Why Can't The Republicans Compete In America's Cities?

A lot has been made about how Hillary and other Democrats have failed to address the needs of rural America and have failed electorally in rural areas. Democratic policy for rural America is actually far better than Republican policy but that isn’t where Democrats have failed. They’ve failed culturally in areas where social conservatism and religionist superstition is still powerful, something that would be hard to avoid while sweeping fear more progressive areas, the big cities. This past cycle, Hillary kicked ass in urban America, while losing in under-populated rural districts— from Maine’s second district to the Dakotas. Wyoming, whose 3 electoral votes were awarded by 174,248 Trump voters had far fewer voters than the city of Detroit, where Hillary beat Trump 95.0-3.1%, but whose votes were meaningless in the electoral college.

Detroit was Trump’s worst-performing city— but not the only one where he was uncompetitive. Trump’s percentage in some of the biggest cities in America, where he failed to score even 20% of the vote:

• Detroit- 3.1%
• Washington- 4.1%
• Seattle- 8.4%
• San Francisco- 9.2%
• Baltimore- 10.5%
• Minnespolis- 11.8%
• Chicago- 12.4%
• Portland (OR)- 12.8%
• Boston- 13.9%
• Cleveland- 14.3%
• New Orleans- 14.7%
• Madison- 15.0%
• Philadelphia- 15.3%
• St. Louis- 15.7%
• Salt Lake City- 16.3%
• Los Angeles- 16.4%
• St. Paul- 16.9%
• NYC- 18.0%
• Milwaukee- 18.4%
• Buffalo- 18.2%
• Denver- 18.9%

You might be able to guess what urban studies expert Richard Florida would say about this and how he would tie it in to his theories about density and the creative class and why progressive politics thrives in areas with high concentrations of technology workers, artists, musicians, gays and lesbians and "high bohemians,” (collectively the creative class), groups with a higher level of economic development and an open, dynamic, personal and professional environment which attracts more creative people, as well as businesses and capital. A couple of weeks ago Florida wrote a piece about how Jane Jacobs, writing decades ago, predicted the rise of Trump… or at least Trumpism. He reminds his readers that Jacobs “was one of the most prescient writers of the 20th century. In the 1960s, when suburbanization and heavy-handed urban renewal programs threatened urban neighborhoods, she published her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities. During the 1970s and 1980s, when policy-makers and economists focused on industrial competitiveness and national economic strategy, she drew attention to the role of cities and clustering in powering innovation and economic growth in her books The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.”

But she may well have saved her best for last.

At a time when pundits and political scientists were celebrating the end of history, pointing to an emerging Democratic majority and extolling the virtues of a flat world of globalization, she ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and populist backlash in her final work, Dark Age Ahead. Eerily prescient as always, rereading the 2005 book today serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump.

Jacobs outlines an increasing distrust of politicians and politics, a burgeoning new urban crisis in cities, worsening environmental degradation, entrenched segregation, and an “enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class” as signals and symptoms of a coming Dark Age.

Nationalism and xenophobia form the core of Jacobs’ Dark Age. “Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor,” as “self-imposed isolation” leads to “a fortress mentality,” she writes.

That mentality transforms logic into myth, Jacobs writes, with a conservatism that “looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” (Jacobs borrows that phrase from Karen Armstrong’s Short History of Islam, who points to Ferdinand and Isabella driving Muslims out of Spain in 1492, signaling a turning point for Mesopotamia in the Middle Ages).

Historically speaking, dark ages have come upon us relatively quickly, as “radical jolts” lead to the collapse of once-vital economic political and cultural institutions. Europe’s original Dark Age came about as local governments and city-states were “expunged by imperial decree and were replaced by a centralized military despotism.” Jacobs points to the cities of the Roman Empire, which lost the advantages of subsidiarity—closeness to the people—and fiscal accountability to the imperial treasury before its collapse. In the book, she asks a very big question that stands at the heart of dark ages: “how and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?”

Jacobs finds the answer in the rise of “mass amnesia.” The notion of a widespread, “permanent and profound” society-wide loss of memory, which seemed so strange and out of place when she wrote the book, seems suddenly all too real in a world of Trump and Brexit—a world where every new outrage quickly leads to another, where facts have no meaning.

The Five Pillars of Dark Age Descent

According to Jacobs, our own dark age is taking shape around the erosion of “five key pillars” of society.

The first is the decline of family and community. The same politicians who call families the foundation of society undertake policies that weaken and undermine them. The replacement of extended families with nuclear ones make it impossible for many to cover the cost of housing. Falling birth rates mean a smaller workforce to take care of an aging population.

At the same time, the broader community falls victim to market pressures, materialism, and the hegemony of brands. Jacobs points especially to the automobile as a “destroyer of worlds” that not only wastes energy and promotes sprawl, but skews priorities from public interest to self-interest.

