The City That Democrats Debased

D elegates to the Democratic convention this week will be working inside a security bubble that shields them from the fact that their progressive policies have ruined America’s Second City.

The poet Carl Sandburg called Chicago the “city of big shoulders.” He celebrated how its working-class self-reliance and drive had made it a leader in every industry from meatpacking to railroad construction. In the 1950s, it was known as “the city that works,” with public services that were the envy of the nation. A new slogan for Chicago today, however, might be “the city that people leave.” The four horsemen of urban apocalypse — poverty, high crime rates, oppressive taxation, and horrible public schools — are driving an exodus from the city.

Chicago’s population is now lower than it was 100 years ago. Its population has decreased by 3.8 percent since the 2020 census, which recorded a population of 2,743,000. It is now down another 105,000 people, to 2,638,000. Only San Francisco and Detroit — also poster children for bad governance — have suffered greater population decreases. More than a third of Chicagoans tell pollsters that they would leave if they had the chance.

Major companies, too, are pulling up stakes. In the past two years, Boeing, Caterpillar, Tyson Foods, and Citadel have left. With them have gone hundreds of taxpaying employees and millions in philanthropic dollars. In 2022, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski told the Economic Club of Chicago, “There is a general sense out there that our city is in crisis.”

Things have gotten only worse since then, accelerated by last year’s narrow election of Brandon Johnson, a former lobbyist for the Chicago Teachers Union, as mayor. He heads a coalition that now basically runs the city: teachers’-union members, public employees, DEI activists, corporate-welfare guzzlers, and community organizers. The Chicago Teachers Union is now really feeling its oats with one of their own installed as mayor. In contract negotiations, it is now demanding 9 percent annual raises, housing assistance for teachers and families, and divestment from funds that contribute to climate change. CTU president Stacy Davis Gates says the union wants “$50 billion and three cents.” At the City Club of Chicago in March, when pressed on where the money would come from, she said, “Stop asking that question. Ask another question.” One reason for her reticence to discuss the issue may be that she knows the city is sitting on a public-pension time bomb. An article by University of Chicago’s Center for Effective government notes that the city spent one-fifth of its 2023 budget propping up its four public pension funds.

Mayor Johnson ignores all this. He has never run anything, so he focuses on race politics, espouses an openly Marxist agenda, constantly shifts blame to others for management failures, and pursues policy hobbyhorses that don’t address the city’s real problems.

In June, Johnson issued an executive order creating a task force to report on slavery reparations. “We are going to invest half a million dollars into the study of restoration and reparations for the City of Chicago so that we can begin to move in the direction of complete liberation,” he announced. “It’s important to remember that reparations will not only benefit black people but also the entire neighborhoods in which black people exist. We will create inclusive opportunities so that we all can win. Reparations will ultimately help us build a better, stronger, safer Chicago.” He concluded by saying, “God bless you, and God bless the blackest city in the world, the City of Chicago.”

Johnson was again in front of the microphones this month to announce that a study he had commissioned found that his idea to build three city-owned grocery stores is “necessary, feasible, and implementable.” Because of Chicago’s crime problem, Walmart recently shut four stores. Other stores are limiting the number of carts available to shoppers to prevent them from being used for theft, and pharmacies are locking even more items in cabinets. But it’s not as if Chicagoans cannot find or afford groceries. Federal food stamps are readily available to anyone who earns up to 130 percent of the poverty line. The Greater Chicago Food Depository already provides more than 70 million pounds of food a year through 700 pantries. Johnson’s city-owned food stores would just add another layer of bureaucracy.

Progressives love to talk about the “root causes” of urban decay. The “root causes” of store closures are violent crime, shoplifting, soaring taxes, and increased regulation. These are creating the very “food deserts” that progressives say government must spend oceans of money to provide for. If he really cared about Chicagoans, Mayor Johnson would prosecute criminals, put more police on the street, stop making excuses for looters, and end his lawsuits against carmakers for “making their vehicles too easy to steal.”

As Ronald Reagan said, “Contrary to what we’re told, there are simple solutions to some of our problems. Just not easy ones.”

New York — and, indeed, Chicago — was revitalized in the 1990s. Two noteworthy reforms involved focusing law enforcement on petty crime to send a message that more-significant ones wouldn’t be tolerated, and treating businesses as job providers rather than as cows to be milked.

Will Chicago relearn those lessons in time?

Few expect any course corrections in the short term. “Everyone and everything in life serves a purpose,” Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, told me. “In Chicago’s case, one of its current purposes is to serve as a bad example warning others not to do the same things.”

If Democratic delegates want to learn why they are losing support among working-class and minority voters, they should get out of their convention bubble and look around Chicago. They might learn some things that aren’t in their party’s platform but on the minds of the citizens they are appealing to.