YOU BLACK? A DEMOCRAT? SUCKER! WANT TO RAISE YOUR POLITICAL IQ? BECOME A CONSERVATIVE

Liz,

There is some statistical evidence that crime rates are up in all cities, regardless of who they are run by, but they are still below the crime rates of a decade or two ago, for example when Rudy was running the Big Apple.

Could the recent increase (including to some extent the recent rioting and looting) have anything at all to do with Trump’s comparatively terrible handling of the (now out of control) pandemic and the corresponding economic collapse which hit low income city folks (often people of color) particularly hard? What is that old saying about the simplest explanation probably being the one staring you in the face? What is that old military thing about the guy in charge ultimately being accountable for the downste effects of his actions and inactions? But yah, could be the 250 year old institution of public schools, not just a president who fans the flames when he that compares the deaths of black men and women to the equivalent of chocking on a golf putt, could it? Could be that simple could it?

Liz,

A few facts that I don’t think are much in dispute:

1. Republican mayors of big cities have become kind of rare these days.

2. Crime has generally gone down in all cities beginning in the 1990’s.

3. Homicides have increased in big cities this year, the spike is similar in smaller cities run by Republican mayors such a Tulsa, OK.

4. City mayors actually legally have less direct power to control crime in most states than people might think. Cities in and of themselves have no inherent authority. They are creatures of state law and are incorporated by the state. Cities cannot run deficits. They are “cities”, not “city states”. In most ways that matter, the POTUS actually has more effective power over the things that cause crime (gun control, poverty, immigration, A NATIONAL HEALTH AND ECONOMIC RESPONSE TO A PANDEMIC, etc.) than the mayors do.

5. The more local the government is, the less that it is actually ideologically partisan. During my last year of law school, I exturned as a paid law clerk for the Jefferson County attorney’s office In Alabama. After law school, I represented a city, a small suburb of Birmingham, AL in various forms of legal counsel from tort litigation to imminent domain. I just don’t remember anyone with a particularly partisan ideology. At that level, the political issues and differences are less ideologically abstract and more practical. This kind of partisan politicization of blame shifting and credit taking just doesn’t occur at the city level. People generally just blame or credit the individual elected officials. I can tell you that when it comes to dealing with public worker’s unions and workers rights, mayors tend to govern more like Republicans than Democrats. (Do you know how hard it is to fire an incompetent city employee? I do because I’ve helped do it and I didn’t even know their politics). People care more about potholes than political parties.

6. Crime rates are fueled by Long building economic problems that have little to do with simply proclaiming “law and order”. Deindustrialization and white flight allowed by trains and highways drove urban blight (and thus crime) more than who gets the most tough on crime in inner cities. For example, half of Detroit’s labor force was unemployed during the worst point in the pandemic.

7. Republicans are denying aid to cities just when they are bankrupting due to the Pandemic. In other words, Trump screwed up the national pandemic response and now he’s blaming the cities for the problems he caused while doing nothing to ameliorate their problems. As one expert put it, “If you want order, it helps to keep government working.” Through his incompetence, Trump lit the economic match that has some parts of some cities burning and now he’s dumping gas on the fire by blaming all the locals. Don’t send in American war fighting forces to kill their own citizens (killing is what we train to do right?) ad Cadet Bone Spur keeps proposing. Just send some aid during an international health emergency.

Liz,

I honestly don’t know what “defunding the police” means, except that it is something that some on the extreme Left have been saying, although how that is actually defined seems to depend greatly on whom you talk to. We can go mayor by mayor if you want to, but I see very little Democratic political consensus to get rid of the police, just reform them in the face of numerous riot inducing tragedies. Joe Biden has specifically said on numerous occasions that he does not support defunding the Police. It sounds like a disingenuously or oped up straw man. I don’t think it will work on most people, especially when they look at Trump’s daily acts of corruption and lawlessness. (The latest is that, at risk of committing a felony, Trump is encouraging his supporters to vote twice).

Regardless, I feel absolutely no need to defend every crackpot thing the extreme Left does anymore than you should feel the need to defend the words and actions of White Supremacists on the extreme Right. As I have said, I am an Independent who has voted for individuals from both Parties.

Everything that I have read in a free press (or as Trump calls them, “The Enemy of the People”) is that crime is spiking everywhere, red and blue, all over the country in Trump’s America, but crime is still lower than the gang crime heydays of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Feel free to correct my understanding with real data if you can find it. Should Democratic Mayors get credit for that overall historic decrease if they are to take the blame for a recent spike? Possibly, but we all seem to agree that there are bigger national and international causes here that have little to do with any governor or mayor, much less their political party affiliation.

As far as the response to the pandemic, this is more akin to being attacked by an enemy at a national level. Certainly, we have a right to be critical of local officials for their mistakes or for not following a national strategy, but Trump doesn’t have a strategy and when his scientists try to come up with one, he goes against it. This leaves local officials, red and blue, constantly flailing to keep up with changing political whims of the national leadership in a national crisis. For example, in my deep red state, the governor admitted to making mistakes by not taking the pandemic seriously enough early on. Since then (and in spite of Trump), he has been lead by the science to take aggressive action (especially for Mississippi) and our COVID numbers that were spiking are starting to level off. He has also been very transparent about the data and honest about what it means in a poor state with extreme poverty in the predominantly black regions that have been effected worst. In other words, unlike your title above Tom, he hasn’t patronized black Democrats in the cities and the Delta areas by just calling them stupid negro “suckers”. He has instead worked with all his constituencies to try to save lives with the resources he has and with a lot of ideological blowback, particularly from his right flank.

There is a reason why most blacks are Democrats that goes back to the Civil Rights era and has been reinforced by the Republican Southern Strategy and more recently by “surgically calculated” Republican voter suppression efforts. Trotting out virtually every single black Republican at the Convention doesn’t really change that historical distrust. Look up the term “moral licensing” to see how this kind of self delusion works, or as Trump said of one of his few regular black attendees at his predominantly white rallies, “Where’s my black man?”

Perhaps it’s who I hang out with, but my friends who happen to be black here in the South tend to be deeply religious. I’ve been told that this isn’t uncommon in the black southern culture where everyone has had a Mom or an Auntie who drags them to church. This should mean that my friends actually should be natural conservative Republicans, but mostly I have no idea what their political leanings are.

When black southern folks do publicly lean Republican based upon their Christian moral sentiments (Sen. Tim Scott comes to mind), they spend all their time defending the worst racist aspects of a planned and coordinated Republican race baiting and dog whistling strategy, such as most of what comes out of Donald J. Trump mouth and Tweet hole.

“You speak of the Southern Strategy, a myth.”

Look up this guy:

“He is telling people that they can go to the polls and vote if their vote was not received in the mail.“

If you send in a vote by mail and then got to the polls and try to vote again, regardless of whether your first vote has been received or tabulated yet, then that is attempting to vote twice. Even attempting to vote twice is a Class 1 Felony in NC. In other words, our lawless president is encouraging his voters to commit a crime (which in itself is a crime). This is true regardless of how easy it is for the system to catch double voters and discard their second vote. Period.

Sorry, wrong link. This should be the infamous Lee Atwater recording: