The left says the right is willfully overlooking the deeper causes of the city’s distress. | REUTERS Detroit, the right's perfect pinata

In one place, conservative pundits have found a symbol of everything they charge is wrong with the left’s policies.

Welcome to Detroit — the latest bull’s eye for commentators on the right who have zeroed in on what they see as the three evils of liberalism, neatly condensed within city limits: Unions run amok pillaging the city’s coffers; corrupt Democratic politicians with no Republican in power since the 1960s; and a failed big-government welfare state.


The Motor City’s epic downfall, the conservatives pundits say, also is a warning sign to the rest of the country of what can happen if liberals continue in power, unchecked.

Republican strategist Mike Murphy suggested on Friday taking advantage of the symbolism of the broken city by staging the Republican National Convention there in 2016. “Hey RNC convention, why not Detroit ’16? Just like ’80. Tell a story, start the comeback,” Murphy tweeted. “Detroit is a big message opp.”

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For their part, voices on the left have charged the right with alarmist demagoguing, willfully overlooking the larger and deeper causes of the bankrupt city’s distress which they argue have little to do with Democratic governance.

But that hasn’t slowed the commentariat from attacking with glee from the right:

Rush Limbaugh on Fox News: “The town has been a Petri dish of everything Democrat party stands for. You have massive welfare states where citizens are given things left and right in order to buy their votes. You have no opposition whatsoever.”

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Ann Coulter on Fox News: “[Detroit was] the gem of the United States of America. First, it was destroyed by the mob with the race riots. Then it was destroyed by the unions driving the jobs abroad.”

Charles Krauthammer in his column: “It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein’s Law and yell, ‘Stop.’ You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff.”

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Even Ted Nugent, who earlier in his music career was widely known as the “Motor City Madman,” got in on the act, telling TMZ: “Liberal Democrats took hold of the greatest, most productive city on earth and turned it into a bloodsucker excuse-making hell. If allowed to continue, our President will do the same to the whole country. Heartbreaking and tragic.”

It’s like “a kid in a candy store,” Bob Garfield, the host of NPR’s “On the Media,” which had an episode devoted to the Detroit, said of conservative commentators’ feeding frenzy. “I mean if you were looking for a poster child for all that ails the welfare state, look no further.”

The right’s pounding of the city’s unions has been unrelenting.

Often, said Republican strategist Richard Galen, organized labor is careful to engage in some kind of give and take — but not so in Detroit.

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“With [Detroit’s] public unions, there was never an end to the amount of the money that was available,” Galen said, calling the city “a symbol of dreadful policy.” “At some point, the city just collapsed under the weight of that.”

Conservative columnist George Will ripped the unions as parasites. “Government employees’ unions living parasitically on Detroit have been less aware than ichneumon larvae,” Will wrote.

Detroit owes more than $18 billion, mostly to public employee unions and to owners of municipal bonds. The debt includes $3.5 billion in unfunded pensions and $5.7 billion in underfunded health benefits for about 21,000 retired workers, according to a letter sent to Gov. Rick Snyder by Kevyn Orr, Detroit’s emergency manager. Retirees outnumber the city’s active workers by more than a 2-to-1 ratio. The burden of paying the pensions is one of the biggest strains on the Detroit’s finances.

A string of corruption scandals is another favorite point of attack for pundits on the right.

Democratic corruption is so bad in Detroit that it rivals the third world, said the Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel. “The depth of corruption and dysfunction is so fantastic, it’s gone so far past anything you can imagine, it’s so far that you might describe it as Third World dysfunction. There’s no need [for conservatives] to gin it up. It’s just right there. It’s there for the taking.”

In March, former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted of scheming to fix contracts and accepting bribes and kickbacks. He faces more than a decade in prison at his sentencing in September. Last year, the IRS put a special agent in charge of a task force to target corruption in the city. “The city of Detroit has been hit hard by public corruption crimes,” said Special Agent Erick Martinez last year at a press conference announcing the task force.

Lastly, conservative commentators are making hay with what they charge is a long history of Democratic mayors who pushed a liberal “tax-and-spend” approach to running the city.

“Misgovernance and the welfare state run amok played big part why [Detroit] can’t get itself up off the floor,” Commentary Magazine editor Jonathan Tobin told POLITICO.

“Everybody’s got their snout in the trough,” he added. “That is both the genius and biggest problem with liberal welfare government, because the way it works is it’s not just the poor that get subsidies, the middle class get subsidies in certain ways, although heavily taxed. It creates constituencies for the status quo and just continuing with the problems.”

Detroit has among the highest property taxes for homeowners in the country, the top commercial property tax and the second-highest industrial property tax, but nearly half of the owners of Detroit’s 305,000 properties failed to pay their tax bills last year. Those high taxes and over-regulation prevents new business from coming into the city to replace the dying ones, critics contend.

The Motor City has also been the benefit of federal programs from Washington, from the Model Cities program launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s to President Barack Obama’s bailout of the auto companies in 2009. When the bankruptcy was declared, pundits pounced, replaying Obama’s comments shortly before Election Day last year when he used his weekly radio address to tout his administration’s rescue of General Motors and Chrysler, saying it was the federal government that kept the auto companies afloat.

“But we refused to throw in the towel and do nothing,” Obama said in the Oct. 13 address. “We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt.”

Some media outlets and Obama’s supporters have responded that the president’s use of the word “Detroit” was a reference to the auto industry, not the city itself.

Meanwhile, pundits on the left have blamed Detroit’s decline on big picture issues, such as the de-industrialization of the Rust Belt and decline of manufacturing.

“Conservatives are using the most insulting language possible that they can come up with to blame unions, blame black people, blame their culture for Detroit’s troubles,” MSNBC host Ed Schulz said on his show in early August. “But the real parasites, my friends, are their conservative ideals that coming from state government and from the feds. Detroit is exactly what the Republicans want. They outsourced manufacturing jobs, attack unions, cut public services, and this is the result. Now they can wipe the slate clean because now they can start privatizing city assets.”

“It’s an obvious target for [the right], it’s part of a larger campaign they have to demonize urban America,” said Eric Boehlert, senior fellow at Media Matters. “They decided to adopt Detroit and make it a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with liberalism, urban America, and the Democratic party while completely ignoring the very specific challenges that Detroit faces.”