Liars: How Progressives Exploit Our Fears for Power and Control Read online

  Detroit can’t provide public services or pay its bills. There are more than one hundred thousand different city creditors owed a staggering $20 billion (that’s $25,000 per resident). The city has long held the unenviable title of Murder Capital of America, although it has recently lagged behind such other progressive bastions as Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

  In May 2015, Detroit’s unemployment rate was 13.1 percent, mercifully down from 18.6 percent in May 2013, but it remained twice the national average. Pamela Moore, president and CEO of Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation, said:

  We know that the unemployment rate is at least double, perhaps triple the 13.1 percent reported for Detroit. The rate does not include those who are no longer seeking employment or receiving unemployment benefits. Recent research . . . indicated that there were 175,000 Detroiters in the labor pool who were not working and are not actively seeking a job. The number of jobs available is growing, but businesses are looking for employees who are ready to work and skilled.

  Ready to work and skilled? Unfortunately, that does not exactly describe every Detroiter. In 2011, the National Institute for Literacy reported that a shocking forty-seven percent of adult Motor City residents were functional illiterates. But it gets even worse. The Detroit Regional Workforce Fund reports that half of that forty-seven percent who are illiterate hold high school degrees. Too bad they can’t read them.

  What’s Detroit like beyond the depressing statistics? What are the little details of life within the city limits of America’s progressive poster child? Here are a few examples, from a friend’s personal experiences.

  It’s a beautiful sunny day outside a major league ballpark. You pull into a nearby parking lot for an afternoon of peanuts, popcorn, and Cracker Jack with your family. But before you get any further, you see an object glistening in the gravel below. You bend down and retrieve something. A live round of ammunition. That’s a ball game in Detroit.

  On a trip to church, you drive past block after block of nothingness. No houses. Nothing. Once people lived here, businesses functioned, neighborhoods thrived. Now there’s nothing. And when you get there, before you are greeted by an usher or a clergyman, a guard—a very necessary guard—patrolling the parking lot salutes you. That’s Easter Sunday morning in Detroit.

  You visit the Detroit Public Library. A staffer retrieves a roll of microfilm for you, and you head for the reader. The machine’s turning mechanism is broken and held together by tiny bars of scrap metal that are in turn held together by wire. You look at it and think this looks like nothing you’ve seen in a normal American library. Is this America? you silently ask yourself. And then the horrible thought: This is how they hold things together in Cuba. This is Cuba. That’s academic research in Detroit.

  So how did Detroit go from being the Arsenal of Democracy to one step above “Soylent Green”? Somehow progressives always blame Republicans—or the Koch brothers or climate change or something else completely irrelevant—for the disasters they’ve created. Republicans rarely run big cities, and when they do, they sometimes even help turn them around (see what Rudy Giuliani did with what was left of New York). But from Baltimore to St. Louis to Philadelphia to Detroit, progressives have run America’s major cities for decades—usually right into the ground.

  Back in the “Progressive Era,” it was fashionable to say that the states were the “laboratories of democracy.” States like Wisconsin or Oregon passed initiatives and referendums that other states might emulate. Well, for quite a while now, big cities have been Frankenstein-esque “laboratories of progressivism.”

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  It didn’t start with Detroit. The most famous pioneer progressive mayor was actually New York City’s Fiorello “the Little Flower” LaGuardia. He might have been a little flower, but he was a big RINO (Republican in name only). He supported Franklin Roosevelt, pushed for rent control, increased welfare programs, and built public housing. He ran for reelection with the support of the Communist-dominated American Labor Party. His great protégé was the renowned fellow-traveling (pro-Communist) congressman Vito Marcantino. Mainstream historians still rank LaGuardia as one of America’s great mayors, but he helped set the world’s greatest city on a decades-long path of decline. (Helping to keep it on that dreadful path was another media-darling RINO, 1960s mayor John V. Lindsey.)

  LaGuardia was from the left wing, and many left-wing mayors, in city after city, have been following in his path. They all use the same basic playbook, the one first articulated by FDR’s top aide, Harry Hopkins, in 1938: “We will spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect.”

