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The reasons why there has been a deterioration of GOP strength in the cities over the course of the 20th century is severalfold. Has a one-party Dem control been a disaster for them ? Of course. But the question is how can the damage be repaired ? This is not an easy thing to do. If said cities started voting GOP/Conservative again, it would undoubtedly launch a renaissance. But let’s face it, most simply don’t want to.

In short, the reasons why they won’t come down to this:

#1, Racial. For most Northern cities, Blacks were stalwart supporters of the GOP until the 1930s. After FDR, they went from majority GOP to competitive until the 1950s when they rapidly became a small percentage until by 1964 they were gone. A prime example is to look at the voting preferences for the IL 1st district in Chicago. Once an urban Republican district with a large Black population, it elected White Republicans with Black support until 1928 and then elected a Black Republican until 1934. After 1935, it never went back to the GOP, though it still remained competitive for close to 2 decades.

The post-FDR period of expansive big government projects played a role in Blacks departure from the GOP. Blacks had a more disproportionate trust for the federal government role for obvious reasons. It was the federal government that had liberated them from slavery, and tended to be disenchanted with a more local approach. Couple this with the fact that urban patronage being overwhelmingly Democrat in the post-FDR period, and you simply had no choice but to support the Dems to get anywhere. Even urban Whites had to go that route, and they did so ahead of Blacks (ethnic Whites especially — in Chicago, Eastern Europeans were voting Democrat going back to the 1890s and one CD in Chicago (occupied by Adolph Sabath, a Bohemian) flipped to the Democrats way back in 1906 and never went back.

Witness Irish voters in MA that never strayed from the Democrat column after the 1880s after they had been premier GOP districts, too. Even all these years and years later, breaking that loyalty is very hard. They vote with their racial/ethnic identity and not with what is necessarily best for them.

#2, Patronage. As I touched on before, patronage was the lifeblood for the political parties in urban areas. If you wanted a job or a relative had a job you depended upon, you had no choice but to support party R or party D. If the other party got in power, you might lose your job and livelihood. Up until the 1930s/40s, if you lived in Philadelphia and voted Democrat, you were playing with fire if you depended upon the system for a job. Philly was Republican until the 1950s. But after the Democrats broke the one-party monopoly that had lasted since the 19th century, if you were an urban dweller, you had to shift loyalties. Dems ultimately played that game far better than the GOP.

By the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were no longer enough Republicans in these cities to make voting for them a viable option. Only in unusual situations did the GOP make these close races, and often they were racially-based (such as in Chicago when Whites voted overwhelmingly for Upton or Eddie Vrdolyak over Harold Washington, or Frank Rizzo after his party switch, though they all still lost).

#3, Social issues. Up until the 1970s in urban locales, you still had enough White voters who could be construed as socially Conservative and patriotic. While they may not be enough to get Republicans elected in downballot races, they were enough to deliver statewide landslides for President Nixon in 1972 (with the last hurrah probably in 1980, and rapidly diminishing after that).

Unfortunately, in the post-Ike era, liberalism followed by radical politics took hold in urban locales. Many urban Democrats who had been semi-Conservative socially (though fiscal liberals) started to be aggressively replaced by the 1960s counter-culture, who started to show real strength in the early 1970s, culminating in 1974. Even sensible Democrats in Congress were pulled hard to the left, or they risked losing their power bases.

In the era of JFK, you had true-believing White liberals who believed showering government largesse was the answer to urban decay. Instead, it turned into an unheralded disaster. Whites fled the cities to the suburbs, and many whom had voted Democrat previously jettisoned it for the GOP. Blacks were, of course, hardest hit. Family unity (2-parent households) had reached their apex BEFORE the Civil Rights Acts of the ‘60s. With urban liberals in both parties (notably Republican John Lindsay in NYC, whom would eventually leave the GOP) pushing the welfare state (which often forced fathers out of the household in order for the mothers to get more $$ welfare), crime and chaos exploded.

