"Democrats begin their four-day national convention Monday in the city that perhaps best exemplifies the chasm between their party's dreamy policy rhetoric and grim real-world results," writes Reason's long-time editor Matt Welch.
The tragedy is that the "grim reality" of life in Chicago wasn't always true. Chicago was never a paradise, but thanks to the iron-fisted rule of Mayor Richard J. Daley, it was a livable city.
"The city that works" wasn't the ironic joke that it is today. At one time in the post-war period, Chicago was the mercantile center of the world. Carl Sandurg's "Hog Butcher to the World" was only a small part of Chicago's economic engine. Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, and Walgreens used to be three of the top 5 retail companies in America. The Chicago Board of Trade (now CME) dominated markets worldwide.
The city's racial and ethnic tensions were swept under the rug with the help of the Chicago police who paid little attention to constitutional niceties in keeping the peace. The city's politics were corrupt, the politicians were venal, and the racial divisions were sharply defined.
Did the city need reforming? Absolutely. However, efforts to reform the city devolved into a race to divide the spoils between ever-more grasping and conniving minority groups. The ideas of the "reformers" centered on making sure blacks, Hispanics, and others with their hands out got a share of the goodies. The city went to hell while ethnic and racial politicians squabbled over scraps.
Related: John Fetterman: The Last Classic Liberal in the Democratic Party
Chicago is a failed city. It hasn't failed because of the two-party system letting voters down. It has failed because of one-party rule. And that party is the Democrats.
Illinois, where Democrats control the governorship and a two-thirds majority of the legislature, lost "an estimated $3.6 billion in income tax revenue in 2022 alone, a year the net loss of 87,000 residents subtracted $9.8 billion in adjusted gross income," syndicated columnist and Illinois native George Will observed last week. "In the past six years, $47.5 billion [adjusted gross income] has left.…Illinois leads the nation in net losses of households making 200,000 or more."
Why would Democrats hold their convention in a city that serves as a painful reminder of their catastrophic policy failures, not to mention their cynical manipulations of race, class, sexual preference, and gender?
First and foremost, Democrats know that few "journalists" will make the connection between the glitzy, gaudy Democratic National Convention and the reality just outside the door of the United Center. But beyond that, it's what Harris tried to say in one of her classic word salads about why we should spend trillions of dollars more on cockamamie plans, like $25,000 for first-time home buyers and going after invisible "price gougers."
"What we're doing in terms of the [first-time homebuyer] tax credits, we know that there's a great return on investment," Harris asserted in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. "When we increase home ownership in America, what that means in terms of increasing the tax base, not to mention property tax base, what that does to fund schools—again, return on investment.
For the last few years, Democrats have been substituting the word "investment" for "government spending."
The bigger mystery has been why the Democratic Party would choose such a metaphorically dicey backdrop. But an answer begins to suggest itself amid the banal dystopia of the DNC's endless security checkpoints, concrete barriers, and battalions of police officers separating America's political class from its serfs. Democrats chose Chicago for a similar reason that Harris chose a running mate with a particularly awful record during the pandemic- and riot-scarred year of 2020: Because they, like their candidate, know that, contra Harris' assertion Sunday in Pennsylvania, the people who talk about policy—whether politician, journalist, or political consumer—almost never "critically evaluate how you measure the return on investment."
How would you measure the "return on investment" for the billions of dollars spent on McCormick Place, the site of most convention business you don't see on TV? Built in 1960, McCormick Place has been expanded over and over again "despite a time of market oversupply and conventioneering decline."
"Over and over, Chicago and Illinois public officials and a roster of consultants promised that a bigger McCormick Place would yield hundreds of thousands of new convention attendees and billions in new spending and public revenues," Heywood Sanders wrote in his 2014 book, "Convention Center Follies." "Those repeated promises have proved false, the consultant projections unmet."
How's that for a "return on investment," Kamala?
