Interesting how the failures all began with the start of the Progressive era.
Answer: LIBERALISM.
No, I had better not say that word.
Democrats.
Because 80% of the nation’s wealth is held by 1 or 2 percent of the people. They seem to be working with the Federal Reserve and the Progressives to act as a money sink so the Fed can create new money without allowing it to reach the people and cause inflation. This creates unnecessary debt to push the nation off the cliff. Even when the bubble implodes, they will still be very wealthy but the rest of us will become wards of the state.
They do have one major thing in common...
It’s all those commie ‘RAT “poverty programs” they rely upon to keep them afloat.
Diversity.
We lowered the import tariffs which resulted in off-shoring our manufacturing.
A lot of cities that depended on that manufacturing were devastated.
Easy answer. Look who have been running those cities for the last 25 years.
What/When has all of the city’s Demographics changed(IE when did Blacks and Mexicans start to outnumber whites?) AND when did each city begin to “elect” “Minority” “Leadership”?
They all have huge populations of stupid dependent minorities who can’t find enough intelligence among them to combine to have a community IQ in the double digits. And they are paid to reproduce like bunnies. Could anything be more stupid that this policy?
No red town has failed.
Stealing.
There’s a lot that goes into it. A lot has happened during those cities booms, yes liberalism and the rise of the fed. But also mobility, and air conditioning. I know you’re thinking “air conditioning?!” but really without central air the sunbelt was a pretty inhospitable place, hard to live in during the summer, once AC came to be though the sunbelt became much nicer, and by comparison the snowbelt (where our failing cities are) became much more inhospitable, because no matter how hot it you never have to shovel it out of your driveway. A lot of these failing cities wouldn’t be failing if they weren’t bleeding population, but the snowbelt as a whole is losing people. We now live in a world where people chose where they want to live, cities are competing with each other for people, not just companies.
At the rate Austin is spending money on stupid things (like light rail) I don’t doubt they are on the downward slide. Their saving grace is the tech boom, people moving here, and the fact they are in Texas.
The cities need manufacturing jobs in those abandoned factories. It would be better to make people earn their benefits rather than having them survive on handouts.
The cities became income distribution centers where the law abiding, hard working productive people were penalized and the parasites, criminals and “community organizers” were rewarded.
The good people left, the bad people took over and the cities became dependent on money from the Federal and State government. Eventually the cities became so dysfunctional and crime ridden that they collapsed.
Random thoughts of Alexis de Toqueville, French visitor to a young United States of America, on cities, religion, the superpowers, and the races.
Chapter XV-IXX[edit]
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
Chapter XV
In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
Chapter XV
Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.
Chapter XVI
In cities men cannot be prevented from concerting together, and from awakening a mutual excitement which prompts sudden and passionate resolutions. Cities may be looked upon as large assemblies, of which all the inhabitants are members; their populace exercises a prodigious influence upon the magistrates, and frequently executes its own wishes without their intervention.
Variant translation: In towns it is impossible to prevent men from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves. Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members. In them the people wield immense influence over their magistrates and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries.
Chapter XVII
If it be of the highest importance to man, as an individual, that his religion should be true, the case of society is not the same. Society has no future life to hope for or to fear; and provided the citizens profess a religion, the peculiar tenets of that religion are of very little importance to its interests.
Variant translation: Though it is very important for man as an individual that his religion should be true, that is not the case for society. Society has nothing to fear or hope from another life; what is most important for it is not that all citizens profess the true religion but that they should profess religion.
Chapter XVII
The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.
Chapter XVII
Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?
Chapter XVII
They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion on this point.
Chapter XVII
The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.
Chapter XVII
Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian.
You may set the Negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European. Nor is this all we scarcely acknowledge the common features of humanity in this stranger whom slavery has brought among us. His physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes.
Chapter XVIII
No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.
Variant: What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.
Chapter XVIII
I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.
Chapter XVIII
The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.
Chapter XVIII
There are at the present time two great nations in the world—allude to the Russians and the Americans— All other nations seem to have nearly reached their national limits, and have only to maintain their power; these alone are proceeding—along a path to which no limit can be perceived.
Chapter XVIII
In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days’ vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness.
Chapter XXIX
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840)[edit]
Book One[edit]
The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.
Book One, Chapter II
In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
Book One, Chapter II
General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.
Book One, Chapter III
Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.
The legacy of Democrat goverment.