American Cities Committing Urban Suicide

Near the end of the nineteenth century French sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote what remains a seminal work on Suicide. In it he identified three types of suicide, egotistical, altruistic and anomic.

For the record, an altruist commits suicide to take responsibility for his bad behavior, and thus to relieve others of their responsibility. Think of the commander who loses a war and commits suicide to assert that the fault is entirely his. Seppuku counts as altruistic suicide.

Anomic suicide befalls someone who is alone and bereft, who is unmoored and cut off from social contact. The term "anomie" means normlessness, and it suggests that people who do not fit into society can end up committing suicide. Feeling like a pariah allows them to feel that they are dead already. When the shunning and shaming becomes unbearable, they end their lives.

As for egotistical suicide, Durkheim believed that some people kill themselves to punish others. The jilted lover who hangs himself in his former lover’s living room is cursing her. He wants to punish her for rejecting her. He is willing to kill himself if he can leave this earth thinking of the pain he is going to inflict on her. This does not make him a fine human being.

These thoughts came to mind as I was reading some newspaper articles on the declining state of America’s cities. I was struck by the fact that the people leading these cities, leftist politicians-- diverse group now exposed as incompetent frauds and as portraits in cowardice-- might be committing urban suicide in order to hurt someone else-- that is President Trump. Surely the teachers’ unions that are now out in force refusing to go back to work know very well that keeping children out of school will damage the economy-- during an election campaign. It's an egotistical urban suicide.

Is there another country on the planet where politicians would allow major cities to be destroyed-- to make political points?

Gerard Baker adds that America’s corporate elites, even its intellectual elites, have been cheering from the sidelines as cities burn. After all, it is not happening in their neighborhoods-- at least not yet. Militants from BLM or Antifa are damaging the interests of those they pretend to represent.  

Poor minority children will suffer the most for not going to school. Minority business owners will suffer as their shops are burned or looted. Property values in minority neighborhoods will head south. The reputations of minority Americans will be damaged, setting back the cause of civil rights for decades.

Baker explains:

Whatever the political consequences of this unprecedented summer, there will be hefty costs, and they won’t be borne by those responsible. As cities are further hollowed out by crime and decay, taxes will rise, further stifling investment and growth, further harming the most disadvantaged, and accelerating a vicious circle of decline.

It’s a needless tragedy engineered by ideologues that is sending into sharp reverse the gains made in large American cities in the early years of the 21st century.

Leftist political leaders are doing it egotistically, in order to damage the Trump campaign. But, what about the corporate elites, and those who do not need to come to the office. To take an obvious example, Google has told its staff members not to come to the office for a year-- why would they stay in declining large cities?

City leaders are now re-creating the social conditions that ruined these cities in the 1960s and ’70s: violent crime; urban blight, crumbling infrastructure. And they’ve added to that list schools run by unions dedicated to radical ideology and the mob in control of the streets in furtherance of an intolerant political agenda.

Worst of all, now we have a corporate elite, safely sequestered from the consequences of all this ruin, loudly helping it along by signaling their own virtue and denouncing our supposed vice.

Consider, Baker continues, the damage done:

For cities like New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland, Ore., the damage done by this indulgent summer of insanity may never be repaired. For decades these cities have been controlled by monolithic Democratic establishments—though Republican mayors proved they could govern New York. They have milked the more dynamic parts of their populations to feed their own ideological agenda while doing nothing to lift the least advantaged out of misery.

The Great Meltdown of 2020 has exposed how rotten these urban establishments have become.

The lockdown, that soul-crushing exercise in economic suicide, imposed and enforced largely by the people it least affects, has permanently demolished vast elements of the economic base of these cities: businesses that will never return, employees who have moved away or will work from home rather than tolerate the increasingly perilous lottery of commuting and working in a deteriorating urban environment.

Yes, it’s economic suicide, committed for the reasons I outlines above. 

Democratic mayors have attacked and defunded the police. The predictable result has been a spike in crime-- crime that has most often hurt minority communities:

Then, as Democratic mayors actively encouraged an all-out assault on city police forces, a terrifying wave of violence and crime swept the cities. In Chicago last month murder rose 139% over a year earlier. New York had more shootings in the first seven months of 2020 than in all of 2019. The victims of these crimes are almost never the vocal elites, safe in their well-protected homes and offices. They are the poorest and least secure of our neighbors.

As for the pandemic, mayors and governors happily allow mass protests, the kind that are guaranteed to propagate the virus. Yet, they are up in arms if people want to attend religious services:

So, for example, those of us who stayed in New York this summer weren’t permitted to worship in church, but we were allowed—we were more or less instructed—to worship at the feet of those who preach hatred of the police, racial strife and white self-loathing. Friends weren’t permitted to attend parents’ funerals, but the right people were free to travel across state lines to attend multiple funerals for political and public show.

In New York City, the drama is being played out in empty office buildings. Even though more and more of them are open, most are still empty. Nicole Gelinas reports that New York City commercial real estate just lost its appeal.

Now, the city — or, at least, sentient public and private-economy officials who can see implications, a group that notably doesn’t include the mayor — wants people to come back. Office-building managers have replanted flowers for summer and installed cheery greeters.

But people aren’t coming. Midtown is a little busier than in mid-March. It’s still empty. Yes, employers may find that it’s harder to integrate new workers into a virtual workforce or that workers become less productive over time.

Nevertheless, it’s something the city has never seen before, not on the cusp of ’70s turmoil, in 1966; not emerging from ’70s near-bankruptcy, in 1980; not even in 2005, which was too short to matter.

The white-collar workforce has proved it can skip the office not just one day, not just a week, not just two weeks, but for nearly five months now.

For those of us who have been concerned about whether New York City would ever come back, these are ominous signs.

Consider this, from the Wall Street Journal, regarding fashion executive Josie Natari:

Josie Natori is back in the office, but most of her staff isn’t.

The founder and chief executive of women’s apparel company Natori Co. returned to her office on Madison Avenue in New York City in early June. Few others have returned to the business’s midtown Manhattan neighborhood—or Natori’s 50-person office and showroom. Cleaning crews have continued to maintain the premises, and mail and packages are being delivered, but the building’s lobby and halls are empty.

In recent weeks, a handful of designers and product developers have trickled through to take care of things that couldn’t be done remotely. Everyone else is working from home or furloughed.

That is the state of New York employment: working from home or laid off. New York City is in serious trouble. The current leadership does not understand the problem. It has aggravated the problem. After all, if you are walking up or down the priciest real estate location in the country and read: Black Lives Matter on the street-- will you feel welcome, or will you feel that it’s time to pick up and leave? Might you not feel that protesters and rioters, criminals and maniacs now own New York City?