Category: Politics

The election of Barack Obama six years ago was hailed as a breakthrough both for minorities, particularly African Americans, and for his being the first “city guy” elected president in recent history. Both blacks and urbanistas got one of their “own” in power, and there were hopes that race relations and urban fortunes would improve at a rapid pace.

Instead, the recent controversies over police killings of African American men have revealed a shocking deterioration of race relations not seen in a generation. Since the racial euphoria that accompanied the president’s election, views of race relations held by blacks and whites, according to Pew, have become decidedly less optimistic. Nearly half of whites and roughly two in five blacks, according to a recent Politico poll, say race relations have worsened under Obama. Only 4 percent of whites and 13 percent of African Americans thought relations had improved. Another recent survey, this one by Bloomberg, finds 53 percent of Americans opining that race relations have declined under Obama.

For the most part, the current racial discord has been traced largely to the long, uneasy relationship between minorities, notably African Americans, and the police. The disparity in perceptions between whites and blacks are most notable here, says Pew, with 70 percent of African Americans, but barely 25 percent of whites, disputing that police do a good job treating the races “equally.”

Here’s the real tragedy: Some 50 years after the passage of sweeping nationwide civil rights legislation, the institutionalization of affirmative action and billions poured into addressing urban poverty, many African American youth remain well outside the mainstream, unmoored to the economy and far too liable to get into confrontations with law enforcement. This is clearly connected with such factors as the preponderance among African Americans of 70 percent single-female-headed households, nearly half of which are poor.

Then, there are the murder statistics. Columnist Walter Williams has noted that, out of roughly 7,000 blacks murdered last year, 94 percent were killed by another black person. Half of all homicide victims are black, while blacks account for barely 13 percent of the nation’s population. Williams calculates that the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, more than 22 times higher.

Pervasive poverty

Not surprisingly, these sad numbers are also reflected in economic statistics. African American unemployment remains twice that of whites. The black middle class, so responsible for, and understandably proud of, Obama’s elevation, according to the Urban League, in the past decade has conceded many of the gains made over the prior 30 years.

Despite the hoopla about urban revival, a recent study reveals that entrenched urban poverty – places where 30 percent or more of the population lives below the poverty line – actually grew in the first decade of the new millennium, from 1,100 to 3,100 neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the population of these areas doubled, to 4 million. “This growing concentration of poverty,” notes researchers Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi, “is the biggest problem confronting American cities.”

These trends dwarf the oft-celebrated movement of young professionals and empty-nesters into the urban core. Indeed, notes demographer Wendell Cox, roughly 80 percent of population growth in cities during 2000-10 was from poor people. Not surprisingly, many African Americans have moved to suburbs, where a majority of them now live, according to the Census Bureau.

Also not surprising is that poverty and conflicts with law enforcement are now found in some suburban areas, as was clear in the case of Ferguson, Mo. Yet, poverty in the core cities remains considerably worse than in the suburbs. Despite trite talk about “suburban ghettos,” the poverty rate in the suburbs remains roughly half that of urban centers (as of 2010, 20.9 percent in core compared with 11.4 percent in the suburbs).

Much the same can be said about crime. The overall violent-crime rate in urban cores, although down from 2001, remains almost four times higher than in the suburbs, according to FBI data. Many of the most crime-ravaged cities are heavily African American: Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, Tenn., Cleveland and Atlanta.

Big-city class chasms

The fundamental preconditions for increased racial tensions can be seen in the growing class chasm within cities, particularly gentrifying ones. In New York City, the epicenter of the current debate over policing, good times on Wall Street and among the glitterati has not trickled down into the ghetto. The majority of people in hip Brooklyn, notes researcher Daniel Hertz, have seen their incomes drop over the past decade; roughly one in four Brooklynites, a cohort overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, lives in poverty. Over the entire borough, he points out, residential patterns have become more segregated, and Brooklyn now is second, only to Milwaukee, in terms of racial separation.

In Chicago, like most cities, areas of concentrated poverty have expanded in recent years. Chicago is widely hailed as the progenitor of Alan Ehrenhalt’s “great inversion,” which predicts a continuing shift of rich people into cities while the poor exit to the dreary suburban wasteland. But the reality is far more complicated, as employment in Chicago has dropped below 2001 levels, and middle-class neighborhoods have continually shrunk.

Essentially, amidst renewal, there is greater bifurcation. Prosperous and greatly hyped “super-global Chicago,” notes urban analyst Pete Saunders, enjoys income and education levels well above those of the suburban areas. Most Chicagoans, however, live in “rust belt Chicago,” with education and income levels well below suburban levels. Rather than simply bifurcated, Saunders suggests, “Chicago may be better understood in thirds – one-third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit.”

