I Thought Obama Saved Detroit?

It's too easy to blame the decline and fall of Detroit on the Democrat party, progressivism and modern-day liberals. That goes without saying. They've had Detroit in their strangle hold since Ike was president. Sure, the corporations have their share of blame, but there is nothing conservative about them.

Big Business, Big Labor and Big Government:  The Combustible Mixture that Blew Up Detroit

Big Business is now spilling over with Crony Crapitalists who would piss their pants if they had to make it in a free, unrigged market. Big Labor is made up mostly of apple-shaped bureaucrats who don't know the meaning of labor, but such is the state of things today in the Absurd States of America. And Big Government never met a law or regulation it didn't like.  Selling exemptions to them is a money-making machine no DC chiseler or state capital grandee in his or her right mind would want to dismantle.

And Detroit is the inevitable result.

Jonathan Chait is a reliable liberal, but I read him because he is prone to sporadic outbursts of candor refreshing but rare in today's party-line, doctrinally-pure liberals. Also, he's a good writer and he makes me look up words like "synecdoche," which I learned from The Free Dictionary, means "a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for a whole or a whole for a part, as in 50 head of cattle for 50 cows, or the army for a soldier."

Jonathan Chait is right. Detroit is America writ small:

Detroit is a synecdoche for America — not America’s future, but its past.

Everything that happened in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century happened in and around Detroit, but moreso.

He describes the racial downward spiral, the white flight, and the increasing racial animosity between the city and the 'burbs, concluding...

The worse Detroit got, the more whites hated and feared, fueling black racial paranoia, which made the city worse still.

Also, I love his sense of humor:

Some national commentators recently suggested that Mitt Romney be brought in to turn around the city, which is a bit like suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu would make a great Prime Minister for the Palestinians — hey, he’s from around there!

He also throws in this trite campaign phrase from one of the nation's greatest job destroyers, liberal Democrat Governor Jennifer Granholm:

“The only thing that should come between Detroit and Michigan is a comma.”

Chait grew up in a Detroit suburb, so he brings real-life insight to the article. It's an educational read blessedly devoid of stale liberal claptrap and cracked shibboleths that such liberal articles are usually littered with.

See also:
Why Liberals Won't Face Facts on Detroit
Stalled Motor City