I was doing a thought experiment on what the future of the blue states and in particular the blue cities would look like. Until recently I assumed that once the Democrats were securely in charge of Washington DC that they’d finally rein in the mayhem and begin to reassert law and order in the cities like New York and Chicago that they rule over.
But I was completely wrong about that. The recent mayoral election in Chicago and the prosecution for manslaughter of the Marine who attempted to stop an unhinged homeless man from assaulting old women on a New York City subway car illustrate the stabilization of the new normal in these places. Soros funded prosecutors in both cities allow black criminals to escape without indictment for charges that have included murder. While self-defense has now been criminalized in the case where the defendant is white.
If we extrapolate these practices going on indefinitely and try to predict the outcome for these places, I feel we can make some assumptions.
First off, it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that relatively soon anyone with a family will decide to leave these cities. And this won’t just include upper- and middle-class white families. Basically, anyone who has the wherewithal will be trying to find a refuge away from the multitude of problems that these cities pose for children. After all violence is only the worst of the problems. Other major issues are the abysmal school systems, crumbling infrastructure, disappearing retail stores, endemic crime, skyrocketing taxes, fear of real estate price collapse and disappearing job market.
So, the cities will lose the majority of their middle-class residents. And with the recent flight to remote workers, many of the biggest corporations are moving their headquarters and other locations out of the cities. I think the template for what this will create is Detroit. This was a major American city that allowed crime to destroy the wealth and importance it once had.
Detroit had an entrenched monopoly on one of the largest industrial sectors of the United States economy, the automobile manufacturing industry. But by allowing crime to destabilize the environment it imploded. It went from a population in 1950 of 1,850,000 to less than 650,000 today. That’s a loss of 65% of its population. And currently the city is a shambles with crumbling infrastructure and wide areas abandoned to such an extent that woods have grown up swallowing streets and houses in their path. More than half the residents do not pay their real estate taxes and the city’s finances and politics are reminiscent of a third world country. And horrendous crime rates have never been brought under control.
Now imagine this situation spreading to most of the large American cities. Just think if every large metropolitan area from Washington DC to Boston becomes like Detroit. It’s really not so hard to imagine. DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Camden, Newark and a few other major population centers are already halfway along to Detroit status. It won’t take much more ruin to finish them off. And when New York city really hits the skids that will be one hell of a corpse.
And that is basically what the George Floyd revolution has brought. In the same way that the civil rights riots of the 1960s killed Detroit so will the 2020 riots finish off the rest of these cities. The next question is what happens to the areas outside of the cities? Currently the Biden administration is continuing the Obama policy of moving the inner city poor out into the suburbs. In effect they’re attempting to metastasize the inner-city cancer to the rest of the country. And now with the immigrant invasion they’d like to supercharge the problem.
But I think there is a limit to this process and possibly the red state governments will take some steps to limit the damage. I’ll take an optimistic stance on how this will play out. I will speculate that as the decay of the cities proceeds the red states will take charge of these failed cities and strip them of self-governance and attempt to rehabilitate them. How I see that happening is the idea that these corrupt failed city governments will be guilty of civil rights violations by not providing competent criminal justice services such as impartial police and courts. In addition, by forcing the inhabitants to work for their relief checks they can limit their free time and the amount of criminal activity they get into.
Basically, these cities will be turned into detention centers to quarantine them from rest of the state. School and work opportunities could be organized by the state government with the prospect of weaning the inhabitants from this dysfunctional existence and hopefully one day restoring these areas to a more normal existence. But it will probably take a century to make that happen.
In the meantime, these areas will continue under competent law enforcement and the chaotic and violent existence that we are now seeing played out in the various blue cities won’t become the rule in the red states.
Now I don’t kid myself that this will happen easily. Red state cities like St Louis and Houston will need to be tamed and brought back to law and order. That will only happen when these states decide that lawlessness won’t be allowed to destroy the urban centers inside their boundaries.
And I don’t doubt that this will be complicated when the federal government attempts to stop this process of fixing these cities. They have intentionally exacerbated these problems. They won’t easily allow their sabotage to be undone.
But as I said I’m choosing the optimistic path for this essay. It’s also possible that the red states will fail to solve this problem. Then that leads to a different model, Brazil.