The Summer of Hell

Liberals are outraged that they are being governed by Donald Trump. But pity “the millions who wake up every day to be governed by liberals? … This is the summer of ’17 for people who live in politically blue northern cities, but few would call it the best days of their lives,” Daniel Henninger writes in the WSJ,

• NYC: Thanks to an antiquated transportation infrastructure, commuters were trapped for 45 minutes without air or lights in a southbound F train. Meanwhile, riders in Harlem were evacuated after the tracks caught fire. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s solution? A $700 million tax increase on “the wealthiest in our city.”
• Chicago,IL: More than 100 people were shot over July Fourth weekend (14 dead). So naturally Mayor Rahm Emanuel has filed a sanctuary-cities lawsuit against the federal government to protect the city’s immigrants.
• Hartford, CT: At the brink of insolvency, the city last month hired a law firm specializing in bankruptcy.
• Baltimore, MD: The owners of dozens of destroyed businesses sued the city in June for mishandling the mayhem, two years after the riots ended.

Defenders of the liberal model argue that cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles are changing into sophisticated, cosmopolitan hubs that attract a new class of young professionals who will restore urban America. Instead, many of these urban revivals are producing a phenomenon economists now call “racially concentrated areas of affluence,” or RCAAs.

Some of the most RCAAed cities are liberal duchies like Boston, Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Today, private economic life, especially that of the urban middle class, is no longer a partner in the liberal model. It’s merely a “revenue source” for a system whose patronage is open-ended welfare and largely uncapped public-employee pensions. I’d describe the liberal-progressive governing strategy as ruin and rule.

Now comes the summer-of-hell infrastructure crisis. Residents of the northeastern slab from New Jersey to Boston have been living off infrastructure created by their grandparents and great-grandparents during the golden age of American capitalism.

They are now asking the federal government, meaning taxpayers who live in parts of the U.S. not hostile to capitalism, to give them nearly $15 billion to replace the 100-year-old train tunnel beneath the Hudson River. Why should they? Why send money to a moribund, dysfunctional urban liberal politics that will never—as in, not ever—clean up its act or reform?

Read more in Daniel Henninger’s Wonderland here.