Liberalism's Wreckage
BARNES, FRED
Liberalism's Wreckage A 'New Democrat' Chronicles Urban Decline By Fred Barnes There's a sure-fire way to get a laugh when speaking anywhere outside the Beltway: mention Mayor Marion Barry and the...
...In the next six years, welfare jumped by 630,000, and "the character of the city [was] fundamentally transformed," Siegel writes...
...For all the horrors, there's some good news...
...The story Siegel tells brilliantly in The Future Once Happened Here is compelling and sad...
...There's not much to like...
...Barry is the elected leader, but the city is mostly run by an unelected control board...
...David Frum, for example, says Washington is halfway to the libertarian paradise of no taxes and no government services...
...Among the largest cities, L.A...
...It's clear when welfare exploded...
...Boisterous laughter erupts when you declare crime is down 23 percent in D.C...
...To them, the failure of lavish government spending only means more money was required in the first place...
...The immigrant model for advancing in America "was not just modified but completely abandoned," writes Siegel, a history professor at Cooper Union and a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, the New Democrat think tank...
...Their budget shrank...
...Washington has all the characteristics of a laboratory of liberalism...
...Federal aid was aggressively pursued...
...this year—and that's just in the mayor's office...
...In L.A., Riordan balked at changing the city's mindset on race...
...The other is the appalling condition of American cities like Washington...
...As Fred Siegel notes in his account of urban collapse in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, most of us suburbanites in the Washington area insist we're from Virginia or Maryland, not D.C...
...I'm like others from the Washington suburbs...
...The rolls grew by 47,000 from 1945 to 1960, then by more than 200,000, to 538,000, by 1965...
...Washington...
...When private-sector jobs vanished, they were replaced by "public service" employment or the dole...
...The biggest laugh comes in response to an old Leno or Letter-man jibe that Barry established a political first when he was last inaugurated: He's the first political figure ever to ride to his swearing-in in a limousine whose license plates he made...
...If anything, Washington became worse off...
...After World War II, New York had 1 million manufacturing jobs and 250,000 people on welfare...
...As for the power of economic growth to improve lives, they're scornful...
...If poverty persisted, white racism was the cause...
...No longer were the urban poor, now mostly black and Hispanic, expected to work hard and follow a reasonably disciplined lifestyle and in return be guaranteed a decent life...
...In the topsy-turvy world of New York City politics, the 1970s, when the Bronx burned and the city almost went bankrupt, are remembered fondly as an era of federal support," Siegel says...
...In Los Angeles, the situation is better, but the interrelated problems of the police and race await solution...
...Taxes remain, but services are virtually gone...
...We can measure the fate of American liberalism by the distance between the high hopes raised by the promise of home rule in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s and the current disdain for the District and its government," according to Siegel...
...Had he supported the California Civil Rights Initiative last year, he could have established "a transtribal ethic for his fractious metropolis," Siegel argues...
...Calling Barry "mayor for life" draws a chuckle...
...Richard Riordan has spearheaded the economic revival in Los Angeles...
...Once Washington's "shadow senator," Jesse Jackson has returned to Chicago...
...Between 1982 and 1992, Siegel points out, the number of public-housing units stayed the same, while the housing department doubled in staff and its budget nearly quadrupled...
...So to maintain control in high-crime areas—and to protect themselves— the police act brutally...
...burgeoned...
...A "politics that promoted separatism in the name of reducing racial separation" was encouraged...
...What exactly are they laughing at...
...The 30-year experiment has produced swollen welfare rolls, a mammoth but ineffective bureaucracy, a dwindling police force, a high crime rate, breathtakingly bad schools, crumbling infrastructure, high taxes coupled with a shriveling tax base, a shrinking private sector, white and black flight to the suburbs, and race-based politics...
...In 1993, Republican mayors were elected in New York and L.A...
...By contrast, the boom of the 1980s, when minority families made major gains in income, was decried . . . as the decade of greed because federal subsidies failed to keep pace with the city's exploding budget...
...When they committed crimes, it wasn't their fault...
...As a young reporter in Washington in the late '60s, I went to places in Washington at night that I wouldn't visit during the day now...
...The population is falling rapidly, the result these days of black flight to the suburbs...
...But the battle for the cities is hardly won, Siegel says...
...Yet many liberals remain in a state of denial...
...One is the pathetic racial politics that elevated Barry to the mayor's office, then brought him back again after his drug bust...
...Meanwhile, there was one exception to the surging municipal employment—the cops...
...In the largely white San Fernando Valley, a movement to secede from L.A...
...The result: scary, unlivable cities...
...Rudy Giuliani, by controlling spending and facing down racial racketeers, has palpably changed New York...
...Heaven knows, L.A...
...Any fabricated percentage will do, since it's a joke...
...The persistence of poverty is proof white racism was even more deeply rooted than they had suspected...
...After the riot, "the romanticization of the rioters by multiculturalists in the media and would-be black radicals" widened the psychological distance between blacks and whites...
...Siegel says he's optimistic...
...Just before the 1992 riot, he proposed to cut the undermanned police force by 7 percent...
...In New York, a constituency for reforming the bloated city government and streamlining the economy is absent...
...things...
...Today the numbers are roughly reversed: New York has 1.l million people on one form of public assistance or another and fewer than 300,000 manufacturing jobs...
...has both the busiest and the smallest force, in terms of the police-to-population ratio," Siegel notes...
...and every other city needs one...
...Siegel marshals all the numbers of decline and decay in New York, Washington, and other cities...
...Things are so egregiously bad in D.C., from schools that open three weeks late to the absence of snow removal, that it's funny...
...Okay, those aren't the wittiest jokes ever, but the point is people always laugh at them...
...Liberalism's Wreckage A 'New Democrat' Chronicles Urban Decline By Fred Barnes There's a sure-fire way to get a laugh when speaking anywhere outside the Beltway: mention Mayor Marion Barry and the city of Washington, D.C...
...I think two Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Well, maybe the control board will get things under control...
...Cities thrived until everything changed in the 1960s...
...Though an ex-cop, former mayor Tom Bradley, a sweet-tempered liberal, didn't understand what was going on...
...And what Siegel calls "dependent individualism" became a way of life, combining the absolute right to any lifestyle, however bizarre or self-destructive, with "an equally fundamental right to be supported at state expense...
...They were encouraged to go on welfare rather than take "dead end" jobs...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 9
