By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Baltimore is . . . not great. It has the second-highest
murder rate (“non-negligent homicide,” in the nomenclature of the FBI) in the
country, behind St. Louis. It has some of the worst-performing public schools
in the nation. The city’s mayor recently resigned in disgrace after a financial
scandal. It is 63 percent African American. It is an overwhelmingly Democratic
city.
Owsley County, Ky., is . . . not great. It is the poorest
county in the United States. It has the second-highest level of child poverty
in the country. Almost a quarter of the population under the age of 65 is
classified as having a disability. It is 98 percent white. It is an
overwhelmingly Republican county.
What does Baltimore tell us about Democratic governance?
President Trump thinks he knows. (Kind of weird to hear a New Yorker
complaining about the rats in some other city, though.) But we might
also ask: What does Owsley County tell us about Republican governance?
This is not an entirely unfair question in either case,
but you have to be particular about it.
Milwaukee, where the Democrats are having their 2020
convention, is a mess — and it is the Democrats’ mess, no question about it.
But Austin and Denver are very good places to live, and also are overwhelmingly
Democratic cities. You could try to compare the state of big cities that are
overwhelmingly Democratic to those that are overwhelmingly Republican, except
for the problem that there is no big city in the United States that is
overwhelmingly Republican. (Republicans do not seem to be able to think of one
they like very much, which does not bode well for the party’s electoral
future.) There are cities in which Republicans win some offices and have some
influence, including some very good places to live such as San Diego and Boise,
Idaho (which is much less Republican than the rest of Idaho) and some
fine Republican-friendly cities with critical challenges, such as Miami. What
we should conclude from these generalities is not obvious.
On the specific issue of crime, relatively liberal cities
and relatively conservative ones often clump together in the statistics.
Henderson, Nev., has about the same murder rate as Irving, Texas, and Virginia
Beach, Va. Politically dissimilar cities such as Boise, Idaho, Scottsdale,
Ariz., and Irvine, Calif., have even lower rates. High-crime Baltimore is
Democratic, but so is low-crime Austin.
Crime correlates with variables such as race and economic
status. But this also happens in ways that can be counterintuitive. Relative to
their share of the population, African Americans commit more violent crimes and
suffer more violent crimes. And poor areas in general tend to have more violent
crime. Baltimore is two-thirds black, while Austin is less than 8 percent
black. Austin has a median household income of nearly $64,000 a year and a
poverty rate of about 15 percent; Baltimore has a median household income that
is nearly 30 percent less than Austin’s and a poverty rate that is half again
as much. Owsley County’s median household income is half of Baltimore’s, and
its poverty rate is 70 percent higher, but it has a violent crime rate that not
only is radically lower than Baltimore’s but much lower than the national
average. What’s that all about? Population density? Maybe. The fact that
African-American poverty in poor cities has characteristics that are different
from white poverty in poor rural areas? Probably. The wisdom of Representative
Elijah Cummings? Well . . .
Some problems can be much more directly linked to the
character of government and to public policy. The state of the schools in big
American cities, for example, is very closely linked to the character of
American public-sector unions and to their stranglehold on the Democratic
party, which stifles competition and innovation and prevents the enactment of
measures to ensure basic accountability. Moneyed suburban districts in which
there is real school choice — because families can afford to choose — tend to
have much better public schools, even where they have a larger share of
students in private schools. But, again, there is no straightforward policy
narrative: Owsley County’s high-school graduation rate is 28 points higher than
the Milwaukee public school district’s.
The shortage of housing in Democrat-dominated places such
as the Bay Area also is very closely linked to progressive policies, in this
case the ones that keep developers from expanding the housing supply. But these
failures are compounded by the success of these communities: People really like
living in Palo Alto and Manhattan. There is no affordable-housing crisis in
Owsley County, Ky.
There are symmetries: Poor cities and poor rural areas
often are dominated by a familiar kind of insider-outsider politics: “They
don’t care about people like us,” goes the refrain, “and so you should support
your own people, who share your interests.” Hustling politicians promise
visionary new economic-development schemes every other year, but not much
changes. Is that political malpractice? Partly. But it also is the case that
large-scale economic development is not something that politicians can magic
out of a hat. Much of rural America and exurban Rust Belt America are in the
condition they are in because they were built on economic foundations that are
no longer operative. A lot of big Democratic cities are like that, too: If
Philadelphia didn’t already exist, you wouldn’t invent it. St. Louis was built
on the steamboat trade — not much of a going concern just now.
Increasingly southern and rural Republicans are good at
sneering at Baltimore. The tony Democrats in San Francisco are damned
well-practiced at sneering at the rural south. As for doing something about the
problems in those communities — moderate your expectations. Donald Trump is a
famous son of New York City who has offered himself as tribune for the
struggling communities of the heartland, and Nancy Pelosi is a celebrated
daughter of Baltimore, where her father once was mayor. And if the two of them
decided to really take on the most fundamental problems of any of those
communities and put their heads together, it would sound like a minor mishap in
a coconut-processing plant.
And the poor — in the cities or in Appalachia? What about
them? Oh, dear: There are funds to raise and tweets to tweet and elections to
be won and cheap allegations of racism to be bandied about. Maybe we’ll get to
them next time around.
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