By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
March 13, 2023
Frank
Rizzo was no surprise. After presiding over a reign of brutality as
superintendent of police in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, he was twice
elected mayor of that perennially misgoverned city and probably would have been
elected to a third term if the city council hadn’t stopped him from running
again. Rizzo, who was famously photographed attending a
black-tie event with a nightstick tucked into his cummerbund, had promised to “make Attila the
Hun look like a f—-t,” and he did his best to make good on that.
Rizzo
was, of course, a Democrat for the entirety of his career in office. He made
friends across the aisle in his retirement, but he was a Democrat born in 1920
who joined the police in the 1940s. African Americans already had transferred
their political allegiance from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of
Franklin Roosevelt, but it would still be a few decades before that development
would have its full effect on the internal organization of the Democratic
Party. This was at the time when Lyndon Johnson, later identified with the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, was still campaigning in favor of poll taxes
and voting against anti-lynching
legislation.
Contrary to the popular account of the matter, it is not the case that the two
major political parties “traded places” on the question of civil rights—but it
is the case that the Democratic Party experienced a radical change for the
better, which meant that Democratic mayors such as Frank Rizzo were replaced by
progressives such as Wilson Goode, who became the first black mayor of
Philadelphia.
Of
course, it was the progressive Wilson Goode, and not the atavistic racist Frank
Rizzo, who burned down a poor black neighborhood in Philadelphia after
firebombing the home of a black radical group he had declared a terrorist
organization. MOVE, as the group was known, was a group of neo-primitivist
kooks, which, happily, we don’t have in American politics anymore.
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| Jacob Chansley. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) |
Anyway.
The two
bombs Philadelphia police dropped from helicopters on the MOVE house started a
fire that killed 11 people, five of them children, destroying two city blocks
and leaving hundreds of people homeless. A federal court later determined that
the city had used excessive force in the matter and violated the constitutional
rights of Philadelphia residents, including the right to be free from unreasonable
search and seizure. Which is to say, Wilson Goode did his best to make Frank
Rizzo look like … happily, people don’t really talk like that much
anymore.
Big-city
Democrats just seem to have the worst luck.
The
unhappy metropolis of Louisville, Kentucky, is getting run through it good and
hard just now, and not without good reason. The U.S. Department of Justice has
just released a report that it began compiling after the fatal police shooting
of Breonna Taylor, and the findings are pretty ugly:
The municipal government and the police department “engage in a pattern or
practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution
and federal law,” the DOJ finds. The catalog will not surprise you: racial
discrimination targeting black residents, excessive force, the violation of the
free speech rights of anti-police protesters, and, among the most worrying
items from a strictly procedural point of view, conducting searches based on
invalid warrants.
Louisville
is a city run by progressive Democrats. Since its legal reorganization as
Louisville Metro in a 2003 city-county merger, Louisville has never had
a Republican mayor. In the years before that, you won’t find a Republican mayor
in the city’s recent history: There were a brace of Republican mayors in the
middle-late 1960s, and, before that, you’ll have to go back to William B.
Harrison, elected in 1927, to find a Republican in the top spot. The metro
council has long been Democrat-dominated, with the current party split being 19
Democrats to seven Republicans. These aren’t fringe, backwater Democrats,
either: Democratic mayors of Louisville have gone on to Congress and senior
roles in state government.
There
isn’t a lot of Republican power at the state level in Kentucky, either: Since
the end of World War II, Kentucky has had only three Republican governors and
14 Democrats. When Republicans won a majority in the statehouse in the 2016
election, it was their first time to achieve control of that chamber in 95
years. The Kentucky Democratic Party surely has had its share of Robert
Byrd-type bigots over the years, but they weren’t running things in 2016—or in
the 1990s, when Kentucky gave its presidential electoral votes to Bill Clinton
twice. The share of African Americans on the metro council is higher than the
African American share of the metro population. Louisville had a black police
chief from 2003 until 2011, when he got a better offer from Denver. Interim chief
Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel is black. Deputy chief Paul Humphrey is black. They
have a diversity boss who boasts of “several certifications from Cornell
University in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
And
Louisville isn’t a city that suffered some kind of economic or social
catastrophe, like Detroit. Louisville has a slightly higher median household
income than does Houston or Jacksonville, a slightly higher population share
with bachelors’ degrees than Miami or Phoenix, a lower murder rate than Columbus
or Nashville, a lower unemployment rate than Dallas. Without excusing it,
one could understand that police and other municipal agencies
would be under more stress in a city such as St. Louis, where the murder rate
is four times what it is in Louisville, or Camden, N.J., which has a poverty
rate more than twice that of Louisville. Louisville isn’t an especially
well-off place on most measures, but on most metrics it is closer to Austin
than it is to Detroit.
