Decent people want solutions to societal problems, but leftists (as distinguished from liberals) welcome those problems as a means of increasing leftist power.
A current example of how this works is the national debate about the mental-health crisis. Centers for Disease Control data focusing on the years 20219 through 2021 show an alarming increase not only in anxiety and depression among adults, but in mental-health issues in children and adolescents sufficiently severe to require emergency-room visits. CDC data also show that during the 2020 Great Lockdown, drug-overdose deaths increased by over 20,000 from the previous year.
The causes of such disturbances are varied, of course, but it’s widely acknowledged that much of the recent increase is related to the pandemic – or more accurately, to government policies implemented theoretically to address the pandemic. The disastrous consequences of policies such as lockdowns, school shutdowns, travel restrictions, and mandatory vaccination, masking, and social distancing cannot be overstated: bankruptcy of thousands of small businesses, erased incomes and savings of millions, shattered families, increased disease and deaths, destroyed childhoods, and insurmountable losses in educational achievement.
These measures not only failed to defeat the virus (see here, here, here, here, and here), they bred the despair now bemoaned by the same governments that created it.
But leftists who run or influence those governments have solutions. Remarkably, many of those solutions enhance the power and influence of the left: have government take over mental health and spend more taxpayer money on it, pour more taxpayer money into government housing, address “structural racism” in health care, and “strengthen labor policies for low-skilled workers.” (Apparently low-skilled workers suffer mental-health consequences when the government forces their employers into bankruptcy. Who could have seen that coming?)
Solutions that might actually ease the most recent spike in mental-health problems – namely, abolishing pandemic-related restrictions and mandates – are ignored.
Another example of implementing leftist policies to solve leftist problems involves the destruction of the family accomplished by welfare policies that marginalize men and incentivize fatherless families. The inevitable outcome is poorly socialized children bereft of critical male influence and guidance at home.
To address this problem, the argument goes, the State “must” step in to replace the absent or overwhelmed parents with programs that create citizens dependent on government to supply all needs. Even conservative policy-makers now embrace “wraparound services” at schools as the necessary substitute for crumbling families. The result is a further retreat of freedom, self-sufficiency, and human dignity.
The principle also applies concerning issues of sexual orientation and gender identity. In recent years the left has saturated our culture – including the at-least-relatively innocent world of childhood – with promotion of unfettered and frequently unorthodox sexual practices. (Note that sexual radicals including the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg have even advocated reducing the age of consent to 12.) The evil Dr. Kinsey’s fantasy of sexualizing children from birth has been realized beyond the pervert’s wildest dreams.
This is most apparent with “comprehensive sex education” in many public schools. Radicals in the education establishment insist that they be allowed to indoctrinate young children in the most extreme sexual content regardless of what their parents want or decency requires.
The National Sex Education Standards, offered by far-left organizations Advocates for Youth, Answer, and SIECUS, urge instruction in sexual orientation and gender ideology in early elementary school at the latest. Presenting such topics to children used to be known as “grooming” them for sexual activity by desensitizing them to certain concepts and lowering their inhibitions. Now it’s part of the curriculum.
And it achieves the desired outcome. One 2020 study estimates that 9.5% of minors aged 13-17 now identify as some form of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-fluid, queer, whatever) – up from under 2% for homosexual and well under 1% for transgender in decades past.
This destructive indoctrination obviously threatens marriage, families, and general human flourishing. Although leftists refuse to acknowledge that threat, they themselves continually (and misleadingly) trumpet the fragile mental health and increased suicidality of these kids.
So now that they’ve created the problem, the proffered solution is constant affirmation of these troubled youngsters’ feelings in public school. Start the “gender affirmation” and LGBT clubs and pride celebrations even before kids learn basic arithmetic, and don’t tell the parents, who can’t possibly care for their children as much as educrats do. It’s a matter of life and death, right?
So once again the left creates the problem and “solves” it by ladling out more harmful leftism. Can we see a pattern here? Maybe unintended consequences aren’t always unintended after all.