The tensions exacerbated by this growing divide are widely evident. Violence is slowly shifting from Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods and into some of the city’s nicest redoubts; Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 17-year-old son was mugged outside his home. Chicago’s violent-crime rate remains far higher than that of New York or Los Angeles; by some estimates, the city is more dangerous now than during the Al Capone era during Prohibition.

Chicago’s predicament – with a slight increase in murders in 2014 – could prove a harbinger. In some big cities, like Chicago, New York and Atlanta, populations entrenched in poverty will likely remain for the foreseeable future. It’s hard to imagine East New York or the westside of Chicago, much of south Atlanta, or Watts, for that matter, gentrifying anytime soon.

Indeed, Los Angeles, which also experienced a big drop in violent crime over the past decade, now expects to report a 7 percent increase this past year. Late last month, L.A. also experienced a possible attempted assassination of police officers, although the assailants, thankfully, missed.

In some cities, usually smaller and whiter to start with, we are seeing a pattern of what amounts to “ethnic cleansing,” as increasingly isolated communities get driven out of their enclaves by relentlessly rising rents and the loss of blue-collar jobs.

This process is particularly notable in San Francisco, where the black population already is roughly half what it was in 1970. In the nation’s whitest major city – Portland, Ore. – African Americans are being pushed out of the urban core by gentrification, partly supported by city funding. Similar phenomena can be seen in Seattle and Boston where longtime black communities faced near extinction.

Under these circumstances, a degree of racial animus seems inevitable. Some Brooklyn residents, reports theDaily Beast,even justified the targeting of law enforcement officers. For their part, many NYPD officers feel betrayed by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s sympathetic comments about anti-police demonstrations. Some officers have expressed their distaste, inappropriately, by being rude to the mayor and staging slowdowns in arrests.

These racial tensions already are seeping into the political realm. African Americans in New York supported de Blasio’s policing strategy, 2-1, while a strong majority of whites opposed his stance.

The resurgence in racial animus remains arguably the biggest surprise – and one of the greatest failures – not only of Obama, but of our society. In this respect, neither conservative attempts to blame increased racial discord on the president and, now, attempts by his progressive claque to absolve him of any responsibility, really address the more serious issues behind the widening of the racial divide. Cities and communities, divided against themselves by race and class, cannot thrive in the long run, no matter how many publicists and pundits proclaim the battle for urban America already has been won.

This piece first appeared at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is also author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.  He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

With his recent series of executive actions on U.S. policies ranging from climate to energy, immigration and, most recently, Cuba, Barack Obama is working to fulfill his long-held dream of being a “transformative” president. By decisively circumventing Congress with bold decrees, the president has won the plaudits of his core media supporters, with predictable “amens” from Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post and from the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who described him as a more “transformative” president than either Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan.

From his earliest days in office, Barack Obama made no secret of his desire to be a “transformational” president. And in Washington’s alternate reality, many in the media still revere Obama, a president with approval numbers in the low 40s, according to RealClearPolitics.com. One giddy CNN commentator even compared our chief executive to “Superman.” Obama insiders have little doubt about his greatness. Former campaign manager Jim Messina calls him not only “transformative” but among the “all-time great presidents.”

Yet, despite these huzzahs, it seems that voters are less than impressed. One reason: Americans may want some change – and may even be willing to sacrifice some to achieve it – but appear less enthusiastic about being “transformed.” They seem more comfortable with change done through the evolutionary swamp of congressional politics, reaching consensus on important issues and being presidential the old-fashioned way.

The most recent transformational president, ironically, was George W. Bush. In his case, this was less a matter of ambition (or even narcissism) than a reaction to the events of 9/ll. Bush’s transformational reordering of American foreign and military policy left us with a persistent mess that his successor, and, likely, Obama’s successors, will have to clean up.

Foreign Policy

Likewise, it’s hard to see this president’s “transformative” foreign policy ideas as particularly successful, or even well-considered. In many ways, notes Harvard’s Joseph Nye, our best foreign-policy presidents – such as George H.W. Bush or Dwight Eisenhower – are “transactional,” while rejecting what he calls “the cult of transformative leadership” pursued by such idealists as Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

When he took office nearly six years ago, Obama was determined to “reach out” to the Islamic world. Given his own multicultural background, not to mention his famously silvered tongue, Obama seemed sure to turn the Islamic world into our ally. But, as is so often the case, in reality, the U.S. has become steadily less popular since his election. It appears that Muslims have been no more mollified by Obama’s words, not to mention his drones, than by George W. Bush’s bolder bombs-away interventions.

Another exercise in transformational futility has been Obama’s much-hyped “pivot to Asia.” He’s ended up pivoting in circles while China begins to construct its own version of wartime Japan’s imperialist “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” As China’s military capacities grow, the president is stripping down, something that terrifies our friends in East Asia.

