Voters soundly rejected the Democratic Party this month, not just in swing states or red states. In the bluest of blue communities, in the nation’s largest and most liberal cities, voters moved noticeably to the right. President-elect Donald Trump did not, of course, win San Francisco, Chicago, or New York City, but he did better in those cities than any Republican candidate has done in decades.
Trump’s unique brand of politics is not the only reason why. Many Democratic writers have observed that voters in big blue cities are furious. They voted for the highest taxes in the nation, but the Democrats running their states and local governments proved incapable of delivering, or unwilling to deliver, the high-quality government services that were promised. Public transit systems are unsafe and unsanitary. Homeless people, who are often on drugs, and vagrants are everywhere. There aren’t enough police to respond to calls. Trash disfigures urban landscapes. Public schools are a mess.
Soft-on-crime district attorneys funded by Democratic megadonor George Soros are partly to blame, and two such district attorneys were defeated in the left-wing strongholds of Los Angeles and Oakland. However, the Democratic Party’s inability to govern goes deeper than that. There is cancer within the party that makes it incapable of governing effectively, except in deep-red states.
The problem preventing Democrats from governing effectively is public sector unions — Big Labor.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, government workers were specifically excluded from the legislation’s protections.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt wrote.
“It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management,” he continued. “The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations.”
Despite this sensible and obvious warning about the danger of public sector unionization, Democrats began giving government unions collective bargaining privileges first in New York City and then all of New York state. Then, other states began adopting the practice, including California in 1968.
Today, the California Democratic Party, and thereby California state government as a whole, is completely controlled by public sector unions. Nothing happens in the state without their approval. Including the California Teachers Association, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and the California State Employees Association, public sector unions collect over a billion dollars in dues every year.
Not a dime of that is spent improving the delivery of government services to taxpayers. All of it goes to expanding what government employees extract from taxpayers in the form of more pay and more generous health and pension benefits or shrinking what government employees are obliged to give in return to taxpayers by limiting the hours they work and expanding vacation time.
When private sector unions suck too much value out of a private company, and that company can no longer deliver a good product at a competitive price, the business loses market share and must negotiate a better deal with its union employees or go out of business.
However, governments are monopolies. When a local government fails to provide law and order, repair the roads, or provide a good public education, taxpayers’ options are limited or nonexistent. If they are wealthy, they can send their children to private schools or move to gated communities. Many wealthy Democrats have done that in California and elsewhere.
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However, for the average taxpayer, when a Democratic Party-controlled government commands state and local governments, and when those governments fail to deliver basic services, there is recourse other than through the ballot box. No recourse, that is, other than to leave the state entirely, which millions of Californian families have chosen to do.
Until the stranglehold public sector unions have on California and other states run by Democrats is broken, the party of the Left will fail to deliver good services at reasonable prices, cities will continue to lose population, and Democrats will lose elections.