WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH HELLHOLES OF CORRUPTION, RACISM, AND VIOLENCE? “Republicans Must Save the Cities,” Kevin D. Williamson writes:

This is where progressive urban governance leads: The combination of over-promising and under-delivering, corruption, institutional ineffectiveness, and clientelist politics ruptures the relationship between so-called public servants and the public they purport to serve. Chicago isn’t Detroit or Cleveland: It isn’t some lost city that has in effect been left to weed over. But employing the same kinds of institutional approaches with the same values and the same assumptions will produce — surprise — the same results. The Jesse Jacksons of the world instinctively respond by threatening to immiserate the functional parts of Chicago. But Jackson et al. shouldn’t be leading a march on the high-end retail district — they should be leading a march on the Democratic-party headquarters, which is the actual locus of malice in this sorry affair.

Republicans for the moment are pleased to be a non-factor. But that eventually is going to have to change. There is no city in the United States larger than San Diego with a Republican mayor. A Republican and a pseudo-Republican were, for a time, able to thrive politically in New York owing to the unusual character of Rudy Giuliani and the fact that the millionaire residents of an economically resurgent Manhattan wanted to be able to travel from a Broadway theater to a Soho restaurant without passing through Beirut. (New Yorkers, alas, have short memories, and thus have turned the city over to Bill de Blasio, with predictable results.) Conservatives as such are not players in the real-world politics of our largest cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia. They are a relatively minor factor in some large metropolitan aggregates such as greater Houston and the DFW metroplex, but as for the cities themselves — not really. Consider that even in conservative Texas, the big urban political fight this season was whether Houston’s crusading lesbian mayor could subpoena church sermons as part of her campaign to pass a city law guaranteeing certain toilet privileges to men who pretend to be women. That bespeaks a certain battiness, to be sure, but it also suggests an operative political model that should not be that hard to beat: Houston, which is largely working-class and overwhelmingly non-white, rejected that ordinance by a wide margin.

Obviously, it’s long past time for a change:

But if the GOP wishes to seriously get in the game in those cities, as Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Lois Lerner’s victims have all discovered, Republican mayoral candidates are going to have to be prepared to go to war against “the Deep State,” which will maintain the left’s entrenched power and free-flowing graft “by any means necessary,” to coin a phrase.