In his latest Twitter tirade, President Trump slammed Rep. Elijah Cummings by pointing out the crime-stricken, poverty ridden, and rat-infested areas in the city of Baltimore. The media and Democrats jumped on the President’s tweets and lambasted them as racist while attempting to defend the city as a wonderful place to live. Prior to Trump’s tweets, the acknowledgment of Baltimore’s failings and disparagement was widely bipartisan. Public figures such as Bernie Sanders, former Democratic Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh, and The Baltimore Sun all commented on the city’s poor conditions. Baltimore’s skyrocketing crime, terrible education rates, drug epidemic, rodent infestation, and run-down neighborhoods was and is nothing new to Americans.
Trump’s attack on Rep. Cummings through the exposition of Baltimore’s conditions was not a referendum on racism, it was an already known hard truth that is now being painted as a bigoted lie because it came from a specific man. The downfall of Baltimore is not a new story; years of Democratic governance resulting in increasingly unlivable conditions is a phenomenon occurring in many of America’s major cities.
The Mercatus Center’s 2018 ranking of the best and worst states based on fiscal conditions showed that out of the top 10 best states, only one was Democrat controlled while out of the top 10 worst states, only one was under Republican leadership. The top five most violent cities are Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, Baltimore, and Memphis. The top five dirtiest cities are New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Each major urban area runs par with some of the worst metrics. What do these cities have in common? Local governance is under Democratic control and have suffered from liberal policies for years.
Blowing out spending and increasing taxes to compensate that spending, restricting police to give the appearance of driving down crime, ignoring inner city schools and education, and selling empty promises have overwhelmed what used to be some of America’s finest cities.
What happens when syringes cover the streets, homelessness becomes an epidemic, taxes skyrocket, and rats take over? Residents move. Californians are flooding into Texas and New Yorkers are heading to Florida. The exodus of liberal urban areas to more Conservative-run cities is becoming increasingly prevalent, yet what do the new residents do in these red and purple areas? Bring their voting habits. The voting habits that ran down the cities they were fleeing are now taking over urban and suburban areas that have seen economic success through majority Republican control. Texas, a state never before seen as flip-able, is seeing blue districts pop up from transplant voters.
With tribal politics at an all-time high, learning from the failures of our own ideologically-based policies is at an all-time low. The ability to retroactively analyze the downfalls of policy that caused residents to leave in the first place has become void as Republican policy is still viewed as regressive, regardless of producing the best fiscal conditions in the country. The difference between conservative and liberal policy in these cities is how the individual is viewed.
Democratic governance works top down while Republican governance starts with the resident. Top down governance focuses on government control that needs to be fueled by a steady influx of money, otherwise known as taxes. Hindering residents with inordinate taxes and increased cost of living is a gateway to increased poverty, crime, and drug addiction. How you treat the taxpayer is a direct correlation to the health of the local economy, which in turn correlates to the health of communal conditions.
Liberal policies have been destroying our urban areas for years and the evidence is too apparent to ignore. The pattern of Americans migrating from liberal cities to more conservative ones in an attempt to seek a better standard of living is leading us into a cycle of Democratic policy destruction. Trump, Sanders, and Pugh were right when calling out the deficient state of Baltimore. Loving our cities means putting away our ideological pride to work together to implement successful solutions instead of repeating the ones that have led to impoverished communities, hoping one day to get a different outcome. Democratic leadership needs to decide whether they are going to continue to spend their efforts defending their broken neighborhoods in the face of Trump or start fighting for the residents that desperately need it.
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Alyssa Ahlgren
Alyssa has her Bachelor’s in Business Administration and currently works as an analyst in corporate finance. She grew up in northern Wisconsin and is a former collegiate hockey player. Alyssa is pursuing her passion for current events and politics through writing and being an advocate for the conservative movement.
