Working as I am from a rural Alaskan homestead, I have been and still am an odd one to be writing about the state of America's urban areas. If you've been reading my work, you know I grew up in a rural setting in Iowa and am a happy rural dweller myself now. I have little time for cities, despite having lived in them for four decades. I find them unpleasant; crowded, noisy, and, to be honest, they stink. I like the clean country air of Alaska's Susitna Valley, and if that means I have to put up with the occasional ice storm or a moose in the driveway, that's fine.
With that being true, why am I still worried about America's cities? Because our cities are the beating hearts of our nation. Much of the country's economic activity happens there. Urban areas contain a lot of the country's industry and academia. What's more, our cities used to be the pride of the nation, but that's not so much the case anymore. Crime and mismanagement may well have driven our once-great cities to the point of no return.
Case in point: Chicago, a once-great city, once the nation's second city (after the also-deteriorating New York) which is now staggering under incompetent elected officials.
Last month, activists packed the Chicago Teachers Union Center for the annual conference of the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression (NAARPR). Attendees gathered to discuss fighting ICE and confronting the Trump administration.
Despite NAARPR’s relative obscurity—it was founded in 1973 to agitate for the release of Angela Davis and has since become a catch-all activist organization—the group’s conference featured several high-profile speakers, including Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who claimed to have inherited a “white supremacist system.” The event was hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union, one of Johnson’s most aggressive backers.
Let's get one thing straight right from the start: There is no codified institutional white supremacism in the United States today. None. Brandon Johnson took office following the failed administration of Lori Lightfoot, ballyhooed by the left as "Chicago's first black lesbian mayor," and who was the most incompetent mayor in the Windy City's history. Or at least, she was, until Brandon Johnson came along.
Johnson wasn't the only elected Chicago official blaming anyone and everyone but himself for Chicago's woes.
Characteristically for such an event, the conference began with a disruption. As Johnson, a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member, took the stage, protesters rushed forward with posters demanding “justice,” briefly halting the event.
Once order was restored, Johnson began by “fully admit[ting] that I have inherited a white supremacist system.” He suggested that education, health care, public housing, and policing were part of that system, and proposed raising taxes on “the ultra-rich and our large corporations” as the solution.
Chicago alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez ratcheted up the rhetoric. “Here in Chicago, we give these Nazis the treatment they deserve,” the DSA member intoned, later identifying the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as a “Nazi project.” Sigcho-Lopez argued that it was “time to fight capitalism, not with black capitalism or brown capitalism, but with socialism and not being apologetic about it.”
Chicago, under leadership like this, is headed down the same self-destructive path as New York, which just elected a self-avowed "Democratic socialist" (communist) as mayor.
So, why do the residents of these cities keep voting in incompetents? It's easy to blame ignorance, it's easy to blame the politics of envy, and yes, those things have a lot to do with this problem. And, as Democrat politicians prove daily, being an effective demagogue doesn't require a surfeit of brains. Mayor Brandon Johnson proves this on a startlingly regular basis. But people vote in their perceived self-interest, and the Democrats in these cities have done a more than convincing job of convincing urban voters that they aren't responsible for their problems: Other people are. White supremacists, capitalists, billionaires, anyone and everyone but that face in the mirror that confronts them every morning.
It is as it has been: The major problems afflicting America's cities will not be resolved until the voters in those cities change their voting habits. But the few people of good sense, the few producers who remain in these deteriorating urban enclaves, are voices crying out in the wilderness, contending against wealthy elites and the dependency class, who will forever vote for those promising more and more free Schiff. There are Republicans and even moderate independents in these cities, for now at least, but the voters regularly keep putting the same lunatics back in charge of the asylums, the productive and the reasonable keep leaving, and the cities keep deteriorating.
It's a doom spiral, and it can only end with the downfall of these cities. As H.L. Mencken pointed out, democracy is the notion that the people know what government they want and deserve to get it good and hard; he was right, and we see it happening right now in Chicago.
