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Chicago’s Confederacy of Dunces, the Marxist Kind
Chicago Contrarian ^ | Jan 13 2025 | Patrick Dent

Posted on 01/13/2026 6:01:49 AM PST by texas booster

How Chicago ended up governed by people unfit to govern anything

Chicago’s governance failures are usually described as ideological in nature. We are told the city is run by people with unsound ideas — progressive excess, hostility to policing, disdain for markets, and a fondness for socialist abstractions. That diagnosis is not wrong. It is merely incomplete.

Ideology does not arise spontaneously. The more revealing question is how a city repeatedly elevates people who hold such demonstrably false views of the world—and why those views are held with such confidence even as reality refutes them.

The uncomfortable answer is that Chicago is increasingly governed by people who are not merely ideologically misguided, but intellectually inconsequential. They lack the analytical capacity, real-world experience, and critical reasoning skills required to test ideas against evidence. Ideology, for them, is not a hypothesis to be examined but a catechism to be memorized.

This is no accident. It is the predictable output of an educational and professional pipeline dominated by activist pedagogy, grievance politics, and Marxist mental models — institutions that reward conformity over competence and moral signaling over empirical rigor. These systems do not teach students how to think; they teach them what to think. Those least equipped to interrogate ideology are the most likely to absorb it uncritically — and then to seek political power.

Unable to deconstruct the contradictions embedded in that worldview — economic, historical, or mathematical — these officials adopt it wholesale. Markets are dismissed as exploitation. Incentives are ignored. Tradeoffs are treated as moral failure. Arithmetic itself becomes suspect. When policies fail, reality — not theory — is blamed.

The result is not simply bad policy, but governance by abstraction.

A recent protest outside the Daley Center illustrates the problem precisely.

...

Every element of this argument is wrong.

(Excerpt) Read more at chicagocontrarian.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Government; News/Current Events; US: Indiana
KEYWORDS: chicago; letsgobrandon

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Appearing together on video, Andre Vasquez and Robert Peters denounced the Trump administration’s removal of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. In a rambling statement, they declared the action an “illegal war,” claimed it lacked congressional authorization, labeled it impeachable, compared it to the Iraq War, blamed U.S. policy for Latin American poverty, and argued defense spending should instead be redirected to healthcare, housing, and retirement benefits.

Jurisdiction without limits

Neither Vasquez nor Peters has any authority over U.S. foreign policy or presidential power. One is a municipal legislator; the other is a state legislator. Their responsibility is to govern Chicago and Illinois — jurisdictions facing rising crime, fiscal instability, and administrative decay. Their decision to posture as foreign-policy experts is not moral seriousness; it is abdication.

Law, history, and arithmetic

The claim the president lacked authority to act without congressional approval is false. The president’s Article II authority to conduct limited military actions and targeted operations is well established. The Bush administration’s removal of Manuel Noriega from Panama in 1989 provides a clear precedent.

...

1 posted on 01/13/2026 6:01:49 AM PST by texas booster
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To: texas booster

A long but coherent discussion of the sins of the leadership of Chicago, expected out of the Contrarian.

It has become the City of Big Hats. It is no longer the city of big shoulders.

That day has long passed.


2 posted on 01/13/2026 6:03:51 AM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: texas booster
The last section:

Opposition as identity

What unites these figures is not diversity of experience, but its absence. None has built an enterprise. None has managed capital under risk. None has been accountable to customers, markets, or balance sheets.

Their political identity is defined almost entirely by opposition to Donald Trump. Opposition substitutes for substance. Marxist frameworks — long discredited in practice — are recycled as virtue. The same policies that impoverished Venezuela are now proposed for Chicago: defund the police, constrain markets, regulate capital, and moralize failure.

Chicago is governed by people who do not know what they are doing, and who have never demonstrated that they do. However, they cannot be forgiven. They must be forgotten, relegated to the ash bin of history along with their Marxist antecedents.

That is the predicament. Until voters recognize competence is not oppression, arithmetic is not colonialism, and economics is not a social construct, the decline will continue — predictably, relentlessly, and entirely of our own making.

3 posted on 01/13/2026 6:05:28 AM PST by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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To: texas booster

Worth repeatıng!
[
Chicago’s current leadership shares a defining trait: the absence of demonstrated competence outside protected political, union, or nonprofit ecosystems.
]


4 posted on 01/13/2026 6:10:55 AM PST by TomEd (Her şey hazır! Buyrun, şölene!)
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To: TomEd

Smart people leave the city. So cities get bluer and bluer over time.


5 posted on 01/13/2026 6:13:00 AM PST by dfwgator ("I am Charlie Kirk!")
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To: texas booster

Loved the book.

Quite an appropriate comparison, for Ch!tcago.


6 posted on 01/13/2026 6:13:16 AM PST by Jane Long (Jesus is Lord!)
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To: texas booster

I continue to wonder- what is wrong with the people who vote for ANY democrat?


7 posted on 01/13/2026 6:41:19 AM PST by 13Sisters76 ("It is amazing how many people mistake a certain hip snideness for sophistication. " Thos. Sowell)
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To: texas booster

I continue to wonder- what is wrong with the people who vote for ANY democrat?


8 posted on 01/13/2026 6:41:30 AM PST by 13Sisters76 ("It is amazing how many people mistake a certain hip snideness for sophistication. " Thos. Sowell)
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To: texas booster

Chicago another shit hole on the U.S. map.


9 posted on 01/13/2026 6:53:06 AM PST by Vaduz (?.)
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To: texas booster

Voters who are either poorly or mis-educated by America’s public schools account for a lot of people being swayed by lefty bumper sticker slogans.

Worked well in the Old Soviet Union when the commies promised the people Russia would become a workers’ paradise full of happiness and abundance - once evil landlords, greedy land owners and factory bosses, etc. were eliminated and THEY took over... well everything.

Result? At least 66 million dead before the entire false system inevitably imploded in on itself.

It’s playing out here again, b/c people did not learn the lesson of the result of 20th century Communism, which is responsible for 100 million deaths.

Results will be inevitably the same.


10 posted on 01/13/2026 7:54:20 AM PST by Bon of Babble (You Say You Want a Revolution?)
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