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Urban America began falling apart in the 1960s, with skyrocketing crime and worsening disorder. Vagrants and drug dealers colonized streets, parks, and other public spaces. Many once-vibrant city neighborhoods collapsed. The crisis had many causes, including the flight of industrial jobs from northern and midwestern cities. But profound changes in attitudes and government social policy played major roles, too. Crucial adjustments to welfare programs, spurred by liberal policymakers’ belief that the poor were victims of an unjust system, discouraged work and undermined families. The 1960s cultural revolution, which endorsed experimentation with drugs, brought more addiction—and more drug-fueled crime. And as the crisis intensified, policymakers lowered penalties for many crimes, seeing lawbreakers, too, as victims of society, so crime got worse still. Though such policies, championed nationally by President Lyndon B. Johnson and locally by mayors like New York’s John Lindsay, were well-intentioned, they helped produce an urban netherworld.
As City Journal readers know well, cities woke up from this nightmare in the 1990s, with smarter and more aggressive policing, tougher criminal sanctions, greater focus on quality-of-life concerns, welfare reform, and other policy changes. Crime plummeted in many cities, and many city economies surged. Some cities, including New York, became models of urban flourishing.
Yet, tragically—and bewilderingly, given such improvements—a new generation of progressive urban politicians seem intent on returning to some of the policies that cost cities so dearly decades ago. They’re pulling back on enforcement of quality-of-life infractions, ceding public space again to the homeless and drug users, undermining public school discipline, and releasing violent criminals back into communities or refusing to prosecute them in the first place. And lo and behold, crime is starting to rise, and the streets of otherwise successful cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and even parts of New York are filling up with human excrement, drug paraphernalia, and illness-wracked homeless encampments. Residents are growing fearful.
Today’s progressives don’t have the excuse of naiveté, as did their predecessors. In fact, arising as part of the resistance to President Donald Trump, they want to overturn the laws and values that support the nation’s bourgeois, strive-and-thrive culture. If their agenda makes middle-class Seattle homeowners, or businesspeople in San Francisco, or downtown merchants in Chicago uncomfortable—too bad.
Dramatic postwar changes in American life upended cities. Henry Ford’s affordable cars allowed families to move to newfangled suburbs, neither rural nor completely urban, and especially from the 1950s on, many made that choice. So, increasingly, did businesses, as interstate highways, displacing canals and ports, made shipping via truck from the cheaper suburbs easy. Cities hemorrhaged jobs—above all, blue-collar jobs—just as a generation of poor Southern blacks migrated to northern and midwestern urban neighborhoods, seeking opportunity. They were followed, after mid-1960s immigration reforms, by waves of poor, uneducated foreign workers. Many struggled to find the American dream, though the country was prospering. Worried about the entrenchment of a new urban poor, America’s political leaders launched the War on Poverty. The Johnson administration’s chief antipoverty warrior, Sargent Shriver, predicted that it could be won in just a decade.
Shriver and like-minded policymakers designed programs far more ambitious than those of the New Deal liberalism that had characterized the Democratic Party since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election in 1932. Though the New Deal vastly expanded the government safety net, it still recognized a connection between work and upward mobility and viewed government’s role as that of a temporary helper when someone was truly down and out. The officials behind the War on Poverty, by contrast, saw the poor as powerless, crushed by economic and cultural forces that could be overcome only with massive government help. Instead of temporary aid, welfare would now be a right, which the poor were entitled to receive, and benefits became far more generous, so that, by the late 1970s, welfare payments and other government aid now brought in about as much money as low-wage work.
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