Second, these individuals did not simply have an individual problem. They had a family problem. This is a hard thing to say and I am of course aware that this, too, is a generalisation. But many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, middle class or poor.

Most of them are shaping up that way by the time they are in primary school or even in nursery. They then grow up in circumstances where their role models are drug dealers, pimps, people with knives and guns, people who will exploit them and abuse them but with whom they feel a belonging. Hence the gang culture that is so destructive.

This is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. You find it in virtually every developed nation. Breaking it down isn’t about general policy or traditional programmes of investment or treatment. The last government should take real pride in the reductions in inequality, the improvement in many inner-city schools and the big fall in overall crime. But none of these reaches this special group.

By the end of my time as prime minister, I concluded that the solution was specific and quite different from conventional policy. We had to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred. And we had to reform the laws around criminal justice, including on antisocial behaviour, organised crime and the treatment of persistent offenders. We had to treat the gangs in a completely different way to have any hope of success. The agenda that came out of this was conceived in my last years of office, but it had to be attempted against a constant backdrop of opposition, left and right, on civil liberty grounds and on the basis we were “stigmatising” young people. After I’d left, the agenda lost momentum. But the papers and the work are all there.

This is former British Prime Minster Tony Blair’s opinion piece that has been getting a lot of circulation today. I fear we may be witnessing a trend toward the Moynihanian cultural politics of family, which has so permeated American domestic policy discussions.

At the 7:00 mark of this video, Mike Huckabee, the former governor and current Bible-toting dinosaur apologist, picked up a bass and joined the band Nada under Tim Pawlenty’s tent. While standing in front of a crowd of Republican voters, at a family-friendly carnival that kids were dragged to, Mike Huckabee and Nada covered Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”—the classic country song that includes the line, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

Mike Huckabee pays no mind to the unbelievably casual gun violence that Cash drawls. He bobs his head, driving along the bassline, no stop, no pause, no extended Bill O’Reilly harangue.

Johnny Cash was a drinker and a drug user, with several misdemeanors under his belt. One of his car crashes started a large-scale forest fire and he was subsequently sued by the federal government. (He was unapologetic.) He cheated on his wife. He sang about guns, he sang about violence. (He also sang about love, about loss, about faith.) Johnny Cash performed at the White House, numerous times, without a problem.

It’s amazing how selectively Fox News and its followers pick their battles. They can drum up war in foreign lands, they can excuse deaths of other skin colors. They can sign up everyone for the NRA and chain themselves to the Second Amendment fences. They can sing Johnny Cash and Ted Nugent, play Call of Duty 4. But as soon as a black man talks about holding a gun, then it’s something scary, something entirely different.

Jeff gets it right.

The problem is that the tacit control and sense of the common good based upon personal relationships upon which social order finally depends has started to break down in British inner cities, which are often fragmented into different racio-religious and cultural ghettoes. (Though it is notable that the Muslim communities behaved particularly well during the recent troubles.)

In the face of this breakdown normal policing cannot substitute – and unfortunately only a police-state could, an option with which too many British middle-class people seem all too comfortable.

The long-term solution, therefore, must have to do with re-creating ethos and self-respect – this also being the key to local economic renewal. For the time being, the rioters, however bad their actions – and actually because they have been so bad – must be seen as the victims of a wider national malaise as well as responsible actors who momentarily took some very wrong decisions.

A response to the happenings in England by theologian John Milbank. He’s a major intellectual resource of Phillip Blond, a favorite of PM David Cameron and chief architect of Red Toryism. This response, however, pleasantly surprised me, especially with regard to taking to task the liberal-left demand for more policing.

“So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proved wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increases inequality, and reduces final demand.

…

To enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of laissez-faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Both are broken.”

To repeat something that I always do, we must rethink the linkage of markets and capitalism. As Braudel and DeLanda after him have consistently maintained, capitalism as it exists today may be largely anti-market.