  In between spending, taxing, and electing, progressives also did a lot of regulating the hell out of business, coddling public employee unions, handcuffing the police, and eviscerating the remains of a once-functioning public school system. Even the dumbest tenured professor should be able to figure out that the road to urban hell is paved with progressive intentions. But progressives never, never, never learn. Rather than honestly asking themselves what went wrong, they paraphrase 1920s New York governor Al Smith’s saying that “The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy” and scream “The cure for the ills of progressivism is more progressivism.”

  Think it’s impossible to be more progressive than FDR’s buddy LaGuardia? Think again. The most progressive, left-leaning mayor in American history was not the Little Flower. It’s not even New York’s current chief executive, Bill de Blasio (a former Sandinista supporter and Hillary Clinton campaign manager). It was actually Detroit’s longtime mayor Coleman A. Young. He is the key to understanding how Motown spun so badly out of control for so long.

  Young was Detroit’s first black mayor, elected in 1973, when the majority of the city remained narrowly white. He might have been a bridge to racial harmony and have reversed, or at least stabilized, the city’s slow slide.

  He wasn’t, and he didn’t.

  Young was radical through and through. Like many radicals—from Lenin to Jane Fonda to Obama—he didn’t grow up in proletarian circumstances. He was reasonably comfortable. Not wealthy but not broke, either. His father ran a dry-cleaning business. Young attended white schools, even a Catholic parochial school, and soon landed a decent job on the assembly line at the Ford plant and quickly became involved in United Auto Workers politics. During World War II, he served with distinction with the famed Tuskegee Airmen and battled segregation in Franklin Roosevelt’s segregated armed services.

  But early encounters with racism embittered Young, and he wasn’t satisfied to be a mere garden-variety liberal. Walter Reuther, head of the UAW, wasn’t exactly Milton Friedman in his economic beliefs, but even he soon found Young too radical for comfort (as Young boasted, Detroit was “the center of the radical universe in those days”).

  In April 1948, Reuther narrowly escaped a mysterious assassination attempt that permanently crippled his right arm. Young was reportedly heard to say, “Too bad they didn’t kill that [expletive].” Later that year, Young backed Henry Wallace’s Communist-dominated Progressive Party and even ran for state senator as a progressive. In 1950, he helped found the National Negro Labor Council, an organization that was soon officially labeled a Communist front. A year later, when the House Un-American Activities Committee summoned Young to ask him if he was a member of the Communist Party, he took the Fifth Amendment.

  That should have ended Young’s political career. But time heals all wounds (except Reuther’s arm, that is), and the Democratic Party is incredibly forgiving of progressive indiscretions. Young eventually got himself elected as a state senator, was named the Democrats’ senate floor leader, and then, in November 1973, won a narrow election to become Detroit’s first black mayor.

  He wasn’t, however, Detroit’s first progressive mayor. Jerome Cavanagh was just thirty-three years old when he was elected in 1963, the youngest chief executive in the city’s history. He did everything a progressive was supposed to do. He brought in a progress
ive police chief, marched with Martin Luther King, implemented Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society urban-renewal pipe dreams, and supported affirmative-action programs.

  Liberal observers thought Cavanagh was doing a magnificent job. “Retail sales are up dramatically [in Detroit],” gushed the National Observer in 1965. “Earnings are higher. Unemployment is lower. . . . Physically Detroit has acquired freshness and vitality. Acres of slums have been razed, and steel and glass apartments . . . have sprung up in their place.” People seemed to think that Cavanagh was the next Jack Kennedy.

  But Cavanagh’s progressive visions—and his political ambitions—exploded on a Saturday night in July 1967, when his city was overtaken with deadly race riots ignited by a police raid on an African-American nightclub. Twenty-three civilians and sixteen national guardsmen died; 696 civilians and 493 guardsmen were wounded.

