Who Lost the Cities? There is more wrong with Ferguson than the Brown case.

The National Review ^ | August 15, 2014 | Kevin D. Williamson

[2ndDivisionVet]

The Reverend Jesse Jackson is, to the surprise of all thinking people, right about something: “A spark has exploded,” he said, referring to the protests and violence in Ferguson, Mo. “When you look at what sparked riots in the Sixties, it has always been some combination of poverty, which was the fuel, and then some oppressive police tactic. It was the same in Newark, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Los Angeles. It’s symptomatic of a national crisis of urban abandonment and repression, seen in Chicago.”

A question for the Reverend Jackson: Who has been running the show in Newark, in Chicago, in Detroit, and in Los Angeles for a great long while now? The answer is: People who see the world in much the same way as does the Reverend Jackson, who take the same view of government, who support the same policies, and who suffer from the same biases.

This is not intended to be a cheap partisan shot. The Democratic party institutionally certainly has its defects, the chronicle of which could fill several unreadable volumes, but the more important and more fundamental question here is one of philosophy and policy. Newark, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles — and Philadelphia, Cleveland, and a dozen or more other cities — have a great deal in common: They are the places in which the progressive vision of government has reached its fullest expressions. They are the hopeless reality that results from wishful thinking.

Ferguson was hardly a happy suburban garden spot until the shooting of Michael Brown. Ferguson is about two-thirds black, and 28 percent of those black residents live below the poverty line. The median income is well below the Missouri average, and Missouri is hardly the nation’s runaway leader in economic matters. More than 60 percent of the births in the city of St. Louis (and about 40 percent in St. Louis County) are out of wedlock.

My reporting over the past few years has taken me to Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, St. Louis and the nearby community of East St. Louis, Ill., Philadelphia, Detroit, Stockton, San Francisco, and a great many other cities, and the Reverend Jackson is undoubtedly correct in identifying “a national crisis of urban abandonment and repression.” He neglects to point out that he is an important enabler of it.

Philadelphia, for example, has not had a Republican mayor since the Truman administration. It did enjoy the services of Mayor Frank Rizzo, a Democrat who endorsed Nixon in exchange for federal handouts and who governed in the progressive style: He converted a private utility into a public one and promptly turned it into a patronage machine, he was close with the labor unions and raised the city’s wage tax to fund spending on transportation and infrastructure projects, worked for economic benefits for the elderly, etc. He was a classic welfare-statist Democrat — and a man who, as police commissioner, famously promised to “make Attila the Hun look like a fag.” (Rizzo later ran as a Republican.) It wasn’t a right-wing radical who bombed a Philadelphia rowhouse and burned down the neighborhood — it was an African-American progressive, Wilson Goode. Closet Ayn Rand fans have not been running the affairs of Detroit all these years, and the intellectual patrons of the Chicago Boys have had approximately zero influence on the municipal affairs of Chicago. Ralph Reed will never be the mayor of San Francisco.

For years, our major cities were undermined by a confluence of four unhappy factors: 1. higher taxes; 2. defective schools; 3. crime; 4. declining economic opportunity. Together, these weighed much more heavily upon the middle class than upon the very wealthy and the very poor. In the case of Philadelphia, the five counties in the metropolitan area have had a mostly stable population, but the city itself lost more than a quarter of its population between 1950 and 2000 as some 550,000 people fled to the suburbs or beyond. How many people matters, but which people matters, too: They were the ones with the means and the strongest incentive to relocate. Over the same period of time, Chicago lost a fifth of its population, Baltimore nearly a third. Philadelphia is one of the few U.S. cities to impose a municipal income tax (one of the taxes Mayor Rizzo raised), creating very strong incentives to move across the line into Delaware County or Bucks County. This is sometimes known as “white flight,” but that is a misnomer: In Detroit, the white middle class got out as quickly as it could — and the black middle class was hot on its heels. Upwardly mobile people and those who expect to be — i.e., those with an investment in the future — care a great deal about schools, economic opportunity, and safety. And they know where the city limits are.