It’s
just an ordinary, badly governed place—one where the civil rights of residents
are systematically abused, according to the DOJ.
This
isn’t a “Ha, ha, look at those dumb Democrats!” point. It’s a real question:
What do progressive Democrats think it would take to get it right in a place
such as Louisville—a place where Democrats can, as a matter of pure political
power, do pretty much whatever they want?
It isn’t
about money or education—San Francisco is rich and highly educated, and it is a
mess. This isn’t about a black underclass that is cut off from political and
social power: Detroit and Washington both turned into basket-case cities under
largely African American political leadership, Detroit under Coleman Young
(“Aloha, m———–s!”) and Washington under Marion “The Bitch Set Me Up” Barry, who at least had the excuse
of being a genuine crackhead. And there aren’t any very obvious villains in the
story: The current mayor of Louisville isn’t the sort of guy I would vote for,
but he appears to be a bog-standard progressive Democrat of the familiar kind;
his predecessor, the one who was on the job during the Breonna Taylor episode,
was cut from very similar cloth, a green-energy-and-infrastructure guy who got
rid of the naughty statues. Louisville hasn’t been run by orthodox Hayekians,
but it hasn’t been under the heel of Bull Connor, either.
So why
can’t Democrats run the cities that Democrats run?
Partisans
can always tell themselves a nice story about how it’s the other guys’
fault—I’ve heard people blame Ronald Reagan’s presidency for the death of the
automotive industry in Detroit, even though the first of the factories started
closing back when Reagan wasn’t presiding over anything grander than his trailer
back when he was making Bedtime for Bonzo. But it is difficult
to take seriously the argument that the schools in Milwaukee are a mess because
of Republicans, that Philadelphia can’t police its streets because of
Republicans, that San Francisco is an open-air mental ward because of
Republicans, that Louisville is a committed violator of civil rights because of
Republicans. It’s not that Republicans don’t have their own problems—goodness
gracious, yes they do!—but their problems are not Philadelphia’s problems, or
Newark’s or San Francisco’s or Portland’s or Louisville’s.
In the
long term, the contest for dispositive political power in these United States
will be fought in the cities and in the urban inner suburbs—the places where
the people are, where the money is, and where the people and the money are
going. And—more about this later—Republicans are hardly even on the field when
it comes to that fight. Dallas’ current progressive Democrat mayor isn’t the
worst of his kind, but he isn’t so great that he should be running for
reelection unopposed. Yet he is. You could plausibly draw a line
tracing a generally progressive political tendency that held sway in the
Democratic Party from roughly the Lyndon Johnson years to the Barack Obama
years, with Johnson being probably the leftwardmost figure (not as a matter of
cultural affect but as a policy matter, creating Medicare and Medicaid and
signing the major civil rights legislation of the time) and with Bill Clinton
the rightwardmost figure, notwithstanding the intelligent criticism of such
neoconservative-ish Democrats as Daniel Patrick Moynihan. One thing that I
think we could safely say about that model of politics is that it has
demonstrably failed the cities, and, in particular, that it has failed those on
whose behalf and in whose interest urban progressives purport to act, beginning
with the poor and the nonwhite, but also immigrants, criminals attempted to
reenter society, single mothers, and other vulnerable groups. Conservatives
ought to have something to say to those groups, who cannot be entirely satisfied
with the way they are governed today. Conservatives have a great deal to offer
on the policy front.
But what do conservatives say for themselves?
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| Jacob Chansley. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) |
Economics
for English Majors
As a
practical political matter, President Joe Biden’s budget proposal is hardly
worth writing about—it is as dead as fried chicken.
While
the fact that taxing and spending bills are required to originate in the House
of Representatives is today treated as something somewhere between trivia and
quaint formality, the broad spending power still resides in Congress, even if
Congress refuses to engage in the “regular order” process of making a series of
appropriations in discrete bills and instead lurches from crisis to crisis
(hey, remember that debt-ceiling thing?) in a state of permanent emergency.
