LIBERALISM’S WRECKAGE

There’s a sure-fire way to get a laugh when speaking anywhere outside the Beltway: mention Mayor Marion Barry and the city of Washington, D.C. Calling Barry “mayor for life” draws a chuckle. Boisterous laughter erupts when you declare crime is down 23 percent in D.C. this year — and that’s just in the mayor’s office. (Any fabricated percentage will do, since it’s a joke.) The biggest laugh comes in response to an old Leno or Letterman jibe that Barry established a political first when he was last inaugurated: He’s the first political figure ever to ride to his swearing-in in a limousine whose license plates he made.

Okay, those aren’t the wittiest jokes ever, but the point is people always laugh at them. What exactly are they laughing at? I think two things. One is the pathetic racial politics that elevated Barry to the mayor’s office, then brought him back again after his drug bust. The other is the appalling condition of American cities like Washington. Things are so egregiously bad in D.C., from schools that open three weeks late to the absence of snow removal, that it’s funny. David Frum, for example, says Washington is halfway to the libertarian paradise of no taxes and no government services. Taxes remain, but services are virtually gone.

Washington has all the characteristics of a laboratory of liberalism. The 30-year experiment has produced swollen welfare rolls, a mammoth but ineffective bureaucracy, a dwindling police force, a high crime rate, breathtakingly bad schools, crumbling infrastructure, high taxes coupled with a shriveling tax base, a shrinking private sector, white and black flight to the suburbs, and race-based politics. There’s not much to like. As a young reporter in Washington in the late ’60s, I went to places in Washington at night that I wouldn’t visit during the day now. I’m like others from the Washington suburbs. As Fred Siegel notes in his account of urban collapse in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, most of us suburbanites in the Washington area insist we’re from Virginia or Maryland, not D.C.

The story Siegel tells brilliantly in The Future Once Happened Here is compelling and sad. Cities thrived until everything changed in the 1960s. The immigrant model for advancing in America “was not just modified but completely abandoned,” writes Siegel, a history professor at Cooper Union and a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, the New Democrat think tank. No longer were the urban poor, now mostly black and Hispanic, expected to work hard and follow a reasonably disciplined lifestyle and in return be guaranteed a decent life. They were encouraged to go on welfare rather than take “dead end” jobs. When they committed crimes, it wasn’t their fault. If poverty persisted, white racism was the cause. A “politics that promoted separatism in the name of reducing racial separation” was encouraged. Federal aid was aggressively pursued. When private-sector jobs vanished, they were replaced by “public service” employment or the dole. And what Siegel calls ” dependent individualism” became a way of life, combining the absolute right to any lifestyle, however bizarre or self-destructive, with “an equally fundamental right to be supported at state expense.”

The result: scary, unlivable cities. Yet many liberals remain in a state of denial. To them, the failure of lavish government spending only means more money was required in the first place. The persistence of poverty is proof white racism was even more deeply rooted than they had suspected. As for the power of economic growth to improve lives, they’re scornful. “In the topsy- turvy world of New York City politics, the 1970s, when the Bronx burned and the city almost went bankrupt, are remembered fondly as an era of federal support,” Siegel says. “By contrast, the boom of the 1980s, when minority families made major gains in income, was decried . . . as the decade of greed because federal subsidies failed to keep pace with the city’s exploding budget.”

Siegel marshals all the numbers of decline and decay in New York, Washington, and other cities. After World War II, New York had 1 million manufacturing jobs and 250,000 people on welfare. “Today the numbers are roughly reversed: New York has 1.1 million people on one form of public assistance or another and fewer than 300,000 manufacturing jobs.” It’s clear when welfare exploded. The rolls grew by 47,000 from 1945 to 1960, then by more than 200,000, to 538,000, by 1965. In the next six years, welfare jumped by 630,000, and “the character of the city [was] fundamentally transformed,” Siegel writes.

If anything, Washington became worse off. “We can measure the fate of American liberalism by the distance between the high hopes raised by the promise of home rule in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s and the current disdain for the District and its government,” according to Siegel. Barry is the elected leader, but the city is mostly run by an unelected control board. The population is falling rapidly, the result these days of black flight to the suburbs. Once Washington’s “shadow senator,” Jesse Jackson has returned to Chicago. Between 1982 and 1992, Siegel points out, the number of public- housing units stayed the same, while the housing department doubled in staff and its budget nearly quadrupled. Meanwhile, there was one exception to the surging municipal employment — the cops. Their budget shrank.

In Los Angeles, the situation is better, but the interrelated problems of the police and race await solution. “Among the largest cities, L.A. has both the busiest and the smallest force, in terms of the police-to-population ratio,” Siegel notes. So to maintain control in high-crime areas — and to protect themselves — the police act brutally. Though an ex-cop, former mayor Tom Bradley, a sweet-tempered liberal, didn’t understand what was going on. Just before the 1992 riot, he proposed to cut the undermanned police force by 7 percent. After the riot, “the romanticization of the rioters by multiculturalists in the media and would-be black radicals” widened the psychological distance between blacks and whites. In the largely white San Fernando Valley, a movement to secede from L.A. burgeoned.

For all the horrors, there’s some good news. Siegel says he’s optimistic. In 1993, Republican mayors were elected in New York and L.A. Rudy Giuliani, by controlling spending and facing down racial racketeers, has palpably changed New York. Richard Riordan has spearheaded the economic revival in Los Angeles. Washington? Well, maybe the control board will get things under control. But the battle for the cities is hardly won, Siegel says.

In New York, a constituency for reforming the bloated city government and streamlining the economy is absent. In L.A., Riordan balked at changing the city’s mindset on race. Had he supported the California Civil Rights Initiative last year, he could have established “a transtribal ethic for his fractious metropolis,” Siegel argues. Heaven knows, L.A. and every other city needs one.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.