Will Chicago rise again? It’s up to us
History tells us that Chicago was forged in fire — sometimes literal, sometimes figurative.
The first great conflagration, of course, was the Chicago Fire of 1871, when a rough-hewn trading town was reduced to embers and rebuilt into a modern metropolis. Out of that blaze, like the mythical phoenix rose what the Chicago poet Carl Sandberg called the City of Big Shoulders, muscular and confident, powered by immigrants who put aside their ancient differences to forge its glorious future.
The second turning came amidst the global conflagration that was World War I, which fueled demand for the output of Chicago’s industrial powerhouse, making our town a powerful labor magnet which attracted Southern workers “up north,” some with Pullman porters as their Sherpas, in the Great Migration, which began to redefine the city’s demographics. The Irish, Italians, Poles, and Germans who built the city were joined by Blacks and Hispanics who found both opportunity and opposition.
The third great upheaval was another worldwide conflagration — World War II and its aftermath — the industrial zenith followed by the inexorable decline of smokestack America. The city that had produced meat, steel, and machines began to hemorrhage factories and jobs. Federal policy, free trade, and suburbanization combined to hollow out the neighborhoods that had once made Chicago a model of working-class prosperity, many of which went up in smoke in the riots triggered by assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Many thought the roaring flames of that fourth turning were the funeral pyre of our great city.
They were wrong. They underestimated our grit. Our determination. Our indomitable resilience.
Chicago reinvented itself. We rose once again, undaunted, in phoenix-like fashion, from the ashes of those senseless, traumatically tragic riots.
Now we find ourselves, whether we like it or not, in what could be called the Fifth Turning — a social and economic holocaust every bit as consequential if not more so as those former furious flames that forged us. The question before us is: How did we get here, and where are we going?
The disintegration of the city of neighborhoods
For nearly a century after the fire of 1871, Chicago functioned as a city of neighborhoods — a patchwork of ethnic parishes and blue collar pride. The Irish had their wards their parishes; the Poles and Italians theirs, European Jews theirs. The system wasn’t formally segregated; it was simply organic. People lived near their kin, went to church with their own, and built communities that were tough, proud, and — by the standards of human history — remarkably stable. We were less melting pot, more Balkanized along ethnic, religious, and class lines.
Then came the postwar Civil Rights revolution with its legal dismantling of restrictive covenants. The intention was noble, but the effect was destabilizing. The old parochial geography that had let contentious ethnic tribes coexist under a shared big civic tent suddenly vanished.
Simultaneously, the national economy shifted. Globalization and excessive unionization led to deindustrialization, and as a result the city began hemorrhaging blue collar jobs. The newly constructed interstate highway system sliced through neighborhoods and offered the middle class an escape route, an off ramp to seemingly greener pastures. Federal mortgage subsidies enabled too many to live beyond their means, raising justifiable public safety concerns. Unethical real estate agents fanned the flames of fear.
This toxic, multifactorial, perfect storm led the bulwark of the city that was the middle class to succumb to the siren song of the burgeoning suburbs.
By the 1980s, the city that Carl Sandburg had praised as the “stormy, husky, brawling, city of the big shoulders” had been transformed socioeconomically into a city of three Americas:
- An aristocracy of elite professionals downtown,
- An ethnic working class, tragically plagued by an underclass surviving on public aid or black-market hustles, and
- What remains of the old blue collar middle class still making this the city that works after all is said and done, despite the incompetence and fecklessness of the political hacks and DEI hires who are trying their best to run it into the ground.
Chicago went from 97 percent white in 1870 to one-third white today — among the most profound demographic shifts among major American cities. Some neighborhoods endured, but the civic glue dissolved, and many devolved into disaster zones.
A city at a crossroads
Like Caeser’s Gaul, today’s Chicago can be divided politically into three identity politics blocs:
- The Black bloc, centered on the South and West Sides.
- The Brown bloc, and
- The White bloc, bifurcated into:
- The progressive white-collar elites who dominate the knowledge industries; and,
- The residual working-class white ethnics — police officers, firefighters, city workers, and tradesmen who keep the lights on.
It’s an uneasy yet stable multipolar balance, but Chicago has always been a political balancing act. What’s needed, and sorely lacking, is an artful conductor who can orchestrate the soloists into a civic symphony.
Under the current mismanagement, dissonant notes abound. Crime is high, confidence is low, bankruptcy looms, and investment too often flees to red states.
The city government views business as a necessary evil, billionaires as policy failures (except, of course, “good ones” like Jelly Belly Pritzker and the Prince of Darkness George Soros, who do their best to ruin us). The denizens of DEI who seem bound and determined to run this town into the ground seem to view public safety as racist. Our poor excuse for a mayor is a race-grifting, incompetent socialist ideologue who mistakes slogans for solution. Our governor appears more interested in presidential dreams than his hometown’s fate. Don’t even get me started about Boss Toni Preckwinkle.
And yet, the makings of greatness abound.
Chicago remains the financial heart of the Midwest, the home of the futures and options markets that shape global commerce.
It is the logistical hub of America, the crossroads where rail, roadway, and air intersect due to the same geographic blessings its first permanent resident, Jean-Baptiste Point DuSable, leveraged when he established his trading post and homestead.
Our ship of state, blessed by the unrivaled beauty and bountiful font that is Lake Michigan, has the wind of the digital age in its civic sails.
