Culture critic: From El Paso and Dayton to . . . Rwanda

“At first glance,” Lance Morrow admits at City Journal, “the killings in El Paso and Dayton appear entirely different from such foreign horror” as the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the Serbian mass murder of Muslims in 1992. Yet he sees “an inkling in” US mass shootings “of something ominously new in the way of American violence.” That “something” — still yet just a “whiff or germ or intuition of a new infection” — will make the 2020 campaigns “turn mainly on race, racism and immigration.” With each side blind to its own faults, “the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics has colluded with Trump’s provocations to split Americans into polarized tribes,” and “whoever wins, the divisions will remain and probably grow worse.”

Conservative: The Rot in Our Ruling Class

At First Things, R.R. Reno warns that America’s mass shootings “are symptoms of a sick body politic.” White-nationalist ideology and the easy availability of high-powered guns are part of the “danger,” but “neither explanation goes deep enough”: Both were present two generations ago, yet we suffered nothing like today’s epidemic. The deeper cause, Reno ­argues, is “the social decomposition of the United States,” also evidenced by the opioid crisis, growing urban homelessness, rising out-of-wedlock births and working-class Americans’ falling life expectancy. And that ­decomposition is “a direct consequence of the mentalities, policies and actions of our ruling class”: from tech moguls who market addictive video-games and social-media platforms to media and political elites who promote a moral agenda of “soft relativism.”

From the right: Only China Is Losing in This Trade War

President Trump’s “aggressive push on tariffs has thrown the country’s expert class into a tizzy,” notes Salvatore Babobes at The National Interest, even though “the economy is employing record numbers of people” and “inflation is running well below the Fed’s target rate.” China is the real loser, especially if it doesn’t bend: “Its manufacturing base will continue moving to Vietnam and India. Less labor-intensive assembly work will move to Mexico, which has now displaced China as America’s top trade partner. China will lose its unique position at the center of global production networks and, with it, much of its leverage over global politics.” All good, because “when an expansionist totalitarian police state with no respect for the rule of law demands special concessions in the global trading system, then it’s hard to have much sympathy.”

Libertarian: Tulsi Gabbard Is Anti-War But Not Pro-Peace

“To be a force for peace in the world,” America must “stop invading other countries for their benefit and . . . stop cultivating nasty regimes for its benefit,” Shikha Dalmia argues at Reason. But “the very politicos who are ­anti-war often become pro-dictator,” including Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. The only 2020 Democrat to vow to “end wasteful regime-change wars” at the last debate, she “has no qualms about courting dictators if they advance her cause,” embracing both Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. And she has reached out to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose “militant brand of Hindu nationalism is fundamentally transforming a liberal country into an illiberal one.”



Urban wonk: The Regression of Progressive US Cities

“Policy agendas are turning many great cities into loony towns,” ­laments Joel Kotkin in The Orange County Register. And the syndrome becomes a vicious circle. As the middle class and “political middle” flee, “city governments become more insulated from constituents who would be the most adamant about reforming school districts,” fixing infrastructure and maintaining public order. In San Francisco, “decades of tolerance for . . . extreme deviant behavior has helped create a city with more drug addicts than high school students and so much feces on the street that one website has created a ‘poop map.’ ” Los Angeles, meanwhile, is “being overrun by rats,” and its Skid Row neighborhood resembles “a Syrian refugee camp.” Reversal of these declines will only come when those with a “strong stake in the local economy . . . decide to challenge . . . a virtue-signaling political class.”

—Compiled by The Post Editorial Board