Anyone who has read my work for more than approximately six minutes knows that I prefer a rural lifestyle. I was raised in a predominantly rural lifestyle, and I live that way now. But for three decades, nearly half of my life, I lived in and called home a suburb of one of America's major cities, Denver. In those 30 years, I saw Denver go from a pretty decent, clean, prosperous city to... what it is now.
It's no coincidence that in those same 30 years, from 1989 to 2020, Colorado went from a purple state leaning red to a California-blue state. Oh, much of Colorado is still Republican territory - much of the western slope, the eastern plains, a lot of the rural parts of the state, in fact. But the state has been politically overwhelmed by the Denver-Boulder Axis, and those deep-blue jurisdictions are having some of the same problems that all of our big cities are seeing right now.
The question is this: Are our cities redeemable? A Tuesday editorial at Issues & Insights raises some interesting points.
Of the nation’s largest 20 cities, only two have Republican mayors – Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. Republicans hold the mayorships of just 25 of the 100 largest cities. And that number is down from 30 in 2020.
More mysterious is the paradox that, despite the fact that blame for empty stores, rising crime, and the exodus of people rests squarely on the shoulders of Democrats in most of these cities, voters rarely hand control over to Republicans.
Look at the history of the 10 largest cities and despair.
Los Angeles has had one Republican mayor since 1961. New York has had one and a half since 1969 (Michael Bloomberg had been a lifelong Democrat, but ran as a Republican in 2001 and 2005, and then left the GOP midway through his second term).
Chicago has been electing Democratic mayors since 1931, and Houston since 1982.
Democratic mayors, we should note, but also overwhelmingly Democratic city councils. The Democrat mayors, of course, appoint like-minded officials, and the councils vote for leftist policies, social, legal, and more. That's led to a lot of the problems our major urban areas are undergoing right now, and those policies are causing the flight of the prosperous; people who can leave are.
This, of course, concentrates the problem.
So, what is it about cities? Is there something in human nature that causes people to get more liberal – or dumber, depending on your perspective – the more densely packed together they are? Is this just a fact of life? And who cares, anyway? If Democrats want to ruin these cities and people keep voting them into office, we should just say good riddance, right?
But think about it: We are all paying the costs of urban blight and decay that Democrats have brought forth. We pay them in the form of larger housing subsidy costs, bigger welfare costs, deeper economic stagnation, and more widespread cultural rot.
I think that I&I's editorial board misses the point here. It's not that the urban lifestyle makes people more liberal (or dumber) but rather that anyone with any moderate leanings who previously found those urban areas appealing has left. It's a self-sorting process that's been going on for some years now. And while the economic issues are disturbing, it's the social issues that may be even more so.
The urban family has collapsed in recent decades. The percentage of American children born out of wedlock (this is not only an urban problem, mind) has shot up from 5 percent in 1960 to 40 percent today. Crime rates in our cities are spiking. Across much of the nation, schools are failing. All of these are the results of Democratic policies: Open-ended welfare systems that replace a safety net with a hammock, soft-on-crime policies, and uncontested control of the education system by the teachers' unions.
These are not new problems. Since 2020, though, we have been seeing rising unrest in the nation's cities; riots, arson, entire neighborhoods taken over by armed thugs, police attacked, and billions in property damage. And following the re-election of President Trump and the ensuing moves to remove illegal aliens from our towns and cities, things are getting worse, including, now, a planned ambush of federal officers.
See Also: 'A Planned Ambush': Shooting of TX Police Officer Was Part of Larger Plot to Kill ICE Agents
I've been saying, and writing, for years now, that if there is any major societal unrest in the United States, the kind that explodes into violence, it will be the left that starts it, and it will be largely an urban vs. rural conflict, with the suburbs caught in the middle. What we're seeing now may be the beginnings of just that.
How can we redeem our cities? There may be no good answer. The populations of those cities are leaning ever farther left as the productive people leave. It seems unlikely that anything will suddenly cause these urban cohorts to suddenly start voting for candidates promising liberty, prosperity, free markets, and jobs. Law-and-order candidates can have some appeal, especially when things are getting well and truly out of control. But give it an election cycle or two, and those issues are forgotten - see New York from the Giuliani years to today. Once crime is back at a tolerable level, the voters return to form, voting for the liberals promising the most free Schiff, and the cycle begins again.
Now, New York Democrats have chosen as their standard-bearer an actual commie.
How can we redeem our cities?
I'm worried that it may be too late.