Climate Change

Perhaps no issue has less resonance with ordinary Americans than climate change, ranking consistently at the bottom of voters’ expressed concerns. In survey after survey, economic issues such as unemployment, the economy and the federal budget resonate with voters, while climate change barely registers.

But among those closest to Obama, and to the gentry liberals who are his primary funders, there is no issue more “transformational” than climate change. After all, only a transformative president, like a modern-day Moses, can keep the waters from rising over us as we flee the evil pharaohs of the fossil fuel industry.

This is not to say climate is not a concern, even if you are skeptical about some advocates’ more hysterical claims. It is probably a good idea to address carbon emissions, if for no other reason than pollution is bad and that the scientific “consensus,” although far from unimpeachable, is strong enough to suggest taking steps not to overheat the planet. So the question is how to best address this issue, and at what cost.

Unfortunately, the president’s transformational addiction has led to some poor, and likely counterproductive, decisions. This actually hurts the green cause, as most Americans, according to a recent study appearing in the journal Nature Climate Change, are more interested in adapting to climate change than radically reorienting their lifestyles to prevent it. They may fear a changing climate, but not so much that they want to disrupt their lives in the kind of radical ways suggested by many environmental activists and their business backers.

One thing Americans are not enthusiastic about is – in the name of climate change – sending more of their jobs to developing countries. Obama’s recent much-ballyhooed pact with China on emissions allows the world’s fastest-growing polluter, with a terrible record on this issue, to reject scrutiny of its efforts to limit carbon emissions until 2030. India, another rising greenhouse emitter, refuses even to set a similarly bogus deadline.

This all leaves America, and its even more clueless European allies, slouching toward the nirvana of an energy base dependent on “renewables.” In Germany, and here in California, radical steps have raised energy prices and pushed industries to seek out places with less-Draconian regulations. Sadly, neither greens nor the administration has embraced the more evolutionary approach: substituting natural gas for far-dirtier coal. This switch has already helped the U.S. reduce its carbon emissions faster than any major country, far more, indeed, than the self-righteous Europeans, whose expensive and inefficient green policies have left them burning more coal.

Immigration

As with climate change and foreign policy, good intentions no doubt underpinned the president’s recent orders affecting undocumented U.S. residents. But the way the measure was carried out – after the election, and without the support of Congress – all but guarantees deeper conflict over immigration policy in the coming years. Although most Americans support some form of legalization, most, including many Latinos, also opposed using executive authority to do so.

Getting legislation through Congress may well be painful, and slow, but there is something worthwhile in achieving broad support within both parties. This is particularly true when the opposition, as it does now, has a near-record degree of control of the House and a solid majority in the incoming Senate. The Reagan 1986 amnesty plan had its critics, but it allowed this critical issue to be handled in a bipartisan way. Reagan, clearly a more transformative president than either George W. Bush or Obama, still followed the basics of the Constitution, and acknowledged the importance of getting broad congressional buy-in on his policies.

But, given the imperial manner that Obama employed, immigration policy can be dismissed by some as little more than an effort to expand big government’s – and the Democratic Party’s – client base into the next century. One can argue that this strategy is, indeed, transformational, but in a way that threatens to exacerbate ethnic tensions and worsen the economic plight of citizens – Latino and otherwise – already in the country.

Back to Evolution

The president’s bids, without popular or congressional support, to achieve transformation by decree represents a dangerous turn for the entire political process. This is unhealthy in the long term, not only for Republicans and conservatives, but, down the road, likely for liberals as well. Liberals like law professor Jonathan Turley believe his fellow liberals may someday “rue” their support for Obama’s “uber-presidency” when a conservative president, citing the Obama precedent, also rules by decree.

The overall growth of transformational politics endangers the country. If conservatives sometimes overreach in terms of military affairs or regulations in the bedroom, modern transformational liberalism sees itself as blessed by the gods of science, while, of course, ignoring those things – such as the efficacy of natural gas or the need for GMO foods – that are not compatible with their worldview. These polarized positions leave as many as three in five voters, according to Gallup, wishing for a third party.

A healthy political system, of course, changes, but needs to do so – outside of a major emergency – at a pace that the population can absorb. Every significant change in recent years – from growing legalization of marijuana and gay marriage to bold experiments in educational reform – has come, as it should, from states and localities. This allows change to occur congruent with the values of specific locales, and go national only when this stance appeals to the majority of legislators and voters.

As we know from nature, evolution is often messy, and sometimes how it works is surprising. But, with patience and time, natural systems, like political ones, tend to be able to rebalance and adapt. By jettisoning evolution for transformation, President Obama, following a predecessor seen by many as inept, has made this adjustment process far more difficult and contentious than it would otherwise be.

This piece first appeared at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Barack Obama photo by Bigstock.