Detroit is bankrupt. The battles over the city’s financial problems are in the courts right now, as the governor, a federal judge and the lawyers try to find the right legal solution, but the bottom line is the same—a once-great American city is now desolate.
This news has been greeted with what I see as an almost unseemly glee on the political Right. The blame for the city’s collapse has been laid at the left-wing Democratic leadership that runs Motown, as they do most every American city. A line that started on Twitter and has floated around goes to the effect of “If President Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit”, an obvious jab at the president’s earlier remark that if he had a son, the boy would look like Trayvon Martin.
Let’s for the moment set aside the tackiness of mocking a comment made about a dead teenager, regardless of what you think of the verdict or Obama’s view of it. Let’s instead focus on the complete stupidity of tying Obama to the Detroit mess, when in fact conservative ideology bears its own share of responsibility.
Detroit’s downfall has taken place over decades, so it’s important that our understanding of the forces that destroyed it also took place over decades. I trust I’m breaking no new ground in saying that I believe we can start with the decline of the auto industry, both in the volume of people the industry employed and the quality of the wages and benefits paid.
The domestic auto industry suffered because, other than a couple notable instances, the federal government crafted bad policy, and it was policy that conservatives gladly pushed. Specifically, I refer to the free trade agenda. Conservatives placed the purity of the global free market ahead of the Rustbelt.
It was chest-thumping patriots on the Right who decided that it didn’t matter whether the battle for market share was won in Tokyo, Mexico City or Detroit, so long as the efficiency of the market prevailed. Any efforts to suggest that trade protection—through tariffs on foreign cars—were roundly denounced. Conservatives who protested this form of market idolatry—notably Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, and to a lesser extent Mike Huckabee in 2008, where shouted down and Buchanan’s refusal to keep quiet about what was happening eventually cost him his standing in the Republican Right.
The theory was that any protection given to the auto industry would result in bad products and hurt consumers. But Chrysler was bailed out in 1979, and I haven’t heard anyone griping. And the auto bailout of the late ‘00s, set in motion by George W. Bush and implemented fully by Obama, has at least given the city a thread of something to hold onto.
Automakers that stay in Detroit—or anywhere in the United States for that matter, do so it at a loss of profit. They could set up shop in Mexico or elsewhere in the Third World, employ cheap labor and ship back to the American market, thanks to the Wall Street-friendly trade arrangements put through by the alliance of Bill Clinton, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. A bailout for those that struggle under the weight of a flawed global economic system is more than reasonable and both times that we’ve done it, it’s worked out for the best.
Detroit has problems that go well beyond the decline of the auto industry. I have no doubt that if conservatives catalogued all the missteps made by city leaders over the past six decades, I’d probably agree with the critique 90-95 percent of the time. But the fact remains the city was one of a few that had to operate in a flawed structure, one that was created by the very people who are piling on Detroit right now.
I like sports analogies and since this is Detroit, one regarding a bad football team will suffice here. When the city’s Lions went 0-16 in 2008, it didn’t excuse the coaching staff. They were fired and they should have been. But nor did it excuse the front office, whose lousy decisions and structure set the chain of events in motion. Even good coaching wasn’t going to do better than 6-10. Management made decisions that meant bad coaching would result not just in underperformance, but in absolute disaster.
That’s what happened in Detroit—the federal government, locked in the grip of free-trade ideology was the front office and the city’s incompetent leadership was the coaching staff. If we fire one, let’s fire both.
What’s happened to the Rustbelt is a subject that cuts across party lines. Both Clinton and Gingrich are responsible for accelerating the decline. Both Bush and Obama helped with the solution. Now it’s time for leaders of both parties to decide that restoring Detroit and restoring the Rustbelt matters more than partisan political points. I might not be an Obama supporter, but when it comes to Detroit he’s been on the right side of the fight.
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