After a thorough investigation, the sleuths in the Biden administration have identified a suspect in the smash-and-grab shoplifting spree that has besieged California retailers and terrorized residents of late.

The likely villain is two years old, travels at will across the country, and has a vicious spike protein that has caused pain and suffering to millions of people.

That’s...

Visitors look at damage to the Louis Vuitton store after it was looted in San Francisco, Nov. 21.

Photo: Danielle Echeverria/Associated Press

After a thorough investigation, the sleuths in the Biden administration have identified a suspect in the smash-and-grab shoplifting spree that has besieged California retailers and terrorized residents of late.

The likely villain is two years old, travels at will across the country, and has a vicious spike protein that has caused pain and suffering to millions of people.

That’s right. It’s the coronavirus.

Asked last week at a press briefing whether the pandemic was to blame for the surge in crime, as President Biden has suggested, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki declared that, yes, the virus is “a root cause in a lot of communities.”

There it is. That old progressive standby: the “root cause,” the all-encompassing absolution that simultaneously strips criminals of agency and Democratic politicians of responsibility for the consequences of their policies.

“It was the virus that made me do it, your honor. I was an honest, law-abiding citizen, doing my part to fight systemic racism and climate injustice, when all of a sudden I developed a high fever and lost my sense of smell. Next thing I knew, I was pulling $25,000 Louis Vuitton purses out of display cases downtown. I can’t make bail but if you’ll let me go free, I’ll do my best to hunt down this vicious virus and help make our streets safe again.”

It’s easy to ridicule the mindset that seems unable or unwilling to understand the distinction between proper redress of our various social pathologies and the legal and moral obligations of personal responsibility. But this latest manifestation of the grip it has on our ruling class is a disturbing reminder of how far progressive ideology has propelled the country toward social disintegration.

It’s not only about the Democrats who run big cities (and, currently, the federal government) seeking to deflect any responsibility for the surge in crime—the one whose existence they and their friends in the media spent much of last year denying. It is that this eagerness to find anyone to blame for crime other than the people committing it is a central feature of the nihilism eating away at the American identity—the idea that the country is so flawed that miscreants bear less responsibility for their actions than do the institutions that have supposedly oppressed them.

Specific Democratic policies have clearly played a significant part in the retreat from what had been perhaps the most important social advance of the past 50 years—an unprecedented decline in almost all categories of crime.

Defunding the police—or the threat to defund the police—has yielded sharp declines in law-enforcement capabilities in major cities.

Bail “reform”—applied not selectively in the least dangerous cases, but willy-nilly—has resulted in the inevitable horror we witnessed in Waukesha, Wis., last month. Its close relative, mild sentencing and lax supervisory arrangements, produces terror like we saw in New York City last week.

Only a really committed progressive or an idiot—but I repeat myself—could believe it’s a good idea that men charged with committing violent crimes should go back out on the streets and reoffend until they take their savage ambitions to their logical and tragic conclusion.

But it’s the thinking behind the “it’s the pandemic that’s to blame” that is doing most to foster the climate of lawlessness. The idea that criminals are the victims—of circumstances, their upbringing, the cruel society that nurtured them—is a very old one. It seems to come in cycles. Each time, we have to learn the hard way that denial of individual responsibility is the quickest route to social disorder.

It’s back again, this time under the guise of “racial reckoning.” It began in earnest during the Black Lives Matter protests and accompanying riots. We were told that whatever violence was being committed then was justified, and that looting businesses was a kind of postmodern form of reparations for centuries of oppression.

“What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives?” read a headline in the New York Times. These are luxury beliefs. The tenured professors, media commentators, entertainers and Democratic politicians who hold them live for the most part immune from the consequences of their ideological self-indulgence. The irony is apparently lost on them that most of the victims of their obtuse vanity are poor, innocent black people who can’t afford to believe such dangerous nonsense.

Still, anxious citizens will be reassured to know that the crime stoppers at Mr. Biden’s Justice Department are hunting down the real criminals menacing our way of life: anxious parents across the country who want to stop teachers from indoctrinating their children with this ruinous ideology, and who are brave enough to speak out against it.