The second is the decline of education, which has been transformed into vocational training. Education becomes an individualistic investment instead of a public good that produces well-rounded citizens. When that happens, jobs and profit become the sole measure of progress and ultimate justification for political choices, at the expense of everything else.

The third is an attack on science, or what she calls false analogies that mask reality. “If a body of inquiry becomes disconnected from the scientific state of mind, that unfortunate segment of knowledge is no longer scientific,” she writes. “It stagnates.” Objectivity and scientific progress are replaced with dogma.

The fourth pillar is the “dumbing down” of taxes. In place of public investments that build cities and societies, taxes and government investment come to be seen as waste. The result is that all sorts of public goods—education, transit, infrastructure and the social safety which contribute to a functioning and cohesive society—start to break down. Jacobs perceptively identifies the looming “new urban crisis” of unaffordable housing, gaping inequality, escalating sprawl, and congestion facing cities as the result of this sort of attack on taxes and public investment.

The fifth and final pillar is the subversion of the “learned professions” such as medicine, law, architecture, engineering and journalism. We cannot possibly learn every facet of the world, so professions are needed to instill trust and maintain common welfare. Doctors, for example, adhere to a Hippocratic Oath. Lawyers have ethical requirements to adhere to. When such professions come under attack and their norms and functions are undermined, Jacobs notes, society falls victim to the whims of “frauds, brutes, and psychopaths.”

What Would Jane Do?

How to break the cycle and combat our own impending Trumpist dark age? On this, Jacobs provides two important insights.

On the one hand, her life’s work shows us that the vitality of the city and its neighborhoods is the ultimate antidote to darkness. Jacobs had her pessimistic side. In Scranton, she saw first-hand the devastating toll of the Great Depression on industries and workers. As a young woman, she saw the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in Europe. During the 1950s, she witnessed the chilling effect of McCarthyism. Robert Moses-style urban renewal reflected the same unbridled top-down power.

For Jacobs, cities and neighborhoods are much more than walkable, mixed-use places, and much more than engines of innovation and economic growth. They are also bulwarks against the forces of darkness—the fonts of social progress, of human civilization, and of democracy itself.

On the other hand, Jacobs implores us to do everything in our power to protect ourselves from the forces of top-down power and mass amnesia that would destroy our communities and the key pillars of human civilization.

One of the last times we spoke, I asked Jacobs where she and her colleagues found the strength to combat Robert Moses and the incredible centralized power he represented. At the time, she had just finished Dark Age Ahead and was absorbed with her tellingly titled but unfinished last book, A Brief Biography of the Human Race. Still, her optimism came through.

For the longest time, she told me, people would avoid their protests. But one day, a few people started picking up their leaflets; soon many more were joining in and ultimately this cast of neighborhood characters won the battle and saved their neighborhood.

If a dark age starts with a radical jolt, it ends with one too.

Maybe Jane got her ideas from Freddy and Sally Mutant and the gang, the San Francisco punk rockers, The Mutants, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This is one my indie label, 415 Records, released in 1980:

It All Comes Out-- I Was In A Mental Institution... With The Cramps And The Mutants

Next month it will have been 36 years since The Cramps and The Mutants played a show at what was then Napa State Mental Hospital northwest of San Francisco. I had some involvement in organizing that Saturday morning excursion and one of the few records of it-- aside from the video up top-- is an article I wrote about it immediately afterwards for the New York Rocker. (If you don't want to subscribe, you can read it here on The Mutants' website.)

Lately there is a lot of renewed interest and in the last few months I've been interviewed 4 or 5 times about the show. In some cases, I found out more than I knew-- like that in 2003, the concert was recreated by performance artists in England. One of those interviewers was Ralph Montaño from the Office of Communications of the California Department of State Hospitals. "Unfortunately," he wrote me, "the Department of State Hospitals does not have a record of how this historic concert came about. So I’m piecing together what I can." He informed me the concert has its own Facebook page. This week Ralph's story ran in the Department of State Hospitals' internal newsletter. He gave me permission to republish it here on DWT.

Iconic 1978 Napa State Hospital concert personified punk
By Ralph Montano, DSH-Sac

In March, patients at DSH-Napa were given a rare opportunity to see and hear a true rock and roll legend in action.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, DSH-Napa hosted a concert by a Bay Area band called the Irish Newsboys, which features a guitar player by the name of Barry “The Fish” Melton. For those who don’t know it, 45 years ago, Melton played the third day of Woodstock as a member of the band Country Joe and The Fish.

Another member of the Irish Newsboys, Kevin Fagan, is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and he wrote a first-person account of the performance. Reading Fagan’s account brought to mind another Napa hospital concert, one that has become so famous it’s considered a defining moment in rock and roll history.

In June of 1978, what was then Napa State Hospital hosted a concert for its patients by two bands that were part of a new genre of music called punk rock. That show, by the San Francisco-based band The Mutants and New York’s The Cramps, might have disappeared into obscurity were it not for one thing-- a video camera.

