“We have allowed our police departments to get fetal.”

So said then-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015 at an emergency meeting of police chiefs and mayors in the nation’s capital. Barack Obama was still president, and Emanuel was feeling the effects of what researcher and author Heather Mac Donald has dubbed “The Ferguson Effect,” a cause-and-effect relationship whereby the Left’s demonization of law enforcement results in lower levels of proactive policing and an attendant increase in violent crime rates. The term comes from the lawful and justified 2014 shooting death of violent thug Michael “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by Officer Darren Wilson, and the rise in violent crime afterward due to the cops’ understandable unwillingness to put themselves in situations that might get them sent to prison.

What Emanuel meant was, “We have forced our police departments to get fetal.”

Much has happened politically since Emanuel’s utterance. For one thing, Donald Trump has happened — twice. And, as Mac Donald, whose powerful 2016 book The War on Cops details the Left’s culpability in our nation’s violent crime waves, argues, Trump’s return to the White House was in part enabled by the everyday victims of the Democrats’ anti-cop, pro-crime policies.

After having herself just witnessed a young male with a black plastic trash bag as he casually plundered a CVS drug store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Mac Donald talked to the fed-up store clerk, whose “long gray corkscrew curls, beard and heavy Puerto Rican accent did not mark him as a stereotypical Donald Trump voter.” As she writes in the New York Post:

The Democrats created this Trump supporter. Their demonization of the police became more shrill after the George Floyd race riots. Big-city police chiefs refused to arrest — and progressive prosecutors refused to indict — for a range of crimes, all in the name of avoiding disparate impact.

The criminal element soon learned that it could plunder without consequence. Across the country, smash-and-grab robberies became rampant; retail establishments were stripped bare; city blocks filled with vacant storefronts. The allegedly “marginalized” groups the Democrats claim as their special possession — bodega workers, chain-store clerks, deliverymen, Uber drivers — witnessed the anarchy every day and bore its brunt.

Democrats are hard to figure out. On the one hand, they crave political power, so they enact ruinous policies that bring chaos and create a yearning for Big Government solutions. But on the other hand, these “solutions” tend not to work, and this chain of events invariably stirs up anger among the American electorate and results in the Democrats getting booted out of office in the next available election cycle.

California’s so-called Racial Justice Act is one such example. As Mac Donald writes, the law was passed in 2020 “without meaningful public review” and “turns long-standing academic tropes about implicit bias and white privilege into potent legal tools.” It allows “anyone serving time in a California prison or jail for a felony to challenge his conviction and sentencing retroactively on the ground of systemic racial bias.”

Hey, what could go wrong?

The Left’s disastrous “defund the police” movement is, of course, another example. As our Mark Alexander wrote in 2021: “Democrats institutionalized lawlessness in the name of ‘social justice,’ beginning with their ‘Summer of Rage’ riots in 2020, when they intentionally provoked and promoted violence. They simultaneously villainized law enforcement and cut police budgets. The result was, and continues to be, a one-two sucker punch against victims of violence and those charged with protecting them.”

The Left’s normalization of crime has thus created a whole class of victims. And these victims have become something of a modern-day “Forgotten Man,” the anonymous everyday American that FDR referenced in a 1932 speech during the throes of the Great Depression but whose misery he ultimately helped exacerbate and prolong with his disastrous New Deal policies.

The Democrats have thus reaped what they’ve sown. If the events of last week’s annual meeting of the Democratic National Committee are any indication, they don’t seem to be getting the message.

As Mac Donald concludes: “If America’s cities regain the security of property and banish the sense that crime has become normalized, the political realignment that began with this election may become a permanent reality. And city dwellers may get their drugstores back.”