Pandering to Predation

Within Western societies, there persist subcultures that treat institutions as resources to be harvested while simultaneously scorning the normative order those institutions sustain. 

Lars Møller | September 2, 2026

The ideal of a democratic polity rests upon a fragile consensus: that citizens will, by and large, restrain immediate appetite in favor of reciprocal forbearance, that private property will be treated as more than a provisional convenience, and that elected officials will refuse to dignify predation as justice. While rule of law and a free press are necessary conditions for such restraint, they are not sufficient.

Civil society’s everyday virtues -- queueing, mutual non-interference, the tacit assumption that shops will open tomorrow -- are routinely taken as natural rather than as hard-won and easily eroded. Within Western societies, there persist subcultures that treat institutions as resources to be harvested while simultaneously scorning the normative order those institutions sustain. When elected representatives cynically pander to these attitudes, they accelerate the corrosion.

In August 2026, New York State Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, a democratic socialist from Brooklyn, offered a textbook illustration. After her group monitored 360 arraignments over four days outside a Manhattan courthouse, she declared that more than half the cases were low-level misdemeanors and that the theft of soap and toothpaste constituted a “crime of poverty” driven by “biological need.” Society, she insisted, should not prioritize the protection of billion-dollar pharmacy chains over the survival of the destitute; diversion into treatment rather than prosecution was the proper response.

Gallagher’s remarks spread rapidly. Legal analysts observed that poverty may explain theft without licensing it. Retail observers noted the practical consequence: chains already lock everyday goods behind plastic barriers or close stores altogether. Organized rings, not starving individuals, account for a substantial share of contemporary retail loss. Gallagher’s framing nevertheless supplied moral cover for an attitude that is simultaneously parasitic -- living off the residual productivity of others -- and hostile to the very legal order that makes residual productivity possible.

Gallagher’s attitude -- apparently naive and........

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