Democrats are in denial about crime in big, blue cities. You can quibble about the statistics—many large cities became less safe during the height of the pandemic, have seen noticeable improvements since then, but have not returned to their pre-COVID rates of criminality—but to pretend that Washington, DC or Chicago is Andy Griffith’s Mayberry is delusional.
Like the hirsute comedic actor Seth Rogen, many liberals have low standards for what constitutes acceptable city life. Which is fine if you are a celebrity—crime may be bad, but is it Superbad?—an academic, or a progressive pundit, but is less than ideal if you are hoping to hold elected office or govern urban areas.
A perceived indifference to crime was among the reasons the party of FDR, JFK, and LBJ lost its national majority coalition and was soon on the wrong end of 49-state landslides nationally. At that time, it was only the most liberal elements of the Democratic Party who subscribed to the theory that “law and order” was merely synonymous with “white backlash” against the civil-rights movement.
The reality of racism, with the segregationist George Wallace winning nearly 10 million votes as a third-party presidential candidate in 1968, did not mean there was no sincere concern about elevated crime rates. People of all races and backgrounds rather dislike fearing for their lives, families, and property.
It took many years of losing presidential elections for Bill Clinton to walk his party back from the abyss. The Clinton crime bill didn’t solve all the Democrats’ problems—conservative voters associated it more with gun control and social spending on programs like midnight basketball than new police officers on the beat, while progressives and libertarians would come to blame it for mass incarceration—but his triangulation bought them some time as crime rates fell.
Now a wider slice of the Democratic Party is up to its old, pre-Clinton tricks. And while some of their resistance to crackdowns on crime are of the same pedigree as the white backlash talk of the 1960s and early ’70s, as evidenced by the George Floyd protests of 2020, much of it boils down to one man: President Donald Trump.
The apparent reduction in anxiety about crime in Democratic DC outstrips any claimed reduction in crime itself. Affluent white liberals are unlikely to be captured by ICE as they partake of Restaurant Week at their favorite Georgetown or Dupont Circle haunts. Refusing to go out is nevertheless a bold stand to take against the authoritarian Orange Man (although there is some dispute about how many bien pensants are actually denying themselves the pleasures of the nightlife).
Which brings us back to the radicalization of a bigger swathe of Democrats as Trump Derangement Syndrome becomes violent crime denialism. When Marion Barry was reelected as DC mayor after his release from prison, more than 40 percent of the city’s voters actually supported his Republican opponent. Barry’s underwhelming victory and the capital’s fiscal crisis led, however temporarily, to a bigger clawback of home rule than anything Trump has so far proposed. The year before Barry’s return, New York City and Los Angeles elected Republican mayors rather than acquiesce to high crime and ungovernable cities.
While Rudy Giuliani’s star has faded and anti-police politicking has returned, New York City is in many ways still safer than it was in the early 1990s. And while the front-running Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has wisely prioritized the high prices at bodegas and exorbitant rents over defunding the police in his own campaign, the Big Apple is another blue city with a much different mood than all those years ago.
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Not every idea Trump floats about how to deal with crime is truly within the president’s or even the federal government’s purview. Trump and some of his more overzealous aides exaggerate the extent to which major cities, including DC, are dystopian hellholes.
But if the question could be separated from a referendum on Trump’s personality, how many Americans would agree with him or Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a rising star in the national Democratic Party, about whether even an improved Baltimore should set the standard for an acceptable level of crime?
As with immigration, Democrats are letting their distaste for Trump commit them to positions on crime that have been perilous for them in the past, though they hope the culture wars can insulate them from the damage. We’ll see whether history repeats itself, as tragedy and farce at the same time.
