The increasing fragility of blue cities and states is the biggest problem the Democratic coalition faces. Those who hope that demographic change will create a “permanent Democratic majority” need to think about arithmetic as well as demography. The numbers don’t add up for blue cities. The governing model doesn’t produce the revenue that can sustain it long-term. Making cities work—enabling them to provide necessary services at sustainable cost levels while achieving economic development that rebuilds the urban middle class—is the biggest challenge the Democratic Party faces.
Cities have three major Democratic Party constituents, in tension with one another: gentrifiers, thanks to the New Commanding Heights industries of education and health care; urban African-American remnants of the Great Migration of the 1940s and 1950s; and public-sector union members. Among the conflicts:
–public sector unions with lavish pension benefits vs. the gentrifiers who will have to pay higher taxes or enjoy lower levels of services.
–public sector police unions vs. African-Americans upset with police mistreatment
–gentrifiers and African-Americans having different identity-politics preferences for electoral officials
I am actually one of those gentrifiers who lives in Chicago. The article made some fair points on pension benefits and taxes, especially in regards to public education. But whenever conservatives bust out law and order rhetoric from the 70s, they seem completely and utterly ignorant of the lead-crime hypothesis. Its not that they know about it and think its wrong, its like they aren’t even aware it exists.
Regardless of the policing strategy communities employed, regardless of the number of people imprisoned, there was a gigantic increase in crime between the 70s and 90s, that subsequently dropped like a rock. Correlation doesn’t equal causation but correlation is a prerequisite for causation. So I am going to go out on a limb here and question the “lock the poor brown people” up strategy for reducing crime is highly questionable as an empirical matter regardless of its ethics.
Now as a resident of Chicago, I’d like to unpack this Mead’s phrase “aggressive policing”. In Chicago, this means literally torturing false confessions out of suspects (supposedly this doesn’t happen anymore), literally flagrantly violating citizens (who are overwhelmingly brown skin) constitutional rights (that’s still happening), and actually murdering aforementioned brown people (that’s still happening). All this, and its not even clear if this actually reduced crime at all as opposed to a significant reduction of lead in the environment.
That’s why when Mead says “Experts differ as to why crime fell, but aggressive policing probably played a role…”, I’d really like to know what the expert consensus is if any, who those experts are, and which ones think that kind of policing Chicago is notorious for actually in fact played a role. I would then like to know in percentage terms how much of a role it played if one were to even concede that it did. Did torturing false confessions out of suspects reduce crime by 5% or 15%? And assuming that this drop in crime in part resulted from torturing false confessions out of suspects and violating their constitutional rights, is that a good policy? Should we keep that up?
Would you defend the notion that lax policing does not increase crime?
Bribing the red countryside to get what you want is expensive.
One impact of the Fed’s zero interest rate policy has been the pension problem has been moved from a future to a current problem for most blue cities/states.
One problem with the failure of blue cities/states is their residents are forced to go to red states to seek gainful employment. This has the impact of turning a red state purple.
As to Joseph’s comment, I would note that a number of blue cities with large black populations have a very, very high murder rate. A number of cites (many are blue) with large black populations have much lower murder rates (NYC for one, or compare
Chicago to Houston). Why?
Blacks murder more. One question is what is the sensitivity of murder to lead. If murder is a threshold margin (and we might think it is) a small shift in the independent variable can create large effects.
“Cancers” are different things, manifesting differently in different individuals. The more we learn about them, the more we learn to not generalize. Got it!
Cities are all essentially the same, and the only factor that distinguishes them is whether their government is dominated by liberals (“blue state”) or conservatives (“red”). The former are in poor shape by (unidentified) standards and the latter are in much better shape. Got it!
How enlightening the internet is.
Basically all cities are blue. The rest of everything is red. It is population density.
“City governments thus constituted are something like state governments in miniature. The relation of the mayor to the city council is somewhat like that of the governor to the state legislature, and of the president to the national congress. In theory nothing could well be more republican, or more unlike such city governments as those of New York and Philadelphia before the Revolution. Yet in practice it does not seem to work well. New York and Philadelphia seem to have heard as many complaints in the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth, and the same kind of complaints, of excessive taxation, public money wasted or embezzled, ill-paved and dirty streets, inefficient police, and so on to the end of the chapter. In most of our large cities similar evils have been witnessed, and in too many of the smaller ones the trouble seems to be the same in kind, only less in degree. Our republican government, which, after making all due allowances, seems to work remarkably well in rural districts, and in the states, and in the nation, has certainly been far less successful as applied to cities. ”
–Civil Government in the United States (1902), John Fiske
Fiske theorized that the problem of cities trying to institute a republican form of government was tied up in the necessity of the services cities provided. All those impacts on daily life brought forth corruption, etc.
Sadly, instead of figuring out how to govern cities in a more republican manner, we instead altered state and federal governance to be more involved in daily life and the President to be something of a super-mayor in domestic policy.
Are we sure Education and Medical goods and services are STILL the new commanding heights of the economy?
It seems to me like they took the lead from 1970-mid 2000’s, but in my corner of the world all the gentrifiers are coming from a tech or STEM background, and it seems like it’s that way in most of the cities. The presence of EdMed folks doesn’t seem to be the driving force behind the Malthusian rent prices in city centers.
Yes. If non-profit, government and hospital-heavy Oakland represents the commanding heights, what does that make San Francisco?
Perhaps some of it exists, but some comparative examinations of what has, and now does, constitute an economic “Middle Class” in various geographic, demographic and social organization contexts, rather than lumping all the variants into one general statistic.
Compare what constituted the MC of, say, Muncie, IN. in 1965 to that of 2014. Then do the same for ,say, Chicago, IL (Metro Area). Compare MC segments by the sizes (inter alia) of the urban areas. There is the likelihood of real differences in the kinds and rates of changes in the quality of life (Kinds of housing, ownerships, cars, household contents, education, generational mobility) as well as the usual income patterns.
The effects of populations densities would probably be notable.
A sample might be found in the ATL Metro Area by comparisons of the “satellite” communities (cities & counties) to the more dense central areas.
If we look closely, we may find that we have something quite different from “A” Middle Class, but more widely differentiated “sets.”
Gentrifiers vs Blacks: Niether want to live next to each other by definition, and the city is only so big.