It’s true that all communities experience drug overdoses or deaths and inflation puts pressure on all households while the dollar weakens and prices rise. But particularly when it comes to crime, America’s cities have taken a far more radical downward turn than the suburban and rural areas such as the one my wife and I are blessed to live in. The county where we live recorded only one murder in all of 2022. You would be hard-pressed to find a single day last year when nobody was killed in Baltimore or Chicago.
The current situation in America’s urban centers is not sustainable. And for some reason, nearly all of the larger cities are controlled by liberal Democrats who impose the insane policies that allow this mayhem to flourish. Even Austin, in the heart of the red state of Texas, has a municipal government that is hiring wolves to guard the henhouse. And the recent election in Chicago suggests that there is no path back from the brink for many of our formerly-great cities. You simply cannot help those who refuse to help themselves.
As NRO’s Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2010 wrote in 2010 when the failed city of Detroit was making headlines and photo spreads thanks to its Hiroshima-like bombed out landscape, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”