Progressives spent a generation imposing taxes and other expenses on urban populations as though the taxpaying middle class would not relocate. They protected the defective cartel system of public education, and the union money and votes associated with it, as though middle-class parents would not move to places that had better schools. They imposed burdens on businesses, in exchange for more union money and votes, as though businesses would not shift production elsewhere. They imposed policies that disincentivized stable family arrangements as though doing so would have no social cost.

And they did so while adhering to a political philosophy that holds that the state, not the family or the market, is the central actor in our lives, that the interests of private parties — be they taxpayers or businesses — can and indeed must be subordinated to the state’s interests, as though individuals and families were nothing more than gears in the great machine of politics. The philosophy of abusive eminent domain, government monopolies, and opportunistic taxation is also the philosophy of police brutality, the repression of free speech and other constitutional rights, and economic despair. Frank Rizzo was not a paradox — he was an inevitability. When life is reduced to the terms in which it is lived in the poorest and most neglected parts of Chicago or Detroit, the welfare state is the police state. Why should we expect the agents of the government who carry guns and badges to be in general better behaved than those at the IRS or the National Labor Relations Board? We have city councils that conduct their affairs in convenient secrecy and put their own interests above those of the communities that they allege to serve, and yet we naïvely think that when that self-serving process is used to hire a police commissioner or to organize a police department, then we’ll get saints and Einsteins out of all that muck.

The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black. The most pronounced economic inequality in the United States is not in some Republican redoubt in Texas but in San Francisco, an extraordinarily expensive city in which half of all black households make do with less than $25,000 a year. Blacks in San Francisco are arrested on drug felonies at ten times their share of the general population. At 6 percent of the population, they represent 40 percent of those arrested for homicides. Whether you believe that that is the result of a racially biased criminal-justice system or the result of higher crime incidence related to socioeconomic conditions within black communities (or some combination of those factors) what is undeniable is that results for black Americans are far worse in our most progressive, Democrat-dominated cities than they are elsewhere. The progressives have had the run of things for a generation in these cities, and the results are precisely what you see.

Our cities need economic growth and opportunity, functional education systems, and physical security. And where have our few urban success stories come from? We saw a dramatic turnabout in crime and public disorder in New York under Republican Rudy Giuliani, and we’ve seen periods of relatively good governance in two-party cities such as San Diego. At the moment, our most prosperous cities are those such as Houston, cities that are themselves Democrat-dominated but embedded in heavily Republican metropolitan areas or states, and which govern in a way that is much friendlier to enterprise and middle-class interests than is the style that has long predominated in places such as Philadelphia or Detroit.

The Reverend Jackson should not be surprised that places such as Ferguson, Mo., have feckless police departments. He himself has spent his career helping to ensure that they have feckless schools, self-serving bureaucracies, rapacious public-sector unions pillaging the municipal fisc, and malevolent political leadership that is by no means above exploiting racial sentiment in order to hold on to power. His allies have been running U.S. cities for a generation, and it takes a considerable measure of brass for him to come in decrying the results as though he had no hand in them.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Comments?

[Paladin2]

"A question for the Reverend Jackson:"

Have you gotten your offspring straightened out yet?

[Qiviut]

Comments?

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The Reverend Jackson should not be surprised that places such as Ferguson, Mo., have feckless police departments. He himself has spent his career helping to ensure that they have feckless schools, self-serving bureaucracies, rapacious public-sector unions pillaging the municipal fisc, and malevolent political leadership that is by no means above exploiting racial sentiment in order to hold on to power. His allies have been running U.S. cities for a generation, and it takes a considerable measure of brass for him to come in decrying the results as though he had no hand in them.

Right on, right on!

[Jack Hammer]

Yes, there IS something wrong: thanks to the most lawless administration in United States history, would-be lawbreakers consider that the law is for other people.

And, let’s be candid, it’s only for White people.

