There was something deeply demoralizing about the recent Mayoral election in Chicago, once among America’s greatest cities. The good news is that the catastrophic reign of a deeply corrupt and crazed mayor, who piled egregiously racist policies on top of one of the worst COVID responses in the country, came to an end. The bad news is that a guy who is arguably worse took her place.
As Allysia Finley put it in the Wall Street Journal, “Brandon Johnson’s victory in last week’s Chicago mayoral race is a reminder that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse.”
The city itself is facing bankruptcy but that economic reality is changing nothing about city policies. Crime is out of control. Poverty and despair are on the rise. And the residents who can leave are fleeing. Businesses are closing up shop and 175,000 people have left the city in the last two years, leaving the place at the mercy of people who only vote for more handouts and union controls.
The people who leave feel a sense of guilt, but the decision is entirely rational. One person’s vote makes no difference and no one has the obligation to stick around and become a sacrificial victim of pillaging politicians and dangerous criminals.
At some point in the last three years, many people just decided the situation was hopeless and left for greener pastures. Sadly, this put the city into a deep spiral of political disaster to the point that hopes for change and renewal seem to have been permanently dashed. Maybe it will come back to life at some point but maybe not in any of our lifetimes.
Incredibly, however, this same spiral of exodus plus the entrenchment of crime and corruption seems to be affecting other great cities too. People living in New York City today are grateful for an end to the utter madness and desolation of the lockdown years and the city is certainly revived today as compared to what it was in 2020 and 2021. However, by any standard, the experience of the city is massively deprecated compared with what it was only a few years ago.
Cities also created the basis for growing amounts of tolerance, peace, and human rights, as diverse people from all lands and languages came together to their mutual advantage. The experience led to a greater appreciation for the universality of the human experience and incentivized the entrenchment of a new ethos of togetherness. Arguably, it was the city that ended the religious wars, for example, and eventually slavery too.
The 21st century fall of so many American cities poses dangers not just to the city but also to the host state, simply because of the direct election of senators. The original Constitution assured that cities could not dominate state politics because the Senate representation was not subject to direct election. The 17th Amendment of 1913 changed that. Now the fate of the city has a profound effect on the whole state and then the whole nation. It was not supposed to be this way but the disastrous decision to change the Constitution assured that it would be so.