Welfare destroyed the Black family, and with it, increased the need for more welfare. With dwindling two-parent households, neighborhood stability was destroyed. Even today, you can look at the % of households with two parents and figure how a given area is likely to vote. Those with the lowest tend to be urban Black, and predictably send some of the worst elected officials to office. Race-baiting Marxists who absolutely must keep their constituents dumbed-down and on the dole in order to preserve their own power. Sadly, this method has worked now for over a half-century.

When you’ve had people told over and over again they MUST vote this way or things might be worse under the GOP, it’s hard to break through. Even where the GOP hasn’t had a presence for 50 years or longer (Detroit, which hasn’t elected a GOP Mayor since the 1950s, or Chicago which hasn’t elected one since 1929), the party still is blamed for folks being down and out (hence to the ethnic pol, “The reason you guys are poor is because of the GOP. Vote Democrat so we can stop them !”). The outrageousness that it has been so effective (to the point that the Black vote has been monolithic Democrat since the 1960s) is truly remarkable (not in a good way).

Since the 1970s and onward, many urban dwellers, especially Whites, have been very supportive of social causes/issues that Conservatives find utterly repugnant. This divide has only grown in the past 4 decades to the point that it is virtually irreconcilable. This has been a part of the “culture war.” Issues such as abortion, homosexuality, sympathy to the “America is the source of all evil” agenda, anti-religious, hedonism (sexual, drugs), open borders, et al. Until the mid ‘60s or later, most of these were NON-issues in even the most liberal urban areas of the country.

Add in that in too many urban areas now, the vote to support culture rot (Democrat voters) can outdo those in the rest of their respective states. Remove Madison and Milwaukee in WI, and you have a heavily GOP state. Ditto Chicago in IL, St. Louis in MO, Atlanta in GA, Philly & Pittsburgh, NYC, et al. Sadly, however, in some states, the trendy culture leftism spread to the suburbs (Marin County in California, once a bastion of mainstream GOP politics until the 1970s, embraced moonbattery wholeheartedly amongst its mushy-headed upper-class Whites, and now it is one of the most politically extremist counties in the nation. It voted 53% for Gerald Ford in 1976, by 2008, McCain got 20% (even Bob Dole got 28% in ‘96)).

Even a heavily White Marin County is unreachable for the GOP, simply because their residents have a complete and utter disdain for Conservative values. Though this is a wealthy county and they (ironically and hypocritically) insulate their children from the Black urbanites to whom they vote almost identically and uniformally, the children are “educated” into supporting this destructive madness. Brainwashing.

It’s hillarious, if you forced these ultraleft White urbanites to live in the ghetto or barrio, they’d probably become the most reactionary people you’ve ever seen. That they use their wealth to insulate themselves from the policies that cause and proliferate poverty and refuse to support free-market policies (and an agenda of personal responsibility) that might uplift others is yet another example of their hypocrisy. They’ll smugly boast how proud they are to have elected the first Black President, yet they’re some of the most racist people you’ll ever meet.

Getting back to the question at hand, how do we make breakthroughs amongst these groups and voters ? In a lot of cases at the present time, you can’t. Even if we showered urban locales with money and people pushing our cause, at best, the shift would be negligable. This is something that is a long-term problem and cannot be changed in 1 or 2 election cycles.

Even in the cases where we might make a breakthrough (such as with Giuliani in NYC), many of the voters cannot make the connection that more right-leaning policies work and uplift. They’ll elect a Republican to get “tough” on crime, but still want to preserve and keep their leftist social and spending policies for which these cities plunged into the morass in the first place.

Sadly, too, once they’ve elected one ostensibly “good” Mayor, the follow-up will usually be back to business of the bad old days. Bloomberg following Giuliani being the premier example.

Until the late 1980s, we didn’t give much thought that the rot of leftism would come to take hold in a broader sense beyond these urban locales, that the tide had been turned under Reagan. It’s now worse than ever, with the media/educational/cultural complex brainwashing the “masses” that their leftist agenda is a righteous and uplifting one, when the rest of us know the truth and that soon the piper will have to be paid for this abominable direction we’ve gone in. Alas, so few on our side in positions of prominence have the courage to stand up and speak against it. We’ve reached Orwell’s nightmare that in a time of almost universal deceit, speaking that truth is a revolutionary act.