By the way, I live in Manhattan, so I don't need to ride the train from anywhere.
Just the latest essay on the breakdown of the "blue state model" being chronicled by Mead, prompted by the "ticket fixing" scandal going on and a police protest outside a Bronx courtroom. Sounds like a scene out of Tacitus describing Rome in its decadence.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/11/06/occupy-blue-wall-street/
"Meanwhile, the Times was deeply shocked and troubled by what it saw. Policemen booing and cursing prosecutors and officers of the court? Open solidarity with lawbreakers? But it was even worse. Across the street from the courthouse is a âbenefits center.â When the crowd lined up to collect welfare payments started chanting âFix our tickets!â at the protesting cops, the cops responded with derisory chants of âEBT! EBTâ (electric benefits transfer, a popular method of making social support payments here in the blue paradise of the northeast). As if heckling poor people wasnât enough, the Times dismally notes, the taunting, chanting cops failed to pick up after themselves, leaving litter on the streets as the protest broke up.
No doubt the Times reporters involved are more knowledgeable and experienced than this, but the piece sometimes reads as if it was written by a couple of upper middle class college boys shocked and frightened at their first encounter with the rough edges of the urban male working class: dewy cheeked and candy bottomed political studies majors at their first Teamster rally.
The police rally against law enforcement was one of those rare moments that illuminate the life of a great city in crisis. Between the good government, pro-minority Times reporters, the angry crowd of police rallying to protect their privileges and perks against the background of a city facing financial cutbacks, and the crowd of poor benefit seekers waiting in the street, resentful of the privileged police, we see can see the political and social crisis of New York in a single space.
The good government upper middle class, the entrenched groups with a solid stake in the status quo and the marginalized working or non-working poor with no prospects for advancement apart from the patronage of the state: this is the mass base of the blue electoral coalition â and the groups in the coalition donât seem to like each other very much."
Yeah, the Northeast is a regular utopia. Oh, and taxes are high because the infrastructure was supposed to be supporting more people, but lots of people voted with their feet and got out, going to those states where the "stupes" are, leaving those who stayed to pay those fixed costs. Then, when you factor in the fact that so many city dwellers are basically useless and don't pay taxes, rates on those who do pay have to go higher.
See, I support limited government not because I don't live in the city, but because I do. In fact, I've lived 22 years combined in Boston, Chicago and NYC and not a single experience I've had in any of them convinced me that big-city liberalism was anything other than the willful denial of reality.
