ROSS DOUTHAT: WRONG AND WRONG AGAIN

Ross Douthat's new column begins:

THE right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart and the neoconservative scholar James Q. Wilson, who died within 48 hours of each other last week -- Wilson at the age of 80, Breitbart so unexpectedly at 43 -- had one important thing in common: They were both prominent conservatives who arguably left their most enduring legacy in the lives of affluent, cosmopolitan liberals.

Oh, really? This I've got to hear. Go on, Ross.

For Wilson, that legacy is the low crime rates that have made urban areas from Portlandia to Brooklyn safe for left-wing hipsters and Obama-voting professionals alike. There are entire worlds of brunches and brownstones, Zipcars and urban mommy message boards that only exist today because of the work that Wilson and others did, in the shadow of the post-1960s crime wave, to better understand policing and prisons and criminal behavior, and to usher in the current age of urban peace.

Douthat was born in 1979, and thus has no freaking idea what it was like in "the bad old days." When Douthat was just emerging from toddlerhood, I was experiencing the alleged hellscape of 1980s New York in an East Village walkup, where -- despite the high crime rate, the homeless beggars, and the drug dealers -- I was surrounded by ... left-wing hipsters and an emerging caste of gentrifying, Democrat-voting young professionals! Who the hell does Douthat think gentrified Soho and then the East Village before making inroads into Williamsburg and (ultimately) just about every other neighborhood in New York City now or formerly associated with hipness (with a soupcon of avarice imported from Wall Street)? Who does Douthat think was doing blow in the bathrooms of Tribeca hotspots in the era of Bright Lights, Big City (copyright 1984)? Does he think everyone waited for the crime rate to drop before having fun? Could he at least compare the timeline of our cultural history with per-capita crime rates by year and recognize that people actually lived lives when crime was higher than it is now?

Personally, I've never bought Wilson's "broken windows" theory, at least as popularized by that Santorumesque scold Rudy Giuliani. Maybe crime dropped in the Giuliani 1990s because his police force was arresting people for petty offenses, but it wasn't dropping because those arrests created some sort of moral aura of order and rectitude, or whatever codswallop Giuliani was trying to sell us back then -- one theory is that it dropped because some of the arrested minor offenders were wanted on more serious charges, and were then convicted and jailed. Then again, crime dropped all over the place, including cities such as Boston where mayors didn't scold people all the time. And crime has somehow managed to stay low here in New York without the glorious aura of moral purity emanating from Rudy Giuliani's keister. So go figure.

*****

What else is Douthat wrong about? This:

For Breitbart, that legacy is the media landscape that greets those same hipsters and professionals whenever they settle into their local coffee shop and fire up their laptop or iPhone. Breitbart's politics were right-wing, but his digital media achievements were entirely bipartisan. In between his Clinton-era work for the Drudge Report and his career as anti-Obama muckraker, he was present at the creation of The Huffington Post, which has emerged as the defining left-leaning publication of journalism's Internet era.

No offense to the HuffPo, but does anyone on the left still regard it as our defining site in 2012? Sure, it was a fairly big deal for a while, but, um, does anyone remember a little site called Daily Kos, which had a circulation outstripping that of virtually every newspaper in America back before the HuffPo got off the ground? (And if we're talking about reverse-engineering a site, that's certainly one Huffington and her crowd examined and emulated.) And before Kos we had BuzzFlash and the Daily Howler and Cursor and Media Whores Online and Bartcop and Billmon and Steve Gilliard and Atrios and the Rittenhouse Review. And then came Glenn Greenwald and Firedoglake and Americablog and Pandagon. And me, and thousands of others.

No disrespect to the Huffington folks, but saying they invented the Internet left is like saying Green Day invented punk rock. But who knows? Maybe Douthat believes that, too.