We’re in a gloomy mood over here in the Windy City.
Jonathan Martin has written a column over at Politico asking the same question I’ve been hammering on relentlessly since at least April of last year: “Between Protests and a Rookie Mayor, Is Chicago Ready for the DNC?” If you’re familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines or my written corpus to date, you already know the answer is “No.” And it’s primarily because of the unique combination of malevolence and incompetence embodied by Mayor Brandon Johnson. Some excerpts:
There’s already a joke going around Democratic strategist circles that the main difference between 2024 and 1968 is that the Chicago mayor this year will be on the side of the protesters, not the cops. [. . .]
“If there’s any mayor that understands the value of protest and demonstration, it’s me,” Johnson told reporters earlier this week at a groundbreaking, dismissing a question about Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) concerns over unrest in the city during the convention. Johnson said, “Without protests and real demands of a government, people of color and women do not have a place in society.”
More striking was how Johnson responded to whether he thought it was appropriate for police to have been dispatched last weekend to a protest at one of Chicago’s art museums. He spoke in a detached manner — the museum “made that request and the police department reacted,” the mayor said — evading the question and leaving the impression he somehow wasn’t in charge of the city and its police department.
I don’t know how many times I can keep explaining this to people (I tried again the other day), but the reason Brandon Johnson acts like the police should or do not exist is because Brandon Johnson genuinely loathes them, and takes the side of protesters (or violent youth mobs, for that matter) reflexively. So many seem to have this default expectation that big-city mayors — particularly in Chicago, with its modern “Daley machine” tradition — will be “realist” in their orientation, so they can’t quite reckon with what they’re dealing with in Johnson. He is a true believer, all the way to wrack and ruin. He’d rather see the city burn than find himself on the wrong side of “the masses in the streets.” It’s his animating political impulse, beyond all else (including civic order). He is the final bloom of a long-germinating activist corpse flower, grown over an entire generation of radical inculcation. And he is our mayor.
So we’re in a gloomy mood over here in the Windy City. I fear what is coming will end up having been the most predictable civic disaster in American history next to the (still-to-come, but it is coming) collapse of the Social Security system. This morning, a friend of mine contributed to the zeitgeist by sending me this piece of good news from CBS Chicago: “Shortage of Police Officers Draws Concerns with Summer, DNC Coming Up.”
And next to it, he sent me an image of a movie poster adding the only commentary necessary: Get Out.