Why are Democrats so bad at running cities?
Frank Rizzo was no surprise. After presiding over a reign of brutality as superintendent of police in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, he was twice elected mayor of that perennially misgoverned city and probably would have been elected to a third term if the city council hadn’t stopped him from running again. Rizzo, who was famously photographed attending a black-tie event with a nightstick tucked into his cummerbund, had promised to “make Attila the Hun look like a f—-t,” and he did his best to make good on that.
Rizzo was, of course, a Democrat for the entirety of his career in office. He made friends across the aisle in his retirement, but he was a Democrat born in 1920 who joined the police in the 1940s. African Americans already had transferred their political allegiance from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of Franklin Roosevelt, but it would still be a few decades before that development would have its full effect on the internal organization of the Democratic Party. This was at the time when Lyndon Johnson, later identified with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was still campaigning in favor of poll taxes and voting against anti-lynching legislation. Contrary to the popular account of the matter, it is not the case that the two major political parties “traded places” on the question of civil rights—but it is the case that the Democratic Party experienced a radical change for the better, which meant that Democratic mayors such as Frank Rizzo were replaced by progressives such as Wilson Goode, who became the first black mayor of Philadelphia.
Of course, it was the progressive Wilson Goode, and not the atavistic racist Frank Rizzo, who burned down a poor black neighborhood in Philadelphia after firebombing the home of a black radical group he had declared a terrorist organization. MOVE, as the group was known, was a group of neo-primitivist kooks, which, happily, we don’t have in American politics anymore.
Anyway.
The two bombs Philadelphia police dropped from helicopters on the MOVE house started a fire that killed 11 people, five of them children, destroying two city blocks and leaving hundreds of people homeless. A federal court later determined that the city had used excessive force in the matter and violated the constitutional rights of Philadelphia residents, including the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Which is to say, Wilson Goode did his best to make Frank Rizzo look like … happily, people don’t really talk like that much anymore.
Big-city Democrats just seem to have the worst luck.
The unhappy metropolis of Louisville, Kentucky, is getting run through it good and hard just now, and not without good reason. The U.S. Department of Justice has just released a report that it began compiling after the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, and the findings are pretty ugly: The municipal government and the police department “engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” the DOJ finds. The catalog will not surprise you: racial discrimination targeting black residents, excessive force, the violation of the free speech rights of anti-police protesters, and, among the most worrying items from a strictly procedural point of view, conducting searches based on invalid warrants.
Louisville is a city run by progressive Democrats. Since its legal reorganization as Louisville Metro in a 2003 city-county merger, Louisville has never had a Republican mayor. In the years before that, you won’t find a Republican mayor in the city’s recent history: There were a brace of Republican mayors in the middle-late 1960s, and, before that, you’ll have to go back to William B. Harrison, elected in 1927, to find a Republican in the top spot. The metro council has long been Democrat-dominated, with the current party split being 19 Democrats to seven Republicans. These aren’t fringe, backwater Democrats, either: Democratic mayors of Louisville have gone on to Congress and senior roles in state government.
There isn’t a lot of Republican power at the state level in Kentucky, either: Since the end of World War II, Kentucky has had only three Republican governors and 14 Democrats. When Republicans won a majority in the statehouse in the 2016 election, it was their first time to achieve control of that chamber in 95 years. The Kentucky Democratic Party surely has had its share of Robert Byrd-type bigots over the years, but they weren’t running things in 2016—or in the 1990s, when Kentucky gave its presidential electoral votes to Bill Clinton twice. The share of African Americans on the metro council is higher than the African American share of the metro population. Louisville had a black police chief from 2003 until 2011, when he got a better offer from Denver. Interim chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel is black. Deputy chief Paul Humphrey is black. They have a diversity boss who boasts of “several certifications from Cornell University in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
And Louisville isn’t a city that suffered some kind of economic or social catastrophe, like Detroit. Louisville has a slightly higher median household income than does Houston or Jacksonville, a slightly higher population share with bachelors’ degrees than Miami or Phoenix, a lower murder rate than Columbus or Nashville, a lower unemployment rate than Dallas. Without excusing it, one could understand that police and other municipal agencies would be under more stress in a city such as St. Louis, where the murder rate is four times what it is in Louisville, or Camden, N.J., which has a poverty rate more than twice that of Louisville. Louisville isn’t an especially well-off place on most measures, but on most metrics it is closer to Austin than it is to Detroit.
It’s just an ordinary, badly governed place—one where the civil rights of residents are systematically abused, according to the DOJ.
