How Liberalism Has Failed America

President Trump has found himself under attack from the PC police and the mainstream media for referring to the district of Congressman Elijah Cummings as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” The President also claimed that “no human being would want to live there.” His critics tried to paint him as a racist, as his tweet directed at the African-American Cummings came just two weeks after suggesting that the four progressive, minorit Democratic Congresswomen known as “the Squad” to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”  While all four Congresswomen belong to minority groups, only one of them came to the United States from another country (Ilhan Omar).  President Trump’s tweet towards Cummings came as a counterpunch following Cummings’s behavior during a Congressional hearing on the situation at the border. In addition to representing one of the most Democratic districts in the United States and the state of Maryland, Cummings serves as chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Responding to President Trump, Cummings stressed “it is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch.”

In terms of median income, Maryland’s 7^th Congressional District actually secures a spot in the top 50 percent of all 435 districts in the United States.  However, that does not tell the entire story.  According to CBS News, Baltimore had the third highest violent crime rate in the country; behind only St. Louis and Detroit. As for President Trump’s claim that “no human being would want to live there,” 50 years’ worth of census data proves him correct.  In 1950, Baltimore reached a peak population of 949,708.  Maryland’s largest city has done nothing but hemorrhage people ever since.  At the 2010 census, Baltimore had a population of 620,961. 

In addition to the statistical evidence, anecdotal evidence also proves that President Trump might not have missed the mark in his descriptions of Baltimore. Kimberly Klacik of the Baltimore County Republican Central Committee appeared on “Fox & Friends” Saturday, where she called Cummings’s district “the most dangerous district in America.” For the record, Baltimore County does not include the City of Baltimore, which enjoys a status as an “independent city.” Klacik’s appearance on “Fox & Friends” appears to have led President Trump to send out the tweets. Klacik has numerous videos of the trash and decay plaguing West Baltimore on her Twitter account; some of which President Trump has retweeted.

In response to the President’s tweets, the media and the left have tried to argue that President Trump did not just insult Cummings but the people of his district as well.  Maryland’s 7^th Congressional District has a narrow African-American majority.  Maybe it never occurred to the media and the left that President Trump’s tweets took aim at the conditions of the district, not the people of the district. Besides, Democrats have no business lecturing anyone about civility when their standard bearer referred to half of President Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”

Video evidence shows a politician on the other side of the aisle agreeing with President Trump about Baltimore’s rat problem: former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh.  A Fox 45 report featured Pugh touring dilapidated row houses in Baltimore; making comments like “we should just take all this sh** down” and “Whoa, you can smell the rats.” Bernie Sanders once compared Baltimore to a “third world country,” yet no one has called him a racist.

President Trump also went after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Twitter.  He asked “has anyone seen what is happening to Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco,” before adding “it is not even recognizeable (sic) lately. Something must be done before it is too late.” While President Trump did not get specific in explaining the problems of San Francisco, I will. Like Cummings, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi represents one of the most Democratic districts in one of the most Democratic states.  President Trump received less than 10 percent of the vote in California’s 12^th Congressional District, which has a median income of more than $111,000.  Based on median income, Pelosi’s district sounds like a paradise…in theory. In reality, San Francisco has well-documented problems with crime and homelessness.  The San Francisco Chronicle reported that more than 31,000 “smash and grab” robberies took place in the city in 2017. While reporting on the epidemic of robberies in San Francisco, “Inside Edition” had thousands of dollars worth of equipment stolen from their crew car.  San Francisco has become so filthy that fictional obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk would want to pack up and move out.  Human waste and hypodermic needles have become as synonymous with San Francisco as the Golden Gate Bridge and Fisherman’s Wharf.  President Trump might want to send out a more detailed tweet talking about how Nancy Pelosi has done nothing for her “poop-infested” district.  While President Trump’s critics will have a hard time calling President Trump a racist for criticizing Pelosi, they will surely call him sophomoric for using the word “poop.” Expect them to throw in the “sexist” or “misogynist” label as well.

