Michael Dukakis: the original woke?

My biggest problem with policies of the political left is that they don't work.  Or if they work, they have consequences.  The left doesn't go beyond first order thinking, thinking only in terms of the plan to do X doing X, not thinking that X will lead to Y and Z.  In the U.S., the Democrats force this line of thinking through the CBO's use of static scoring.  Static scoring assumes no behavioral changes or substitutions.

Even when politicians say out of one side of their mouth that increasing the tax on tobacco will drive people to quit smoking and convince others never to pick up the habit, they direct the CBO to assume that a 10% tax rate increase will increase tax revenues by exactly 10%.

The greater, and increasing, danger comes from the fact that a particular liberal elite is driving the political debate.  The primary goal of the elite is to improve their standing among their fellow elite.  To do so, they propose policies with good intentions, but they get more and more "out there" each year.  People outside the elite notice the obvious consequences of these policies, but their voices are ignored or worse, shouted down as XXXist.

To take one example, a policy favoring increased immigration, illegal or otherwise, is popular among some groups on all sides of the political spectrum.  To the liberal elite, it is all about preening and posturing: Look how noble and open-minded and diverse and not bigoted I am.  To the mainstream population, they see a variety of possible consequences: competition for jobs driving down wages, increased crime, and the strain on public schools and social programs.

But I increasingly fear that the liberal elite does know about the consequences of their policies, and they just don't care.  They are free to not care because they are insulated from the consequences of the policy decisions they support.  The illegal immigrant isn't going to work as a television journalist or hedge fund manager or think tank fellow or professor or head of a nonprofit.  Their children aren't going to be enrolled in their private schools.  They won't be seeking care in their hospitals.  They won't enter their gated communities.

(Unless it's to clean their house or tend to their yard.  Because if there's one thing true of wealthy liberals, they're deathly allergic to paying a living wage to someone outside their social class.)

The recent passing of President George H. W. Bush has brought a lot of details about his political life to the public eye for the first time in decades.  One of those was his criticism, during the 1988 election, of Governor Michael Dukakis' prison furlough program.  (Aside: It was an obvious criticism, and one first raised by Senator Al Gore during the primaries.)

Dukakis was the stereotypical northern white liberal, declaring he was a proud card-carrying member of the ACLU and everything.  To that mindset, it was right and good to be compassionate to criminals, because that would help make them better people.  The furlough policy made him look good in the eyes of people like him.  It was very woke of him, decades before the term was coined.

The real fear that, say, a murderer on a furlough release would go on to rape a woman?  Perhaps he didn't think about that.

Or, perhaps, he knew that a released murderer would never go to his neighborhood, and would never harm him or his family due to his armed security.

Remember that he also flubbed a debate question, reacting with a strange lack of emotion to the idea of his wife being a victim of violent crime.  Now that I think back, maybe this is the same issue.  He couldn't conceive of this happening because he knew he was insulated from the danger.