This isn’t a “Ha, ha, look at those dumb Democrats!” point. It’s a real question: What do progressive Democrats think it would take to get it right in a place such as Louisville—a place where Democrats can, as a matter of pure political power, do pretty much whatever they want?
It isn’t about money or education—San Francisco is rich and highly educated, and it is a mess. This isn’t about a black underclass that is cut off from political and social power: Detroit and Washington both turned into basket-case cities under largely African American political leadership, Detroit under Coleman Young (“Aloha, m———–s!”) and Washington under Marion “The Bitch Set Me Up” Barry, who at least had the excuse of being a genuine crackhead. And there aren’t any very obvious villains in the story: The current mayor of Louisville isn’t the sort of guy I would vote for, but he appears to be a bog-standard progressive Democrat of the familiar kind; his predecessor, the one who was on the job during the Breonna Taylor episode, was cut from very similar cloth, a green-energy-and-infrastructure guy who got rid of the naughty statues. Louisville hasn’t been run by orthodox Hayekians, but it hasn’t been under the heel of Bull Connor, either.
So why can’t Democrats run the cities that Democrats run?
Partisans can always tell themselves a nice story about how it’s the other guys’ fault—I’ve heard people blame Ronald Reagan’s presidency for the death of the automotive industry in Detroit, even though the first of the factories started closing back when Reagan wasn’t presiding over anything grander than his trailer back when he was making Bedtime for Bonzo. But it is difficult to take seriously the argument that the schools in Milwaukee are a mess because of Republicans, that Philadelphia can’t police its streets because of Republicans, that San Francisco is an open-air mental ward because of Republicans, that Louisville is a committed violator of civil rights because of Republicans. It’s not that Republicans don’t have their own problems—goodness gracious, yes they do!—but their problems are not Philadelphia’s problems, or Newark’s or San Francisco’s or Portland’s or Louisville’s.
In the long term, the contest for dispositive political power in these United States will be fought in the cities and in the urban inner suburbs—the places where the people are, where the money is, and where the people and the money are going. And—more about this later—Republicans are hardly even on the field when it comes to that fight. Dallas’ current progressive Democrat mayor isn’t the worst of his kind, but he isn’t so great that he should be running for reelection unopposed. Yet he is. You could plausibly draw a line tracing a generally progressive political tendency that held sway in the Democratic Party from roughly the Lyndon Johnson years to the Barack Obama years, with Johnson being probably the leftwardmost figure (not as a matter of cultural affect but as a policy matter, creating Medicare and Medicaid and signing the major civil rights legislation of the time) and with Bill Clinton the rightwardmost figure, notwithstanding the intelligent criticism of such neoconservative-ish Democrats as Daniel Patrick Moynihan. One thing that I think we could safely say about that model of politics is that it has demonstrably failed the cities, and, in particular, that it has failed those on whose behalf and in whose interest urban progressives purport to act, beginning with the poor and the nonwhite, but also immigrants, criminals attempted to reenter society, single mothers, and other vulnerable groups. Conservatives ought to have something to say to those groups, who cannot be entirely satisfied with the way they are governed today. Conservatives have a great deal to offer on the policy front.
But what do conservatives say for themselves?
. . .
Biden says his proposals would reduce the deficit substantially over the coming decade. And they would—but not by as much as the policies he already has enacted would increase it. Under the current Congressional Budget Office baseline projection, federal debt held by the public will hit $43.5 trillion a decade hence, at the beginning of 2033. Biden’s deficit-reduction measures (mostly tax increases) would—in theory! in the perfect world in which the plan was perfectly executed!—knock that down to about $40.6 trillion. But, scoot back a couple of years from 2033 to the 2030 projection. Why do that? Because in 2020, just before Joe Biden was elected president, CBO also made some projections. In that project, CBO estimated that debt held by the public would hit $31.8 trillion in 2030, but the current CBO projection has that debt hitting $36.4 trillion in 2030, almost $5 trillion more than in the ten-year projection from 2020. What happened? A whole bunch of spending, largely at the hands of Joe Biden’s Democratic allies in Congress with the blessing of Joe Biden. So, another way of looking at this is that Biden’s proposal would cut the deficit back $2.9 trillion from a baseline his allies already have increased by almost $5 trillion. If you had planned to buy yourself a Lamborghini and decided to settle for a Bentley instead, you didn’t actually save yourself any money. And that matters if—and this part matters!—you really can’t afford the Bentley, much less the Lamborghini.
Forward!