Saving Our Cities

During the 60s and 70s many of our cities devolved into cauldrons of crime, poverty, and terror. Heather MacDonald at City Journal argues, in a column that everyone concerned about the poor and the condition of our cities simply must read, that the decay of our communities and the demoralization of our people were not accidents. They were the result of the adoption by policy-makers of a nest of liberal assumptions about human nature and sociology that the experience of three decades of urban life have amply demonstrated to be manifestly false.

MacDonald opens her column with this:

Conservative ideas are responsible for the two great urban-policy successes of the last quarter-century: the breathtaking drops in crime and in welfare dependency since the early 1990s. You’d never know it from members of the opinion elite, however, who have rarely recognized these successes, much less their provenance.

So let’s recapitulate an epic battle about the foundations of social order, a battle that had not just a clear winner but also a clear loser: the liberal policy prescriptions for cities that many opinion makers and politicians still embrace. New York has been at the center of this battle because so many of the bad ideas that wreaked havoc on cities hatched there. Fortunately, so did many of the antidotes.

What were those bad ideas? MacDonald elaborates:

Liberal urban policy was based on several core assumptions. Number One: multigenerational poverty was the result of structural forces—above all, of rapacious capitalism and racism. It could never be the result of bad decision-making or a deficit of personal responsibility. Number Two: though men were still, alas, required for conceiving a child, they were purely optional for raising one. (Corollary: the role of illegitimacy in creating and perpetuating poverty could never be acknowledged.) Number Three: low-wage work was demeaning and pointless. It was better to receive a monthly welfare check than to labor at an entry-level job. Number Four: crime was an understandable and inevitable reaction to economic injustice and discrimination. (Corollary: the police could not lower crime; only government social programs and wealth-redistribution schemes could.)

Together, these four conceits composed the most dangerous idea of all: that the bourgeois values of order, self-discipline, and respect for the law were decorative afterthoughts to prosperity, rather than its very precondition.

In the balance of the essay, which I would love to post in its entirety if only it wouldn't violate blog etiquette, MacDonald talks about how city governments finally realized that ideas that sounded good in college classrooms had failed in the crucible of real life. After billions of dollars were wasted and thousands of lives lost, liberalism was shown to be an utter disaster.

Whatever you had planned for the next five minutes put it on hold, go to the link, and read MacDonald's article. Nothing could better illustrate why conservatives believe liberal nostrums should be avoided like they were carrying HIV.