Video footage of The Cramps performance from that show has become legendary. Copies of video are readily available on the internet and the video has its own Facebook page with 500 followers. The footage has been featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2003, the entire performance was recreated by performance artists in England to mark the 25th anniversary of the concert. Their duplication of the concert, titled File Under Sacred Music, features actors playing both the musicians and the audience at the show.

Thirty-six years after the concert, Mental Notes was not able to find a lot of information about how the concert came about. The executive director of the hospital at that time was Dr. Dennis Michael O’Connor, who served in that capacity from 1977 to 1983, before becoming the director of the Department of Mental Health from 1983 to 1990. Attempts to reach Dr. O’Connor in Monterey, the last known area where he was practicing years ago, were not successful.

However, Mental Notes was able to track down one witness to the show, a man named Howie Klein. At the time, Klein was a rock and roll journalist in San Francisco with a late-night radio show and connections to music fanzines in New York. Klein wrote a review of the concert for the July 1978 issue of a punk fanzine called New York Rocker. From those humble beginnings, Klein went on to become president of Reprise/Warner Bros. Records from 1989 to 2001. He developed the careers of dozens of bands including: Depeche Mode, The Ramones, The Pretenders, Alanis Morissette, Green Day and Ice-T.

But on that particular June day, Klein was just one of several people tagging along with a band. The Mutants had publicized their upcoming Napa gig in San Francisco. The city’s punk community grew up around a nightclub called Mabuhay Garden, in the North Beach neighborhood.

“Back in those days there wasn’t an infrastructure in the punk scene,” Klein said. “It was a small, tight community. Probably 200 people in San Francisco said they were going to show up (in Napa),” Klein said. “But 190 of them didn’t get up early enough to go. I went up with some of The Mutants. There were probably ten of us and the band.”

How did he and others get in to the concert? “Everyone who came just said they were with the band, and they carried an amplifier or something,” Klein said. He recalls the staff at the hospital being very friendly to the bands and thanking them for driving out to perform.

The Cramps were actually the first band to take the stage, which was nothing more than an outdoor concrete amphitheater. There was hardly any lighting set up for the show so The Cramps had the advantage of playing in the light of the setting Napa sun while The Mutants would end up playing mostly in the dark.

The fact that there was a portable video camera in the crowd was not something unusual, said Klein. “Yeah, sure, I noticed the video being made. They were part of the punk scene back then. They didn’t stand out because they were always there. They filmed every punk show in San Francisco at the time. They were always there.”

Behind the camera was a member of an artist collective in San Francisco called Target Video. The concert was recorded in black and white film by the first commercially available video camera, which required a separate battery pack to roll the film.

In 2008, the Los Angeles Times interviewed the videographer, Joe Rees, about the show. “It was incredible,” Rees told the Times. “The Cramps were at the height of their powers. You couldn’t tell the patients from the band … Many of the patients danced right next to the band, mimicking their movements perfectly.”

The blurred line between performers and audience still stands out in Klein’s mind as well.

“With other rock shows at the time, there was always a barrier between the audience and the band,” Klein said. “In punk, the barrier wasn’t as steep. That was kind of the rule, anyway, in 1978. It was part of the punk ethos; the band and the audience are on the same level. But it was even more so at this concert. The audience and band were together and everyone was participating. It was just the way it should be.”

In his New York Rocker review, Klein wrote that The Cramps and The Mutants concert at Napa was the “greatest new wave show I’ve ever seen-- and this boy’s been to England and seen the Clash.”

“Well, to be fair, I said that about pretty much every show I liked,” Klein said 36 years later. But he added that the influence this concert at Napa has had on punk rock is undeniable. It is a glimpse at a new rock genre in its infancy and at its most raw and natural state.

“Little kids were influenced by the ethos around this concert and other events,” Klein said. “It was those kids, with this early influence, that brought punk to where it is today.”

So what the article didn't cover-- I guess for obvious reasons-- is that the show got a lot of the patients overly excited and there was a breakout. Well, that's a little dramatic. There wasn't much security and the patients just went running down the road as the vans were driving back to the city. I recall a security guard saying that they'd get hungry and cold and come home on their own. One didn't. She was hitchhiking about half a mile up the road and we picked her up and drove her back to San Francisco. She fit right in with the punk community and a year or two later moved to New York, where she became the in-house booking agent for one of the top punk clubs. Tragically, she was hit by a car in front of the club one night. She had always been so kind to all the San Francisco bands looking for a place to play in New York.

The video below, "Insect Lounge," by The Mutants is part of a 3-song 7", one of the earliest records released on my indie label, 415 Records. I hope you enjoy it. It's totally out of print, of course, and only a few thousand copies were ever made in the first place. I have a few in totally mint condition. If you're a collector and would like one... well, make a nice contribution to the Blue America PAC and I'll send it to you as a gift.