What government is for

An indicator of how political polarization is undermining American governance can be found in how the most basic tasks of government are now becoming increasingly difficult to perform.

The maintenance of law and or- der is perhaps the most conspicuous example of this, with the “defund the police” movement threatening to significantly weaken the primary instrument with which government performs its primary function — the provision of security for its citizens.

The stunning spike in gun registrations noted in FBI data in recent months, amid the spread of rioting and disorder, both implies the effective end of gun control as a movement and suggests that an increasing percentage of the citizenry, while perhaps less than enamored of firearms, now sufficiently doubts the capacity of their government to protect them to resort to their own expedients.

That one of our two major political parties (the one which runs most major American cities from top to bottom) increasingly sides with those spreading the rioting and disorder over those tasked with resisting it (the police) makes it likely that this form of “self-help” will be resorted to more frequently as urban America descends into a Hobbesian state of nature.

Within this context, it isn’t difficult to figure out that the only ones who benefit when police are depicted as the bad guys are the real bad guys. Everyone else loses.

Only slightly less significant in terms of the provision of “public goods” than law enforcement (those things that government, whatever else it might do, should be sure to do first and do well) is public education, which has obviously been plagued by various deficiencies in recent decades but is now in further jeopardy from the “lockdown left” (which overlaps considerably with the anti-police left); the essential position of which is that anything resembling normal life should be put on hold until there is a virus vaccine, which might of course be never.

The inability to articulate any other metric that would allow schools to reopen testifies to the lack of seriousness of those taking such a position or, more precisely, the lack of serious thought that they have put into arriving at it.

Indeed, our debate over whether to keep schools closed until whenever, and thereby deny children the most important requisite for successful lives as adults, is one of those few where there really aren’t two sides with relevant points of view, just a side that is demonstrably right and one that is demonstrably wrong.

“Science” clearly betrays the “party of science” on this one since even the most diligent scouring of the databases of the CDC and state departments of health statistics turns up only a handful of cases of children in this country or anywhere else perishing from the virus. The numbers vary somewhat, but still comprise only a tiny fraction of those who die annually from influenza, pneumonia, or even drowning.

At last glance nobody was arguing that public schools should close down for the duration of flu seasons or that our kids shouldn’t be allowed to go swimming (and one would think that schools might be more essential than swimming pools) but since the flu kills more children even out of season than the virus has, the keep schools closed argument, based on its own logic, would mean keeping them closed forever.

What a growing body of research from many countries tells us is that not only are kids not at serious risk from the virus, they also apparently don’t pass it on to each other or to adults very often (the last point being one that the teachers’ unions might respond to as they seek to keep their minions from going back to work).

Looking at similar data, virtually all European countries have opened their schools, with many having done so months ago (and some having never closed them). In other circumstances, these would be precisely the kinds of countries that the American left applauds for their child-friendly public policies.

Especially remarkable along these lines was the decision well in advance of those running the Los Angeles and San Diego public schools to keep things shut down for the fall when not a single child has died to this point because of the virus in their state of 40 million people.

It would thus be difficult to muster much support for any of the following propositions: that children would be at great risk going to school, that online education is adequate for children; that the provision of adequate public education is not essential to children, and that teachers face greater risks going to work during this time of national difficulty than do health-care workers, soldiers, firefighters, or policemen.

Few would have predicted six months ago that our coming elections might be decided by the issue of whether or not to open our schools, and that on one side would be Democrats and teachers unions’ and on the other Republicans and parents.

And that, on this one at least, the science would strongly support the latter. Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.