Liars (35 page)

In between spending, taxing, and electing, progressives also did a lot of regulating the hell out of business, coddling public employee unions, handcuffing the police, and eviscerating the remains of a once-functioning public school system. Even the dumbest tenured professor should be able to figure out that the road to urban hell is paved with progressive intentions. But progressives never, never, never learn. Rather than honestly asking themselves what went wrong, they paraphrase 1920s New York governor Al Smith's saying that “The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy” and scream “The cure for the ills of progressivism is
more
progressivism.”

Think it's impossible to be more progressive than FDR's buddy LaGuardia? Think again. The most progressive, left-leaning mayor in American history was not the Little Flower. It's not even New York's current chief executive, Bill de Blasio (a former Sandinista supporter and Hillary Clinton campaign manager). It was actually Detroit's longtime mayor Coleman A. Young. He is the key to understanding how Motown spun so badly out of control for so long.

Young was Detroit's first black mayor, elected in 1973, when the majority of the city remained narrowly white. He might have been a bridge to racial harmony and have reversed, or at least stabilized, the city's slow slide.

He wasn't, and he didn't.

Young was radical through and through. Like many radicals—from Lenin to Jane Fonda to Obama—he didn't grow up in proletarian circumstances. He was reasonably comfortable. Not wealthy but not broke, either. His father ran a dry-cleaning business. Young attended white schools, even a Catholic parochial school, and soon landed a decent job on the assembly line at the Ford plant and quickly became involved in United Auto Workers politics. During World War II, he served with distinction with the famed Tuskegee Airmen and battled segregation in Franklin Roosevelt's segregated armed services.

But early encounters with racism embittered Young, and he wasn't satisfied to be a mere garden-variety liberal. Walter Reuther, head of the UAW, wasn't exactly Milton Friedman in his economic beliefs, but even he soon found Young too radical for comfort (as Young boasted, Detroit was “the
center of the radical universe in those days”).

In April 1948, Reuther narrowly escaped a mysterious assassination attempt that permanently crippled his right arm. Young was reportedly heard to say, “
Too bad they didn't kill that [expletive].” Later that year, Young backed Henry Wallace's
Communist-dominated Progressive Party and even
ran for state senator as a progressive. In 1950, he helped found the National Negro Labor Council, an organization that was soon
officially labeled a Communist front. A year later, when the House Un-American Activities Committee summoned Young to ask him if he was a member of the Communist Party,
he took the Fifth Amendment.

That should have ended Young's political career. But time heals all wounds (except Reuther's arm, that is), and the Democratic Party is incredibly forgiving of progressive indiscretions. Young eventually got himself
elected as a state senator, was named the Democrats' senate floor leader, and then, in November 1973, won a narrow election to become Detroit's first black mayor.

He wasn't, however, Detroit's first
progressive
mayor. Jerome Cavanagh was just thirty-three years old when he was elected in
1963, the youngest chief executive in the city's history. He did everything a progressive was supposed to do. He brought in a progressive police chief, marched with Martin Luther King, implemented Lyndon Johnson's Great Society urban-renewal pipe dreams, and supported affirmative-action programs.

Liberal observers thought Cavanagh was doing a magnificent job. “Retail sales are up dramatically [in Detroit],” gushed the
National Observer
in 1965. “Earnings are higher. Unemployment is lower. . . . Physically Detroit has acquired freshness and vitality. Acres of slums have been razed, and steel and glass apartments . . .
have sprung up in their place.” People seemed to think that Cavanagh was the next Jack Kennedy.

But Cavanagh's progressive visions—and his political ambitions—exploded on a Saturday night in July 1967, when his city was overtaken with deadly race riots
ignited by a police raid on an African-American nightclub. Twenty-three civilians and sixteen national guardsmen died; 696 civilians and 493 guardsmen were wounded.

Cavanagh's progressive policies hadn't done much for Detroit. And neither would Young's. He might have chosen to be a healer—like Virginia's first black governor, Doug Wilder, or Los Angeles's first black mayor, Tom Bradley. But Young never outgrew his early progressive roots. He remained angry, bitter, confrontational, and often profane. Sociologist James Q. Wilson summed him up like this: “Young rejected the integrationist goal in favor of a flamboyant, black-power style that won him loyal followers, but he
left the city a fiscal and social wreck.” Even the
New York Times
had to admit that Young seemed “to revel in
the sort of polarization that other politicians dread.”

Young pursued the same sort of big-government projects Cavanagh had loved. He built the most expensive public mass-transit project in American history, a 2.94-mile “People Mover,” as well as a grandiose $350 million “
Renaissance Center” in Detroit's fading downtown.
Few citizens ever used the People Mover and the Renaissance Center also flopped. Young
later sold it to General Motors for $80 million. Scandals on the Water Board and in the Police Department marred his later terms, and
federal investigators probed his efforts to guide contracts to black-owned companies.

Young left office in January 1994, but Detroit's die had already been cast. The city was too far gone along the path of progressive politics to reform itself. Young's worst successor was a fellow who took Cavanagh's title of Detroit's youngest mayor. Elected at just thirty-one years old in 2001, Kwame Kilpatrick eventually found himself convicted on a staggering multiplicity of corruption charges.

His Honor is scheduled to be released in 2041.

♣

A lot of people have
written Detroit off. It's been forever ruined by the Left, they say. It has no hope.

But that's not true.

Detroit has a chance at rebirth, just as America does. If we allowed the city to be truly free (creating incentives to bring in private enterprise and create jobs, lifting red tape and regulations that make it more cost-effective for industries to locate elsewhere), then Detroit could rise again. There is nothing in the DNA of the people of Detroit that keeps them from succeeding.

But we need to do more than just provide job opportunities and ease regulations. We need to cure the citizens of Detroit—and increasingly many citizens across America—of a debilitating and, in some cases, lifelong addiction. Addiction to broken promises. Addiction to the same leaders offering the same failed ideas. Addiction to dependency and learned helplessness. Addiction to fear. Addiction to lies.

I know something about addiction. I'm an alcoholic. Which means that I am an addict. I know how hard it is to quit something that can
do you great damage. The first step to recovery is to recognize what you are addicted to. And to find ways to substitute something else for that drug, whatever it may be.

For those who have become addicted to fear because of their progressive dealers, we must offer the counter to fear. That is hope.

History has always been about a choice between fear and hope. World War II pitted an ideology based on fear of Jews, of gays, of “outsiders,” of Germany's loss of prestige and power, against the free-enterprise system, an ideology based on the hope that people can transcend and rise about their circumstances, can strive, can achieve, can fail and try again.

Or consider the Cold War, which pitted America against Communists whose ideology thrived on the fear of inequality and the evils of the “capitalist system” that supposedly enriched only the few.

Progressives, as we've seen, promote the state—more regulations, more taxes, more rules, more restraints—as the answer to these fears. That is always their mantra, always their default. Give your power to us. We'll take care of you.

Like the saber-toothed cat, fear stalks us all. The question is, what do you do about it? Was Steve Jobs, who was once fired from Apple before returning to the company, afraid of failing again? Of course he was. Was Walt Disney afraid that his movies wouldn't sell or that his theme parks—which were thought impractical and too expensive by almost everyone—would become duds? Of course.

The greatest people in America—the most successful pioneers in all walks of life—experience fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Even those who are working in their own communities and neighborhoods—fighting for the lives of the unborn, opposing new laws and rules that restrict freedom—are often afraid. Speaking out, being criticized, being ignored—they are all scary things. But the successful don't let fear control them. They acknowledge it and say,
Yes, I'm afraid, so what?
That's the secret.