Even if Republicans were not in control of the House of Representatives,
Biden’s budget would have approximately 0.000 percent chance of making it
through the legislative process in any kind of recognizable form—but, as it
happens, Republicans are in control of the House of Representatives. And you
know what that means: Finally, real fiscal reform under calculating and
cold-eyed Republican leadership.
Just kidding.
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| Jacob Chansley. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) |
Republican
control of the House is going to be a full-employment program for those happy
few lawyers whose names appear between the drug dealers in Hunter Biden’s
contacts list—hooray for investigations!—and, even if there’s no real fiscal
reform under calculating and cold-eyed Republican leadership, Biden’s
priorities are going to be pushing up a whole crop of political daisies
post-haste.
But, if
only as a drawing-room exercise (did the gentry really draw so
much in the past that they needed whole rooms dedicated to drawing?) a few of
Biden’s proposals and assumptions are worth having a little look at.
Biden
says his proposals would reduce the deficit substantially over the coming
decade. And they would—but not by as much as the policies he already has
enacted would increase it. Under the current Congressional Budget Office
baseline projection, federal debt held by the public will hit $43.5 trillion a
decade hence, at the beginning of 2033. Biden’s deficit-reduction measures
(mostly tax increases) would—in theory! in the perfect world in which the plan
was perfectly executed!—knock that down to about $40.6 trillion. But, scoot
back a couple of years from 2033 to the 2030 projection. Why do that? Because
in 2020, just before Joe Biden was elected president, CBO also made some
projections. In that project, CBO estimated that debt held by the public would
hit $31.8 trillion in 2030, but the current CBO projection has that debt hitting
$36.4 trillion in 2030, almost $5 trillion more than in the ten-year projection
from 2020. What happened? A whole bunch of spending, largely at the hands of
Joe Biden’s Democratic allies in Congress with the blessing of Joe Biden. So,
another way of looking at this is that Biden’s proposal would cut the deficit
back $2.9 trillion from a baseline his allies already have increased by almost
$5 trillion. If you had planned to buy yourself a Lamborghini and decided to
settle for a Bentley instead, you didn’t actually save yourself any money. And
that matters if—and this part matters!—you really can’t afford the
Bentley, much less the Lamborghini.
(As
always, don’t just take my word for it: You can look at the numbers yourselves.)
One of
the ways Biden’s hallucinatory budget proposes to reduce the deficit is by
taxing the unrealized capital gains of certain wealthy people. I know that in
the general-readership newspapers, the words “unrealized capital gains” are
where 93.7 percent of people stop reading, but this is The Dispatch,
and I am confident we’ll get through this. A capital gain is just the profit
you make from an investment. If you buy a share of stock for $4 and you sell it
for $5, then you have a $1 capital gain, according to my English-major math. If
you held the investment for less than one year and one day, then that’s a
short-term gain, and you pay the regular income tax on it; if you held the
investment for longer, then that’s a long-term gain, and you get a tax
discount, with the highest rate being 20 percent, as opposed to 37 percent for
ordinary income. (The population notion that people are getting $100 million
investment paydays and then paying essentially no tax is patently false.) In
many cases, that investment will have been funded out of money that you’ve
already paid individual income taxes on: You make $1, pay 37 cents in federal
income tax at the top rate (and a selection of other taxes), save a little of
what’s left, and then pay another 20 percent top rate on whatever investing
your savings earned you, at which point you wonder why you didn’t just use that
money to buy a bass boat, or you join a militia, or something.
(It used
to be that you’d go out and vote Republican, but what’s the point of that?)
The
thing about taxing investment profits is, there have to be investment profits
for the Man to tax. But not if Joe Biden gets his way—and he is not the only
Democrat with this daffy idea. Biden proposes to tax imaginary investment
profits. As you may have heard, the stock market goes up and down.
And, if you are anything like me, you log into your brokerage account every now
and then and say, “Huh, on paper, I made $x today.” And you smile,
and leave a bigger tip than usual after your Denver omelet. And, then, a week
later, you repeat the exercise and say, “Huh, on paper, I lost $y today.”
And then you kick Paul Krugman’s cat. Some of you may even have had the
experience of being rich—on paper. (Lookin’ at you, Bitcon Bob.)
Sometimes, a stock goes nuts or something like that—and, sometimes, the
opposite happens. You know how on those radio ads for dodgy-sounding
investments they always say, “Investing in securities entails the risk of
loss”? That’s because investing in securities entails the risk of loss.