[Slyfox]

Ferguson ... 28 percent of those black residents live below the poverty line.

How many of those residents own a smart phone?

[Vince Ferrer]

Can they milk it until the elections?

[Mears]

bfl

[Bullish]

Dependency on big govt handouts has robbed inner city blacks of their souls and they’ve sure been acting like it.

[Celtic Conservative]

All of them or just the ones he knows of?

CC

[spel_grammer_an_punct_polise]

“The Reverend Jackson should not be surprised that places such as Ferguson, Mo., have feckless police departments. He himself has spent his career helping to ensure that they have feckless schools, self-serving bureaucracies, rapacious public-sector unions pillaging the municipal fisc, and malevolent political leadership that is by no means above exploiting racial sentiment in order to hold on to power. His allies have been running U.S. cities for a generation, and it takes a considerable measure of brass for him to come in decrying the results as though he had no hand in them.”

It is not about race for Je$$e. It is 100% about keeping his wallet full.

[aquila48]

I’m afraid the problem is deeper than the incompetence of the democrats at governing.

The problem is the “bell curve”.

[Berlin_Freeper]

Looters in St Louis caught on video; 32 arrested - YouTube

[Flatus I. Maximus]

> Progressives spent a generation imposing taxes and other expenses on urban populations as though the taxpaying middle class would not relocate.

Much as they've done with corporate taxes, while likewise imagining that corporations would not relocate.

Watch the "tax inversion" battle closely. What they're trying to do on a large scale now -- keeping corporations from relocating offshore to avoid taxes -- they'll be doing on a more personal scale in a few years. Imagine having to pay an "exit tax" if you want to move out of the country -- or even if you want to pack up your furniture and move out of Chicago.

[SWAMPSNIPER]

Cities are self destructive by nature.

[nathanbedford]

The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black.

Why is it not equally logical to reverse this syllogism? Why not, the more black the city the worse place it is likely to be and the more likely it is to be progressive?

The answer is that it's politically incorrect to reverse the logic and one dare not utter those sentiments in polite discourse. But until we acknowledge that it is not just macroeconomics but race that contributes to the devastation of Indian an Eskimo villages, we will never hope to help these wretched people. Until we are able to acknowledge that there is a difference (statistically speaking-because we are always eager to acknowledge the individual on his own terms and accomplishments as being "created equal" under the law and in fact, no matter what the statistical norm) in the culture of the African-American race, we will have more Detroits and more Ferguson Missouri's.

Until we are ready to identify a difference in the ways in which the culture of Chinese ghettos live in family unity and prosper in education, we as a society will fail to learn from their values until we are ready to acknowledge that race plays a part. The author Williamson has done a credible job in this article identifying the connection between progressivism and political and cultural decay.

The idea that all of the problems of black American cities can be laid at the feet of "progressives" is attractive to us conservatives and it is certainly part of the story but it is not the whole story. We are so gun shy about openly acknowledging the real truths about race that we verge of intellectual dishonesty. I watched Newark burn in 1967 and I know the cause was not wholly the progressive administration of Mayor Addunezio, all the correlations were also to race.

If that be political incorrectness, make the most of it.

[Cubs Fan]

As long is there is any kind of police in place anywhere that enforces laws against criminals blacks are going to launch PC attacks on it.

because the real underlying problem to it all—that black culture romanticizes, encourages and enables criminal behavior— is never ever addrssed.

[trebb]

“A spark has exploded,” he said,

When the baiters like Jackson keep talking out their asses while fanning the flames, eventually the spark will explode form all the gassin'.

[Ann Archy]

If blacks EVER want equality, they BETTER STOP VOTING FOR DEMOCRATS!!! Democrats KEEP them on their PLANTATION!!!

IF blacks ever wake up from their Welfare-Induced STUPOR to see what Destruction the Left has caused them, Katie bar the door....there would be blood in the gated communities of the left.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Got some baby pictures you want to show us, Rev ?