The number of socialist mayors going back more than three decades is, thankfully, low as a portion of all U.S. mayors. A few stand out: Ron Dellums was Oakland’s mayor from 2007 to 2011; Konstantine Anthony had a short run in Burbank, Calif., that ended last year; and, of course, Bernie Sanders, now a U.S. senator, was mayor of Burlington, Vt., for eight years in the 1980s.
A number of other cities have socialist members on their governing councils. But, again, as a portion of all municipal-level policymakers, their numbers are small. Wikipedia says there are only 100 socialists currently on city councils and county commissions combined.
Despite the relative paucity of socialist municipal-level elected officials, large cities tend to adopt policies that can reasonably be called socialist. In some cases, it’s unavoidable. Privatizing city streets, for instance, would be a difficult task. So would the untangling of water and utility provision, which have been socialized for more than a century. Nevertheless, urban centers often run on government programs.
Most of today’s cities have been shaped by the events of the first two decades of the 20th century, when “socialist politicians in the United States were prominent and active at the municipal level, holding office as government insiders,” says David R. Berman, who wrote “Socialist Mayors in the United States.”
Berman, a professor emeritus of political science at Arizona State University, believes that, “socialist mayors in over 200 small cities across the United States brought meaningful improvements in the quality of life for people in their communities, playing an important role in this period’s municipal reform movement.”
Read Kerry Jackson’s Free Cities Center article about the failure of public housing.
Read Jeremy Lott’s Free Cities Center review of “Centers for Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World.”
Yet, the most “meaningful improvements in the quality of life for people in their communities” come not from central planners intent on forcing their will on people but markets. As economist Milton Friedman famously said, “there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.”
The socialism that Berman is so complimentary of is more anchor than life preserver. It curbs people’s ability to cooperate and work together, activities that are critical to a thriving society and the vitality of cities.
“Life in modern civilization, life in what [Friedrich] Hayek calls the ‘Great Society,’ requires us to coordinate peacefully not only with the type of people we would have in tribal life – people familiar to us who share our own perspective and largely share our own ends and our own knowledge about the world – but also strangers,” according to Libertarianism.org.
The Austrian economist, famous for writing “The Road to Serfdom,” also argued that, “Civilization as we know it is inseparable from urban life.” Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal, nods to Hayek’s thinking by writing that the city is the source “of the West’s dynamic, world-transforming science, culture and prosperity.” His article is aptly named, “Freedom and the city.”
Socialist and progressive frameworks make dynamism difficult. Closer to impossible, really. These government-centric ideologies offer only top-down “solutions” that are in practice coercion and compulsion carried out by those in power. Everyone else must submit. The objective of the socialist man is to own not just politics but to own people.
Ugo Okere, a socialist candidate for the Chicago City Council in 2019, said publicly what many will say only in private when he confessed that he believes that “democratic socialism, to me, is about democratic control of every single facet of our life.” We’d say Chicago was fortunate that Okere wasn’t elected. But we can’t because the race in the city’s 40th Ward was won by Andre Vasquez, a Democratic Socialist who was reelected last year.
While socialism controls, the free market liberates. It allows us to voluntarily connect, and does so, said Hayek, in ways that no other human institution can. How can a city flourish if its inhabitants are disconnected through a cold, soulless system that has no room for spontaneity?
Every bustling city was built on the backs of entrepreneurs, who are key to economic prosperity but also bring together people of different “tribes.” Yet socialism and collectivism not only sever human connections, they dampen and often kill the entrepreneurial spirit.
“The result of today’s socialist renaissance could be the economic destruction of New York, and by extension the entrepreneurial spirit that is at the heart of the United States,” Jadan Horyn wrote in the Daily Signal in 2019, during the second year of the second term of leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio. “So it should be particularly concerning to our nation that today, New York’s exports are socialism, the corruption and cronyism that are endemic to accumulated power, and class divisions created by the destruction of the middle class.”
Monopoly government control is the reason public education is failing in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno and a number of other large California cities. It is why garbage infamously piles up rather than being picked up. It is unrepaired potholes, no matter how often we’re told Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” saved that city.
While most big-city mayors and council members would eschew the socialist label, they unfortunately promote policies that are socialist in nature, as they promote government-funded affordable housing and a variety of other programs hatched in City Hall and paid for by taxpayers. These top-down structures limit the ability of citizens to control their own lives.
The socialistic impulses to plan and manipulate gave us zoning, adding a hardship to urban life as work, housing, shopping, worship and other activities were separated from one another. These impulses have also given us painfully high taxes and the welfare state, which saps the life out of individuals and entire communities, and does nothing to attract the investment necessary for progress. Progressivism brought the blight of public housing.
None should wonder that big cities all over the country are struggling – or, according to some, on the edge of collapse. Municipal governments have tried to do too much, and they have no idea what they are doing anyway. The answers are not in city halls but in the industriousness and creativity of people who are not tied down by public policy and make our urban centers not merely habitable but vibrant places to live.
If we want to revive America’s cities, we need to combat failed socialist ideas and re-energize the role of private enterprise.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