You may think you have made a bundle, but you don’t have jack until you sell
the position and put cashy-money in your bank account. What Biden proposes is
to tax certain people—the evil, evil rich!—whose investments have gone up, as
though it were impossible that these would go down. It is
economically stupid, probably unconstitutional, and 10 other critical things
you could say about it.
More to
the point, it is also cowardice. We have very good reason to think
that the only practical way to fund the Scandinavian-style welfare state
Democrats want is with Scandinavian-style taxes, which mean heavier taxes on
the middle classes and even on lower-income workers. Biden says he wants to
wring money out of the top 0.01 percent of households, but, in truth, those
households don’t have enough taxable income or assets to pay for the things
Democrats want to do—because we already spend literally $112 million an hour
on Medicare—hence the proposal to tax imaginary capital
gains.
In
Other Economic News …
Amazingly,
Biden’s budget was not the dumbest piece of economic thinking I have seen this
week. The dumbest bit comes courtesy of NPR. Give it a read and, if you’re
interested, let me know in the comments why you think I think it is such shoddy
work.
Words
About Words
I
noticed a glorious bit of cultural imperialism. In the Merriam Webster
discussion of the Yiddish word chutzpah, the usage example comes from William
F. Buckley Jr., the most gentile American of the 20th century.
“The turgidity of Clifford’s presentation makes it sadistic to dwell on the analysis, but one must, one absolutely must, since such chutzpah requires recognition.”— William F. Buckley, Aberdeen American News, 12 June 1973
Some
additional wordiness …
An NBC News headline: “‘I’m no mastermind’: George
Santos denies any wrongdoing in ATM fraud scheme.”
About
that, a few thoughts:
Firstly:
Goodness, gracious, George Santos. Enough of you already.
Secondly:
“I’m no mastermind.” No, lil homie, you ain’t.
Thirdly
and more expansively: Scheme is an interesting word. Strictly
speaking, a scheme is just a plan, a detailed course of action
or program, as in its fancier cousin, schematic. But in American
English, scheme has a disreputable connotation. That isn’t the
case in British English, where one may write “Government-backed insurance scheme
to give boost to events industry” without the least suggestion of dastardliness. In the United Kingdom,
a benefits scheme is a welfare program; in the United States, a benefits scheme
is welfare fraud. In British English, a politician might refer to
his own plans as a scheme, whereas in the United States,
a scheme is the other guy’s plan.
A
similar word is regime. Regime comes from a Latin
word that survives in English on its own, regimen, and it means,
simply, rule. A regime or regimen is
often used to refer to a rule that provides some general guidance for a mode of
living, as in an exercise regime or dietary regimen—cf. the Benedictine Rule
(Regula Sancti Benedicti) governing the lives and habits of certain monastic
communities. A regime may also describe, neutrally, a body of regulation, as
in, “From the perspective of
institutional reform, the creation of such a unified systemic risk regulator is
arguably the most significant change under the Dodd-Frank regime.” We could write, without evil
implication, about the current tax regime or the Clean Air Act regime, etc.
But regime has taken on a disreputable connotation when
applied to a particular government: Certain excitable conservatives speak
darkly of the “Biden regime” and thunder about “deep-state servants of the
regime,” etc. Others write about the Putin regime or the Chinese Communist Party
regime as though the word regime did the word of communication
distaste all on its own. Regime in that sense implies a
certain level of authoritarian competence and organization; people did write
about the “Gaddafi regime,” but that wouldn’t come naturally to me, in that
Gaddafi’s government always seemed to me (from the little I know about it) too undisciplined
for the word regime to fit.
Incidentally,
when I Googled “Biden regime,” I got an untrustworthy-sources warning. When I
Googled “Bush regime,” the first thing that came up was the Smithsonian
Institution. The next few hits included the University of Miami and an Orange
County Register headlined, “Bush is still just a war criminal to me.”
But, no, no partisanship in the Google regime!
And
Furthermore …
I’m a big fan of Tucker’s new look. I think it’s the beret.
In Closing
If there is a perfect declaration of cowardice for our time, it is: “You don’t piss off the base.” I would write that I am embarrassed to be in the same profession as these Fox “News” clowns, but I don’t think I am in the same profession. That being said, I am embarrassed to be a member of the same species.
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