  Cavanagh’s progressive policies hadn’t done much for Detroit. And neither would Young’s. He might have chosen to be a healer—like Virginia’s first black governor, Doug Wilder, or Los Angeles’s first black mayor, Tom Bradley. But Young never outgrew his early progressive roots. He remained angry, bitter, confrontational, and often profane. Sociologist James Q. Wilson summed him up like this: “Young rejected the integrationist goal in favor of a flamboyant, black-power style that won him loyal followers, but he left the city a fiscal and social wreck.” Even the New York Times had to admit that Young seemed “to revel in the sort of polarization that other politicians dread.”

  Young pursued the same sort of big-government projects Cavanagh had loved. He built the most expensive public mass-transit project in American history, a 2.94-mile “People Mover,” as well as a grandiose $350 million “Renaissance Center” in Detroit’s fading downtown. Few citizens ever used the People Mover and the Renaissance Center also flopped. Young later sold it to General Motors for $80 million. Scandals on the Water Board and in the Police Department marred his later terms, and federal investigators probed his efforts to guide contracts to black-owned companies.

  1860 BALMORAL DRIVE

  By now, you know what a mess Detroit is. Abandoned neighborhoods. Derelict houses. High crime and unemployment. Hundreds of murders every year. Ruin on an unimaginable scale.

  They say that if you look at pictures of Hiroshima and Detroit taken in 1945 and then of both cities taken in 2016, and you weren’t told which were which, you’d match up the photos of 1945 Detroit with those of 2016 Hiroshima and—much, much, much more disturbingly—vice versa. Progressive policies can lay ruin to a greater area for a greater period of time than even a nuclear warhead.

  In 2010, however, Detroit mayor Dave Bing (a basketball hall-of-famer) was a man with a plan: if you couldn’t build or rebuild Detroit, then at least remove some of the rot. He aimed to demolish ten thousand of the city’s ninety thousand abandoned homes, three thousand in the first year alone. What would he do with the land involved? Well, he’d turn it into parks, maybe even farms.

  Yes, farms. That’s what Detroit, the Motor City, the Arsenal of Democracy, had come to. Fantasies about farms.

  Now, you might think these properties would all be in Detroit’s slum areas. Not so. Detroit’s blight is essentially citywide. Even historically “better” neighborhoods slid downhill. “The city has never done this before,” admitted Detroit Building Department director Karla Henderson. “We had to make a culture change.”

  “Culture change,” by the way, is progressive speak for Bring in the bulldozers to bury our mistakes.

  Which takes us up the driveway to a 5,412-square-foot home at 1860 Balmoral Drive in the city’s once grand (and actually still pretty good) Palmer Woods neighborhood.

  Or at least it used to be a home.

  As late as 2002, 1860 Balmoral Drive sold for $645,000. But that was then. Its value plummeted to just $150,000 by February 2007. And by 2010, it was abandoned and heading for outright demolition. “This is an eyesore, and it makes no economic sense to fix it,” said neighbor Joel Pitcoff. “Who wants to spend $1 million on a house so it will be worth $400,000?”

  What was newsworthy about this property? After all, it was just one of many thousands of eyesores, even if it was in a good neighborhood. Well . . . it just so happened to be the boyhood home of Mitt Romney. As he geared up to run for the presidency in 2012, that childhood abode (not exactly Abe Lincoln’s log cabin) lay forlorn, abandoned, and ready for a very public wrecking ball in dystopian Detroit—a testament to failed progressivism.

  Young left office in January 1994, but Detroit’s die had already been cast. The city was too far gone along the path of progressive politics to reform itself. Young’s worst successor was a fellow who took Cavanagh’s title of Detroit’s youngest mayor. Elected at just thirty-one years old in 2001, Kwame Kilpatrick eventually found himself convicted on a staggering multiplicity of corruption charges.

  His Honor is scheduled to be released in 2041.

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  CRONY PROGRESSIVISM

  They say that if you move far enough left or right on the political circle, eventually you’ll meet up with the other side.

  Exhibit A: The Progressive Nonworkers Paradise of Detroit.

  You see, Donald Trump isn’t the only guy who believes in pushing little people around to hand over their homes to big corporations.

  Coleman Young did the same thing.