President Trump might also want to raise awareness about the deteriorating quality of life in a majority-white Congressional district represented by a white male who has jumped on the impeachment bandwagon.  Oregon’s 3^rd Congressional District contains most of the city of Portland and voted against President Trump by a margin of nearly 50 points.  President Trump would certainly have it correct if he claimed that “no human being would want to live there.” At least, “no human being” who voted for Trump would want to.  Portland has basically become the Antifa Capital of America.  Back in October, Antifa protesters accosted an elderly man as he drove through the streets of downtown Portland.  The protesters had gathered to express their outrage at the death of an African-American man the week before.  Just last month, Antifa protesters assaulted conservative journalist Andy Ngo; leaving him with a black eye and a brain hemorrhage.  Yet, people see President Trump as a threat to the First Amendment.   In response to Antifa, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler appears to have embraced the Stephanie Rawlings-Blake approach.  In other words, he seems to agree with the former Baltimore Mayor’s belief in the importance of giving “those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.” Fortunately, Senators Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy have introduced legislation that would classify the group as a domestic terrorist organization. Their decision may come as a shock to CNN personalities such as Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, who have acted as the radical leftist group’s PR firm.

As all of these anecdotes demonstrate, liberalism has failed America’s major cities. Yet, the residents of these cities continue to vote Democratic; often furnishing the votes required to carry Democratic candidates over the finish line in their respective states. San Francisco and Baltimore have not had Republican mayors since the 1960s while Portland has not had a Republican mayor since 1980.  Baltimore voted against President Trump by a margin of nearly 75 points.

Liberals would point to their support for a $15 an hour minimum wage as evidence that they care about people. While a $15 an hour minimum wage might sound good in theory, it does not work out that well in practice.  Just look at the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, one of the most vocal advocates for a $15 an hour minimum wage, who did not even pay his own workers that much.  Ironically, when he agreed to raise his employees’ wages, he ended up cutting their hours.  Apparently, Sanders fails to realize that cutting back on worker’s hours, in addition to reducing the number of workers in general, will become commonplace across America the second a $15 minimum wage becomes the law of the land.

Liberals play the race card when President Trump dares to bring up the obvious fact that liberal government and the War on Poverty have failed to lift urban America out of poverty. Perhaps they feel that by calling President Trump a racist, the people in America’s inner cities will not notice that the out of wedlock birth rates in the African-American community have exploded from 24 percent in 1965 to 64 percent in 1990.  Like it or not, having children out of wedlock often serves as a prescription for poverty.  Appearing on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, who spent much of his adult life in Baltimore, cited a poverty study from the Brookings Institution listing “three things a person could do to reduce the likelihood of poverty to two percent or less: Number one, finish high school; number two, get married, number three, wait until you’re married to have children.”

In other words, the resurrection of America’s major cities can only occur alongside the reemergence of bourgeois culture.  Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego discussed bourgeois culture in an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.”  As I pointed out during one of my very first blog posts, “The article argues that many of the country’s social and economic problems, including the opioid crisis, the epidemic of inner city violence, and low labor-force participation, stem from the breakdown of bourgeois culture.”  I listed some of the examples of the ideas that dominated the bourgeois culture: “getting married before having children, respecting authority and avoiding substance abuse and crime.”  I mentioned above how the consequences of substance abuse and crime loom large in San Francisco while the concept of “respecting authority” appears foreign to the Antifa thugs who have unleashed a reign of terror in Portland and those dousing New York City police officers with water. 

Wax and Alexander argued that “Restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture will require the arbiters of culture – the academics, media, and Hollywood – to relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden.” No one needs to hear that message more than Al Sharpton, who has made a career out of “multicultural grievance polemics.”

The “multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden,” in addition to the promotion of the principles of the cultural revolution that replaced bourgeois culture, have undoubtedly failed America’s major cities. Restoring bourgeois culture serves as an important step in the battle to Make America Great Again.  While liberals will surely paint my desire to return to bourgeois culture as a “dog whistle” to those hoping to restore the racial segregation that defined some parts of America in the original age of bourgeois culture, Wax and Alexander pointed out that “steady improvements for women and minorities were underway even when bourgeois norms reigned. Banishing discrimination and expanding opportunity does not require the demise of bourgeois culture.” All big cities, regardless of their racial compositions, should give bourgeois culture a chance.  To paraphrase President Trump, “what the hell do you have to lose?”