By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, November 02, 2015
Houston is having an election today, and it’s an
interesting one: There’s an open mayor’s seat, and early voting has been
unusually strong, particularly in — this is an unusual pairing —
African-American neighborhoods and conservative neighborhoods. The nation’s
fourth-largest city is well on its way toward becoming the third-largest —
Houston adds to its numbers something close to the population of Santa Cruz,
Calif., in a typical year — and it has all of the enormously complex problems
and institutional challenges characteristic of 21st-century American cities.
The big question in this election: Where should a man in
a dress go potty?
Despite recent downturns in oil and gas prices, Houston
is in better shape than you’d expect. The local economy is performing robustly,
and unemployment is well under 4 percent. Houston has more than its share of
violent crime, but it remains far, far safer than most U.S. cities, coming in
right behind Minneapolis in the rankings at half
the violent crime rate of Detroit and one-fifth
the murders per capita of St. Louis. It is a city that is 44 percent Hispanic,
24 percent black, 26 percent Anglo, 28 percent foreign-born, with only half of
its people speaking English at home, but it has relatively little in the way of
ugly Chicago-style/Los Angeles-style/Philadelphia-style racial politics.
Driving along Interstate 10 in Houston last week, I saw a
wonderful inversion of the familiar urban scene of a sad homeless fellow
standing in an underpass with a “Will Work for Food” sign: Houston’s version is
guy standing in an underpass holding a placard reading: “General Labor Wanted,”
handing out fliers to passers-by looking for work.
But Houston has its problems, too. It suffers from
Cairo-style traffic ensnarements that make one think wistfully of Los Angeles,
a problem intensified by freeways and city streets in a positively dangerous
state of disrepair, as a result of which it takes longer to get from the east
side of Houston to the west side than it does to get from New York City to
Philadelphia. Houston has insanely upside-down city finances, with a deficit
expected to run nearly a half-billion dollars between 2017 and 2020, along with
the usual urban plague of $3.3 billion in unfunded government pension
liabilities. A relatively large number of Houston’s public schools are held in
low esteem by the state’s educational authorities, and 23 of them have been
ranked “academically unacceptable” for two years or longer.
Last time around, Houston elected as its mayor Annise
Parker, the first open lesbian to serve as mayor of a major U.S. city. There
are some ass-kicking lesbians in the world, but Parker is not one of them.
Texas has a reputation for being a hotbed of Evangelical fervor, but
Houstonians are in the main blasé about their mayor’s sexual orientation — it’s
her political orientation that’s the problem. If she’d been able to do
something about the city’s lunar roadscapes or its incipient fiscal emergency,
nobody would have cared if her main sexual enthusiasms was lurking in airport
restrooms hoping for stray Republican congressmen — they’d have built monuments
to her. Even Parker’s progressive-minded constituents must, in their honest
moments, judge her a failure: On such lifestyle-liberal metrics as mass transit
and environmental quality, Houston is kind of a mess.
Instead of a competent city-builder who is also gay,
Houston got a culture warrior whose parting gift to the city is a deeply stupid
fight over “HERO” — the Houston Equal-Rights Ordinance — which among other
things would create a new body of local civil-rights law (the lawyers cheer
with one voice) covering transgender/transsexual people in the matter of public
accommodations, meaning public toilets and the like. This wasn’t preceded by
some crisis in the matter of toilet accommodations for men in dresses, but the
issue is critically important to some people: Namely, to people who are in
their affluence and comfort able to maintain a state of graceful blindness to
the actual nuts-and-bolts problems facing Houston.
The leading candidate in the mayor’s race is Sylvester
Turner, a member of the Texas state house, an African-American Democrat and
Harvard Law graduate whose big idea is putting shiftless young people to work
filling up potholes and calling it a job-training program. He talks in fairly vague
terms about economic inequality and the like, but he’s pretty much a potholes
guy. That’s not so bad, really: Houston could use a potholes guy, assuming he’s
any good at it. The race is expected to go into a runoff, though whom Turner
will face is unclear. One possibility is Republican businessman Bill King, who
has been a mayor before: of Kemah, Texas, a Houston exurb on the coast. King’s
program is in the main stuff that’s familiar to conservative urban reformers:
moving city employees to a defined-contribution pension plan rather than an
unsustainable defined-benefit plan, reducing the management footprint of the
police department and redeploying resources in a way that might actually reduce
crime (the Houston police manage to arrest a grand total of 6 percent of the
city’s burglars), replacing the city’s so-called Rain Tax (a pay-as-you-go
program for drainage and other infrastructure projects) with old-fashioned bond
issues put to a public vote. Solid stuff, though by no means visionary.
Conservative think tanks and policy wonks have done
excellent work over the years in developing intelligent critiques of, and
innovative policy approaches to, big-city problems. And most of that
concentrated brainpower has gone exactly nowhere, as conservative politicians
have in the main given up hope of making inroads into big U.S. cities, which
are almost exclusively — take a bow, San Diego! — monopolistic Democratic
fiefdoms.
Why?
Because a great many city-dwellers are dumb enough, and
sufficiently poisoned by preening moral self-regard, to believe that voting for
a mayor based on some irrelevant demographic characteristic — color of his
skin, whom she prefers sharing a bed with — is an act of virtue rather than an
act of bad citizenship. These people don’t really vote with what’s good for
their city in mind; rather, they are members of the Lena Dunham school of
democratic participation, those whose vote is primarily an expressive rather
than instrumental matter: “What does my vote say about me, and about which
character I’d be if I were a character on Girls?”
Of course, the public-sector unions and other
government-insider interest groups ensure that if the GOP should put up a
candidate who punches some progressive demographic button (such as Kevin James,
a gay conservative activist and talk-radio host who was the Republican
candidate for mayor of Los Angeles some years back), then every available piece
of political artillery will be trained on him. Destroying black, Hispanic, gay,
and female Republican candidates is a top progressive priority.
The unions have a lot of money, but they don’t have a
monopoly on votes, or even a majority of them.
Republicans shouldn’t be under any illusions about their
ability to punch through that kind of boneheaded tribal thinking. Which is to
say, American cities will continue to be badly misgoverned for as long as the
residents of American cities choose to be governed by incompetents, misfits,
criminals, race-hustlers, and practitioners of cheap identity politics.
Unhappily, it isn’t only the cities: Progressive tribal
politics are the main reason that Barack Obama was twice elected president of
these United States, in spite of a pre-election curriculum vitae that suggested
he was entirely unprepared for the presidency and a first term that proved it.
It is why Hillary Rodham Clinton will be, despite her documented incompetence
in the lesser position of secretary of state and the fact that her surname is a
byword for dishonesty and the worst kind of self-serving politics, a formidable
candidate.
And that same kind of affiliation-driven politics is the
reason why, in spite of all of Houston’s serious municipal challenges, the
topic that is dominating the discussion is a so-called civil-rights ordinance
addressing in part the all-important question of public accommodations — read:
toilet rules — for transsexuals. Houston may not know how it’s going to balance
the books, but it is by-God certain that a fellow who wants to while away some
time in the damas’ room at Taco
Cabana has a civil right to do so if he’s feeling feminine that day, and that
this right simply must be codified in the city’s legal code. (The rule was
already thrown out once by the state supreme court on the grounds that it was
improperly adopted.) In Houston’s well-heeled and hipsterish Upper Kirby
neighborhood this morning, I took a moment to speak with some volunteers for
the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, who were very excited about the
great toilet battle to come on Tuesday. I asked them what they thought about
Bill King’s pension-reform plans.
“Who?”
That’s the problem with American politics, that right
there.
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