  Back when Detroit was in its prime, it not only featured substantial populations of Southern whites and blacks, but it also boasted numerous ethnic neighborhoods. There was a Jewish area, a “Greektown,” an Irish “Corktown,” and, once upon a time, a “Poletown.”

  When General Motors wanted to build a new plant in Poletown, residents said: No, thank you. We don’t want to move. But Mayor Young thought he could use the tax revenue and the supposed economic benefits from the plant to prop up the rest of his decomposing city. So even though Poletown’s homes and its business property would be used not for a true public purpose but rather for a purely private one (think “crony capitalism” or, rather, “crony progressivism”), residents found themselves squarely in progressive eminent-domain crosshairs.

  Here’s an account from one Poletown homeowner, Harold Kaczynski, who tried—and failed—to stop GM’s land grab:

  We filed [our objections]. We were told to sign the first one of these with a lot number. This would take care of what we were after. And then we appeared at [Detroit’s] Cobo Hall. . . . And [the judge] never said one word. All the city did was read off all the lists of parcels they wanted. He granted them [1,366] parcels, and that was the end of it. Plus, they searched us coming in like we were a bunch of criminals.

  Forty-two hundred people lost their homes. One hundred forty businesses closed. A thriving neighborhood disappeared.

  That was bad enough. But there was more.

  Harold and Bernice Kaczynski had to move out of Detroit. Harold died in November 1987, and on the very day he was buried, the headline on the front page of the Detroit Free Press announced that GM’s “Poletown Plant” was closing, costing twenty-five hundred workers their jobs.

  When progressives pick winners and losers, everybody loses.

  A lot of people have written Detroit off. It’s been forever ruined by the Left, they say. It has no hope.

  But that’s not true.

  Detroit has a chance at rebirth, just as America does. If we allowed the city to be truly free (creating incentives to bring in private enterprise and create jobs, lifting red tape and regulations that make it more cost-effective for industries to locate elsewhere), then Detroit could rise again. There is nothing in the DNA of the people of Detroit that keeps them from succeeding.

  But we need to do more than just provide job opportunities and ease regulations. We need to cure the citizens of Detroit—and increasingly many citizens across America—of a debilitating and, in some cases, lifelong addiction. Addiction to broken promises. Addiction to the same leaders offering the same failed ideas. Addiction to dependency and learned
helplessness. Addiction to fear. Addiction to lies.

  I know something about addiction. I’m an alcoholic. Which means that I am an addict. I know how hard it is to quit something that can do you great damage. The first step to recovery is to recognize what you are addicted to. And to find ways to substitute something else for that drug, whatever it may be.

  For those who have become addicted to fear because of their progressive dealers, we must offer the counter to fear. That is hope.

  History has always been about a choice between fear and hope. World War II pitted an ideology based on fear of Jews, of gays, of “outsiders,” of Germany’s loss of prestige and power, against the free-enterprise system, an ideology based on the hope that people can transcend and rise about their circumstances, can strive, can achieve, can fail and try again.

  Or consider the Cold War, which pitted America against Communists whose ideology thrived on the fear of inequality and the evils of the “capitalist system” that supposedly enriched only the few.

  Progressives, as we’ve seen, promote the state—more regulations, more taxes, more rules, more restraints—as the answer to these fears. That is always their mantra, always their default. Give your power to us. We’ll take care of you.

  Like the saber-toothed cat, fear stalks us all. The question is, what do you do about it? Was Steve Jobs, who was once fired from Apple before returning to the company, afraid of failing again? Of course he was. Was Walt Disney afraid that his movies wouldn’t sell or that his theme parks—which were thought impractical and too expensive by almost everyone—would become duds? Of course.

  The greatest people in America—the most successful pioneers in all walks of life—experience fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Even those who are working in their own communities and neighborhoods—fighting for the lives of the unborn, opposing new laws and rules that restrict freedom—are often afraid. Speaking out, being criticized, being ignored—they are all scary things. But the successful don’t let fear control them. They acknowledge it and say, Yes, I’m afraid, so what? That’s the secret.