Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway with boxing gloves in front of a backdrop of Madison.
If you’re not a reader of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, let me clue you into the official conservative line about America: Everything’s going to hell and it’s the Democrats’ fault.
Specifically, everything is going to hell in cities because, of course, they’re all run by Democrats. In red states everything outside of these blue cities is wonderful. By order, summer lingers through September. The rain may never fall ‘til after sundown. By eight, the morning fog must disappear. And there’s a legal limit to the snow there. But inside those Democratic cities it’s all American carnage all the time.
Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway poked that bear last week. In the wake of that kind of rhetoric being echoed in the first Republican debate down the road in Milwaukee, she tweeted (sorry, she Xed): “I would suggest that anybody who thinks that this country is in decline: Come to cities. Because Democrat mayors all across the nation are creating great places where people want to be.”
That got ‘em goin’. Challenging the official Republican narrative of America drew gasps from GOP operatives. One conservative commentator simply wrote, “Oh, my…” as if that was all the comment required.
But was the mayor right? That’s a complicated question. She’s certainly right about Madison. The crime rate is low, the employment rate is high, educational attainment is sky high and the overall quality of life is congenial. But we’re a university and government town. It would be an overreach to say that our success is due to liberal policies at the local level. Given our inherited advantages you’d have to work pretty hard to screw things up. The best we can say is that a half century of liberal government has done no harm.
But that in itself is significant because, if you subject yourself to a daily dose of Wall Street Journal editorial opinion as I do (no sacrifice is too great for you, dear readers), you know that it must be the case that that much liberalism will lead to disaster. The fact that it hasn’t makes Madison a test case in how liberal policies maybe don’t just ruin everything after all.
I’ll concede that our town is successful because of things over which we have no control. We became successful the moment the state Capitol and UW-Madison were placed here. But if you are eager to accept that, then it follows that other cities struggle because their fates were also largely determined by their histories.
I grew up in the Milwaukee area, a community built not on government and education, but on manufacturing. When manufacturing got off-shored due to national policies and international economics and developing technology over which the Milwaukee Common Council had no control, the city took a massive hit that it still struggles to recover from.
Actually Milwaukee has had a string of highly competent mayors going back a century to the “Sewer Socialists” and Daniel Hoan. But you can be sure that when the Republicans convene there almost exactly a year from now there will be no videos honoring the good government legacy of Hoan and his colleagues. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they spend some time bashing their host city, run as it is by those horrible Democrats.
To be sure, some Democratic cities have made mistakes, but even there, in a lot of cases, the burghers have reversed course. In San Francisco, for example, progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin was recalled after he fulfilled a campaign promise to stop prosecuting shoplifting and other low-level crimes. The citizens saw the results and didn’t like them. When Boudin didn’t change course, they turned him out. The same happened to three members of the school board there when voters saw them obsessing over school names instead of the learning deficits created by the COVID shutdowns.
And, of course, cities get a bad rap for large homeless populations. Many could manage them better (Madison is actually doing quite well, I think), but it’s easy to criticize while sitting in a suburb or rural area not confronted with the problem.
Rhodes-Conway made one other point that I thought was important. In a Wisconsin State Journal story on the dust up she said: “I think that the challenges that our country faces, challenges around homelessness and lack of housing, challenges around alcohol and substance abuse, challenges around violence, challenges that come from poverty — those are universal. They happen everywhere. Those challenges are not unique to one form of living or governance. And yet they get blamed on cities, which I think is patently unfair.”
Cities tend to get blamed because the concentrations of population make every problem more visible. But, for example, the opioid crisis is largely a rural phenomenon. I don’t hear Democratic politicians and liberal commentators blaming that on conservative politicians or the moral failings of rural residents.
Republicans blame all problems on cities because they don’t get any votes there anyway and it allows them to play on longstanding resentments between urban and rural areas. It would actually be smart for a Republican candidate to campaign in cities for urban votes. That candidate would have an open field and even a small percentage of a lot of votes is still a lot of votes.
I don’t see that happening any time soon. It’s too easy to scapegoat and pander. In the meantime, give our mayor credit for pushing back against the prevailing anti-urban rhetoric. She should write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. It would be nice to read something there with which I agreed.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
