Why Urban Democracies Smell Like Homeless Men
Outdated urban democratic procedures lead to incompetent & corrupt Leaders
Streets littered. Masked adults and children walk with their heads tilted down. Stores closed. Homeless man pissing in a corner. A drug addict, losing his mind, attacks a pedestrian. This is what you see around Penn Station in New York City.
A city with a crushed quality of life. More than a 1,000 restaurants have closed since March. Hundreds of thousands of residents have fled the city. Broadway is closed until Spring 2021. On many streets, women can’t walk safely without being harassed.
Around 14% of NYC residents are unemployed, number of shooting victims are up 103%, corruption is rampant, offices are empty and public finances are in disarray. The life of the city is akin to a third world country. Entrepreneur and best selling author James Altucher declared New York to be dead forever.
This is New York City under the leadership of Mayor Bill de Blasio amid the Covid-19 crisis.
De Blasio’s not only incompetent but also corrupt. When rioting and looting occurred in the summer, de Blasio ordered the police to stand down and let shops and businesses be robbed.
Some journalists, such as Tim Poole, accuse de Blasio of capitalizing on the city’s destruction by enriching him and his real estate buddies by buying prime real estate at depressed prices with plans to flip them for a profit.
Ask anyone on the street about what they think of the mayor. They’ll say “He’s an idiot” or “I can’t stand him.” Well, he’s not going anywhere because he has two years left in his term.
New York City has an incompetent and corrupt leader at a time when it really needs quality leadership. How did NYC get a leader as incompetent and corrupt as de Blasio?
Urban democratic procedures— built in an older and simpler era— encourage weak voter participation, which selects for moronic leadership.
NO ONE CARED TO VOTE
If you ask the person mentioned earlier if they voted for de Blasio, they’ll say they didn’t vote in the last mayoral election, or know when the last one was. In the 2017 mayoral election (de Blasio’s reelection), only 25% percent of the voting population actually voted—only one out of four people in NYC voted.
De Blasio got 726, 361 votes in 2017. There are between 4 and 4.5 million registered voters in NYC—no wonder leadership is so shitty. Only a small portion of people voted for him. He doesn’t represent the will of the majority of people.
Same situation in Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Portland—all cities plagued with riots, violence, massive unemployment and a crashed quality of life under leaders selected by small voting populations.
CITIES ARE TOO BIG FOR THEIR DEMOCRATIC BRITCHES
Urban democratic procedures were designed in eras when major cities rarely had more 30,000 people. Towns usually had way less than 1,000 people. Of the city and town population, usually only landowning white males could vote. The voting population was very small.
Cities today regularly exceed 100,000 and everyone could vote, yet we still have the simple “one man, one vote” procedure.
To understand how city governance change as population expands, let’s look to an impressive 1929 study titled Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture.
For the study, sociologists Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd tracked how American cities had transformed from the mid-19th century, a period of settlement and pioneering, to big cities in the 1920s.
They conducted a massive field survey of one city: Muncie, Indiana (called Middletown in the study). The couple and their researchers interviewed residents and studied the city’s development from a town of 700 people in 1850 to 11,000 in 1890 to 34,000 in 1924 (the year of the study).
The Lynds found Middletown’s political culture using outdated democratic procedures in 1924.
Perhaps it is noteworthy that, despite the importance Middletown attaches to money, it chooses the representatives to whom it delegates the work of looking after the $61,000,000 city of today with its 38,000 inhabitants and its $3-400,000 annual operating expenses in substantially the same way that it chose them for the $5,000,000 city of 1890 with its 11,000 people or for the village of 1850 with its 700 people and annual operating expenses of less than $1,000. One explanation of this constancy of procedure in the midst of radical changes in the number and kinds of activities required of the group is to be found in the fact that the operation of the city’s business is dominated by one of its most cherished ideals —”democratic government.”
The voting population had expanded drastically since 1850. First, there are way more people. Second, the 19th amendment, which had passed in 1920, granted women the right to vote.
Here’s how energetic people were about local politics in 1890.
In 1890 Middletown gave itself over for weeks before each election to the bitter, hilarious joy of conflict. The predilection for “a real good speech” was indulged extravagantly; enthusiastic followers of either party turned out “armed with implements of noise” to march in torchlight processions, drum corps at at their head; horns, anvils, “a boiler on wheels and lots of pounding” were a prelude to “addresses by Middletown’s best orators.”
By the 1920s, that energy evaporated and was redirected toward leisure activities enabled by new inventions, like the radio, automobile and phonograph.
When asked to hear a speech, one man reportedly said, while turning the knob of a radio, “I am not going to hear [the candidate] speak tonight. It’ll be in the paper tomorrow. And anyway, it doesn’t make very much difference. I agree with what it says in Collier’s.”
Presidential elections—the most popular form of elections—even saw participation drop in the period. In the election of 1892, 87 percent of the voting population of the county voted, while 53 percent voted in 1916 and 46 percent voted in 1920.
WHO THE F*CK IS RUNNING?
Voters weren’t as excited about their elections because they didn’t know who the candidates were anymore.
At least two further factors … are apparent in this tendency for Middletown citizens to concern themselves less with the operation of community business. The first is the wide gap existing between what the rank and file of the group actually know about its affairs and the amount they are assumed to know by the nature of their public institutions. In the city of today it is far less possible than in the nineteen eighties and earlier for a voter to know personally each of even the two or three dozen local candidates from whom he is expected at a given election to choose the “best men.”
When cities were smaller, everyone knew each other. The voter had personally met or recognized the people running for office. If he didn’t, it was easy to do so. He could just go up to the candidate after a speech and introduce himself and ask policy questions.
But in 1924, “He is increasingly dependent upon the two political parties for such information as they may give him through newspapers, campaign documents or speakers,” the Lynds found.
Voters had to rely more on political party information channels—all of which acted more like propaganda than news. Voters didn’t receive helpful information, and often just skipped voting.
The other reason why voters disengaged was they saw politics as belonging to the corrupt. Middletown residents commonly told interviewers: “There’s so little to choose between the two, I’m not going to vote.”
And they were right. The pool of skilled political candidates had shrunk. All the skilled leaders were taking up higher paying jobs created in the prosperous 1920s.
Criminals, crooks and drunks openly were common candidates. Here’s one candidate, who after six months spending a six month term at the State Penal Farm, running for city judge, addressing voters:
I admit that up until a couple of years ago I was a bootlegger. I sold more white mule than any man in the country except —. Now here’s — [another candidate], he tries to keep the country dry by drinking it all. Which of us is better?
Here’s what the Lynds concluded about the government of Middletown:
In view of the apathy or repugnance with which many Middletown citizens have come to regard politics, it is perhaps not surprising that the “best citizens” are no longer to be found among Middletown’s public officials.
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