The Baltimore Spring
1st May 2015
The government of Egypt is composed of Egyptians, and of Egyptians who are not starkly different in terms of class or creed from ordinary citizens. Yet these Egyptians do not know how to provide adequate education, jobs, health care, or decent housing for large numbers of citizens. They do not know how to balance the budget or curb corruption or pay for the pension obligations they have amassed. Above all, they do not know how to create a sense of confidence, loyalty, and community between those who govern and those who are governed despite at least rudimentary forms of accountability. And they do not know how to control the police.
The municipal government of Baltimore is composed of normal people from Baltimore, and both the present and previous democratically elected Mayors of the city are black women. Three of the past four Mayors have been black. Much of the city council and school board is composed of black members, too—as is about 40 percent of the police force. Yet these leaders do not know how to deliver quality education to the children of the city, especially those from poorer families. They don’t know how to deal with anxiety-ridden children growing up without a father, amid neighborhoods infested with gangs. They don’t know how to provide adequate nutrition to children so that they are ready to learn in school. They don’t know how to make landlords paint their lower-rent properties so that little kids like Freddie Gray don’t eat lead paint chips, or how to make heroin-addicted mothers (like Freddie Gray’s mother) sweep the floors to prevent their kids from eating lead paint chips. They don’t know how to control the trade in illegal drugs (Freddie, at age 25, had been arrested 22 times for drug-related crimes), to balance a budget, to pay pension obligations, to inspire confidence—or to control the police. You need not have watched The Wire to know all this, but it certainly would have helped.
What am I trying to say here? Simply this: Cairo and Baltimore suffer from serious structural social dysfunctions. The problems in each are not the same, but both sets of problems have multiple and compound sources that are varied, engrained, poorly understood for the most past, and largely immune to fast-working policy fixes from on high. Leaders cope with problems if they can, manage them if they are very lucky; they cannot solve them, either because they lack the power, or because they don’t know how, or both.
Lessons from Baltimore:
- Don’t live in a city that has a large number of black Underclass in it.
- Don’t live in a city run by Democrats.
- Avoid any combination of 1 and 2.
May 1st, 2015 at 17:26
Are there any cities run by Republicans that have large populations of blacks, underclass or other?
May 3rd, 2015 at 03:48
A large black population tends to preclude Republican governance. This is the result of the Great Pivot where the Peter Pan Party went from being the party of Jim Crow to being the party of Victim’s Rights, and their new clients allowed their forgetfulness to be bought.