions on those who harm others, an individualized approach.

In addition to massive government intervention against personal ownership of firearms, Democrats strongly approve of government management of the economy and provision of direct financial patronage to lower-income Americans. Republicans generally prefer to allow markets to manage the production of goods and services and sort them among the population through voluntary agreements, with much less government redistribution of incomes.

Although neither party is fully consistent in its approach to the economy, here too the difference between the two is profound and embodies highly contrasting views of the role of government and its trustworthiness in handling the issue. The leftist approach focuses on promoting equality between groups, and the right’s approach focuses on individual autonomy, with government generally limited to the punishment of force and fraud.

Democrats are also much more supportive of government control of education, even to the point of allowing government-run public schools to encourage children to “transition” into identification as the opposite sex, whereas Republicans prefer that schools generally conform to the preferences of parents and taxpayers and stay out of sex issues or at least inform parents of what they are doing. Here too, Democrats seek to protect and advance certain groups, whereas the Republicans favor individual choice and parental authority.

Similarly, while supporters of both parties want a clean environment, Democrats call for an enormous amount of government control to combat climate change, whereas Republicans tend to be much more skeptical about the government’s ability to administer such a scheme effectively and fairly. The anti-fossil-fuel crusade uses government to force everyone except the very wealthy into equality of energy shortages. The Right prefers to allow energy freedom and address specific cases of provable environmental harms.

Democrats support government promotion of, and even mandates for, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environment and social governance policies, all of which place burdens on people in supposedly privileged groups (many of whom are by no means thriving) and redistribute their resources and opportunities to others (many of whom are already very well-off). Republicans oppose these schemes and, as with other issues, want the government to concentrate on the rooting out of proven harms done through deliberate use of force or fraud. For the Right, mens rea is crucial. For the Left, membership in a designated exploiter class is sufficient to justify government sanctions.

Democrats increasingly approve of government censorship of communications, or at least want to allow it without explicitly expressing approbation, whereas Republicans strongly disapprove of the rising incursions against freedom of speech that have characterized the twenty-first century.

Democrats also strongly approve of government intervention to combat racial and ethnic inequality, with 56 percent of Harris supporters calling it very important. Only 18 percent of Trump-inclined voters want government to determine races’ economic positions.

Finally, most Democrats are adamant that the government should not decide when an infant in the womb becomes a human being with a life requiring protection. Republicans, by contrast, see a role for government in that. Interestingly, however, abortion was traditionally viewed as a crime issue before Roe v. Wade, indicating that the two parties’ attitudes toward the issue derive at least to some degree from their opinions on crime and law and order.

Thus, the issue of what to do about violent crime reveals the consistency in the two parties’ seemingly odd assortment of attitudes about government overriding individual choices. As with the crime issue, the underlying point of view behind all these factors is the individual’s attitude toward self-reliance versus reliance on government, and whether the government should emphasize protecting individuals from harm or equalizing people’s living conditions. The latter attitude, furthermore, determines whether the government relies on provable harms and mens rea or on group membership to justify its actions.

That explains why Democrats want the government to stay out of abortion and immigration and to deemphasize crimefighting, while intervening heavily in the economy, education, children’s sexual education and even sex identification, the environment, international affairs, etc., and do not mind undermining the social value and status of families and religious faith. The Democrats and the Left generally tend to deploy the government to weigh in on the side of groups such as racial minorities, lower-income people, immigrants, and sexual outliers, to increase the power of these groups.

In accordance with this vision, the government intervenes—massively, by necessity—to manage and equalize the economic and political power of the various groups into which society can be divided conceptually.

The establishment of equality among all groups as the Democrats’ overriding goal seems, of course, to conflict with the party’s history of support for slavery, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan, and its deployment of explicit policies of racism in the federal government under President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat. The common factor, however, is clear: the use of government to determine the distribution of wealth and opportunity among various groups of people.

Republicans, by contrast, tend to see government’s role as protecting individuals from exploitation through force and fraud. As with the Democrats, the Republicans’ history is consistent with their current viewpoint, as the GOP is the party that ended slavery, opposed Jim Crow, ended racial segregation in the federal government under President Warren G. Harding (Wilson’s successor), and provided the deciding votes for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act against the fierce opposition of southern Democrats. All these actions were intended to prevent individuals from exploiting one another. That is also the motive behind all reasonable law-and-order policies.

All of this suggests that the emerging political alignments of our time are a matter of sorting based on the individual’s level of trust in government and willingness to rely on authorities as opposed to reliance on self, family, and friends. As the Democrats and the Left in general discover new instances of inequality among various social groups, they call upon government to do whatever it takes to end them. As the actions based on these premises place burdens on people who have individually done nothing wrong (the presumed remedy for supposed systemic racism and the excuse for a massive welfare state, calls for racial reparations payments, DEI, and the like), Republicans are inclined to protect these individuals from the uses of force and/or fraud against them by government.

As this analysis indicates, the crime issue brings to light the two fundamental thoughts that ultimately define the attitudes of the Left and Right in the United States: self-reliance versus reliance on government, and government promotion of equality among groups versus protection of individuals from exploitation. In that regard at least, violent crime is indeed a highly important issue.

S. T. Karnick is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute. His Substack is called Life, Liberty, Property, and is available here.

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