Cities used to be where innovators, industrialists, and financial backers gathered to accomplish great feats and build, through architectural marvels and monuments to their achievements, the great innovations that we now take for granted. Whether Edison and his Menlo Park laboratory or Silicon Valley, cities once used to be where the best went to thrive. Now, not so much, though one mayor has ditched the democrats in an attempt to turn that around.
Crime, high taxes, ridiculous government regulation, and yet more crime have made most of the formerly beautiful cities of the future that spanned America hellholes for their residents, spots on a map where carjackings and muggings are more common than innovative break throughs and great leaps forward, or even just a stable and steady economy.
One mayor just realized that Democrat governance is, to a large extent, the problem leading to that and so switched parties to try and turn his town around. That is Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas, who just switched from being a Democrat to being a Republican and described why in a powerful op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
In the op-ed, titled “America’s Cities Need Republicans, and I’m Becoming One,” Mayor Johnson wrote, “the future of America’s great urban centers depends on the willingness of the nation’s mayors to champion law and order and practice fiscal conservatism.”
Building on that point, Mayor Johnson wrote, “Our cities desperately need the genuine commitment to these principles (as opposed to the inconsistent, poll-driven commitment of many Democrats) that has long been a defining characteristic of the GOP.”
Continuing, he added, “In other words, American cities need Republicans — and Republicans need American cities. “When my political hero Theodore Roosevelt was born, only 20% of Americans lived in urban areas. By the time he was elected president, that share had doubled to 40%. Today, it stands at 80%. As America’s cities go, so goes America.”
Though Dallas struggles with crime, as do most American cities, Mayor Johnson has been praised for working with rather than against the police force in the city, much in contrast to many other Democrat mayors in America’s crime-ridden cities.
Speaking about Mayor Johnson’s record on the policing issue, Austin Police Retired Officers Association Dennis Farris told Fox News Digital, “When you have a mayor who supports the police not only in his words but his actions, you see what happens to crime in your city.”
Continuing, Mr. Farris noted that Mayor Johnson has actually faced the problem of crime and led on it rather than dithering, telling Fox News Digital, “Mayor Johnson has led from the front and it showed when he was re-elected without one single challenger — that’s unheard of in a major U.S. city.”
Despite that, Dallas still struggles with rampant crime, particularly in its inner-city areas, and has a homeless problem that is less bad than the infamously horrible homeless situations in cities like San Francisco but is still a painful reminder of societal decline for residents of the sweltering hot city.
Featured image credit: By US Department of Labor – L-21-06-10-A-312, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111556401
"*" indicates required fields