Bet you didn’t know Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, confidante to President Obama, was a closet Republican, did you? To my knowledge, he’s not — not really. But he sure acts like a Democratic caricature of a fat-cat Republican.
Writing in the Manhattan Institute’s indispensable City Journal this week, Aaron M. Renn observes:
Barack Obama’s former chief of staff managed to make things worse by pursuing a policy of elite-oriented urbanism, or what Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel have dubbed “gentry liberalism”: increased spending on amenities and subsidies targeted at the elite, accompanied by painful cuts in basic public services for the poor and middle class.
Most of what’s been written about Chicago lately has focused on its agonizingly high murder rate, its awful public schools, and the lack of opportunity for poor urban folks, especially African-Americans. You’d think they’re the ones Emanuel would be spending money on. But he seems to think some kind of trickle-down effect will take place if he practices “gentry liberalism,” described by Kotkin this way:
Essentially, gentry liberalism reflects the coalescing interests among the financial, technological and academic upper strata. For these people, the Great Recession was brief and ended long ago. All depend heavily on high stock prices to maintain their wealth. Their interest in the overall U.S. economy — particularly the Main Street grass roots — has become ever more tenuous with their increasing ability to shift assets to East Asia and other developing country hot spots.
In his concluding paragraph, Renn writes:
Under Emanuel’s leadership, though, Chicago has made peace with a two-tier society and broken the social contract. Rather than trying to expand opportunity, Chicago has bet its future on its already successful residents—leading some on the left to call Emanuel Mayor 1 Percent.
Wow. Mayor 1 Percent. Nobody even called Rudy Giuliani that.
Conservatives often say throwing money at social problems often doesn’t solve them. Just today, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page touted a study demonstrating that extended unemployment compensation actually exacerbated unemployment. And we’ve all ready about the utter failure of an experiment in Kansas City, in which a judge ordered the city to build palatial new schools at extravagant cost that wound up performing no better than the decrepit old schools, in terms of academic achievement by the kids.
Liberals talk about serving the poor but seem to do a pretty good job serving the rich (and themselves) once they’re in power.