Urban Wasteland
NRO uses Detroit's bleak situation in Eminem's movie
8 miles to illustrate the failure of modern urban liberalism. The article points out that the city of one million has
one movie theater and
no major retail stores. The racially diverse suburbs (Arab, black and ethnic white) bordering Detroit are prospering while the city collapses in on itself.
The only problem I have with articles like this is that the problem is greater than liberalism. Almost all cities are run by liberals. Seattle, San Francisco, Portland for instance have not needed Republican mayors (who were only center-Left not far Left) like New York or Los Angeles [1]. But the cruel fact is that the mayors that represented the apogee of urban decay and chaos prior to the Republican (read: non-Leftist) takeover (Riordan and Guliani) were black (the more conservative second Daley also took over after the long tenure of a black mayor). Detroit (and Gary, Indiana) are illustrations of the failure of
black liberalism, which is manifested by an absolute lack of social capital mixed in with government programs.
My point is that liberalism is toxic only in certain contexts. In other situations (Sweden, San Francisco, Boston, etc.) the social matrix can absorb it, and the choice of welfare statism is a trade-off rather than a dead-end (less freedom and mobility for more security). By the way, what did Gary do to change its image? The black city elected a white (liberal) mayor.
[1] Black liberalism is more than just skin deep-Seattle, a mostly white city, had a black mayor from a middle-class background. Of course, his skin color automatically made him the "urban" candidate in the race for governor, and he lost out to a Chinese man from a lower-class background who was percieved as being less liberal and polarizing.
Update:
From the message board:
Tom Bradley was a pretty good mayor of Los Angeles, but he got old in office and his fifth term was a disaster. But, in a city that has never been much more than 15% black, he had to do a lot of things right (like bring the Olympics to LA in 1978 when no other city in the world wanted it) to win five elections.
Steve Sailer
