2022-04-22

Is American Culture Dead? Dirty Harry at 50

As a student of cycles and social mood, I have often wondered about the coming cultural wave. Dirty Harry was a movie produced in an American society that had its first taste of liberalism taken to its extremes and the resulting chaos. There was soaring crime, riots, drug use and general decay starting in the 1960s. The early 1970s produced a reaction with Dirty Harry, then Death Wish. By the early 1980s, the action hero's were on the scene. Three-strikes-you're-out laws and mass incarceration were the response to lawless violence.

This violence and chaos of this era is worse than the 1970s, but perhaps less shocking because the population has been desensitized to how bad things are compared to before. About a third of the population are immigrants or descended from immigrants who never knew that America was once a far better place to live. They have little connection to a past that the ruling class intentionally hid from them. A backlash is already taking shape, we can see the political outlines hinting at massive shifts in voting, but the cultural response that would have led the politics in a prior era is suppressed by censorship.

The ruling class' grip is tighter than at anytime in American history, yet this may prove to be their undoing because when the change comes it will not be gradual. Elites can adapt to slowly changing society, but when it snaps, the ruling class finds itself so far out of touch as to have become the villian of the story. Consider how DAs in California and other states are letting murderers go free. People arrested with AR-15s (supposedly dangerous assault weapons these politicians want banned) and drugs, involved in robberies and murders, are let go without charges by these DAs. Here is only the latest example I've seen, these are a dime a dozen if you go looking through local news: DC police arrest then RELEASE seven men accused of stealing puppy at GUNPOINT, and who are also suspected of taking French bulldog 17 minutes later, despite finding them in gun and drug-filled apartment

In the 1970s, the courts went soft on crime. Sentences were shortened. Clearly guilty criminals let go on newly created technicalities. Yet for the most part, guilty criminals swere arrested, went to trial, and faced sentencing. Now, the government lets them go free. The government, the ruling class, is one the side of the criminals. Who might a 2020s "Dirty Harry" target? The movies that will be made, cannot be made in this environment, but once that movie is made, it will be over for the ruling class. There's censorship and thought control because the ruling class understands how tenuous its grip on power is becoming.

Law & Liberty: Dirty Harry's Justice

Even in our unhappy times, Dirty Harry stands out, because its protagonist is everything our elites hate: A proud white male authority figure who enforces the law without concern for what we would now call the “optics.” This is not a man who hesitates to kill or suffers a bad conscience over doing what is necessary to protect the innocent. The film would be impossible to make today, since it is so blind to the cries of systemic racism and toxic masculinity that so dominate woke criticism.

Predictably, art has decayed alongside public debate. Dirty Harry was prescient in warning about a future without freedom. Indeed, our elites gradually narrowed the circle of ideas that can be debated and policies people can vote for. They threw out the notion that the rights of ordinary Americans matter, so that authorities no longer feel duty-bound to protect persons and property from destruction.

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