- On the South Side, a quantum-computing corridor is emerging at the long fallow field that once was the site of the long-departed but never to be forgotten U.S. Steel South Works, where the industrial might of the nation was forged in the fire of its roaring blast furnaces through both world wars until the 1980s;
- In the West Loop and Fulton Market, AI startups and fintech incubators thrive. Google is there along with many other 21st Century enterprises that are our future.
- 1871, founded by Jelly Belly Pritzker before he sold his soul to the DSA devils, has incubated scores or more of stellar start-ups that have spawned thousands of high-paying tech jobs and transformed the leviathan hulk of the Merchandise Mart into a burgeoning, tech hub.
The bones of the old industrial giant that was Chicago have not turned to dust — instead, they are being rewired for the information age.
The challenge is not whether Chicago has assets. It’s whether we still have the civic will to use them.
What was lost may be outweighed by what we’ve gained
Adapt or die — that’s nature’s rule. In the aftermath of every catastrophic conflagration, that’s exactly what we’ve done — and thus, we live to fight another day.
In the old days, every immigrant group brought both pride and prejudice. The Irish and Poles fought; the Italians brawled with the Jews; the Germans distrusted them all. But they shared a common ethic — work, family, faith, and order — that enabled them to productively exist to their mutual benefit.
When the Great Migration and Hispanic immigration transformed the city, the newcomers also brought ambition — but from cultures shaped by the agrarian global South rather than the European North. The inevitable culture clash was traumatic, but like two planets colliding, we forged from the fiery collision something new — much different from our ethnic industrial legacy, but an alloy that has the potential to become something even better and more in tune with the digital age we live in — not paradise lost, but rather paradise found. If we have the will, it truly can be cooler by the lake in more ways than just the milder summer temperatures.
Yes, many of the old ethnic stalwarts fled, an exodus exacerbated by globalization that hollowed out the industrial base that Sandberg immortalized as well as the post-war Interstate expressways that enabled suburban commutes.
We mourn their passing — but we who remain must look forward, not back.
Tragically, in part as a result of that lamentable exodus, we are left with a city that too often feels leaderless and lawless. We have reached the point where the criminal class operates with impunity while the productive class contemplates departure. That is not progress; it’s civic suicide.
Our so-called leaders scold us that we cannot arrest our way back to greatness, and disrespectfully dismiss Chicago’s finest, our men and women in blue, as some sort of a disease. But the fact is that neither decarceration nor defunding law enforcement are the right means to the ends of peace and prosperity that we all so fervently desire.
Know this: these dual mandates are closely related. Peace is the prerequisite to prosperity. Without public safety, arguably the most important human right, the free-market animal spirits that built this city — from the stockyards to the startups—cannot thrive. There’s a reason we have disinvestment, food deserts, and all the other ills that plague our city, and there’s no excuse for it. No root cause, no ancient history of oppression gives anyone a free pass for the violent crime that is the nemesis of prosperity. Civil rights should not be allowed to be the enemy of civil society. Desegregation should not mean disintegration. That’s not what Dr. King gave his life for.
The irony is that the people of color Mayor 6.6, Boss Toni Preckwinkle and her puppet Dim Tim Evans purport to represent are the principal victims of the thug life criminals they foolishly protect from the “adverse impact” that inevitably results when law enforcement and the criminal justice system are at liberty to do their jobs objectively and professionally given the reality of the demographics of our criminal element. The hard-working people of color in this city want acceptable public safety more than anyone else, because they comprise almost 90 percent of crime victims. They know public safety is the fundamental human right, the sine qua non of civil liberties: Freedom from violence, vandalism, and theft. Their leaders are totally out of touch with their own base, which they cynically and callously use and abuse as a beast of burden to fuel their avarice and blind, unholy ambition. They are apologists for crime, not advocates for the law and order for which their long-suffering constituents so desperately yearn.
That has to stop ASAP.
A phoenix rising
What Chicago needs now is a coalition of the willing: People of goodwill, moral character, and common sense of all races, colors, creeds, and classes who are fed up with decline and ready to rebuild.
We need to restore the faith of all Chicagoans of good will — the remnant of the working class, the ambitious immigrants, the entrepreneurs, and even the disillusioned social justice warriors who have been mugged by the reality of life under our socialist regime’s appalling fiscal and administrative incompetence — in the possibility of progress in the true sense of the word, as in the century of progress celebrated by the 1933 World’s Fair. We need to take back our schools from the ideologues who treat classrooms as piggybanks and woke brainwashing factories. We must restore good government and make it good politics again.
This is not “gentrification;” it’s aspiration — the human drive to make things better.
Let Chicago once again become the magnet for the best and brightest.
Let us clean up the streets, defend the police who defend us, and make this city safe for commerce, creativity, culture, and community.
We will never again be the hog-butcher of the world or the steel capital of America, but we can be something even better and just as mighty: a digital, financial powerhouse, the capital of the Midwest’s new information economy and the crossroads of America, still the greatest nation in the history of the world and one with a potentially bright future. Chicago can be the quantum-computing hub, the AI training ground, the fintech and cryptocurrency center that drives the next American renaissance.
Yes, contrarions, there’s reason for hope amidst the darkness. The best may be yet to come, in spite of all the disgusting Sturm and Drang, the corruption and divisiveness, the stupidity and hypocrisy, the bitterness and rumors of bankruptcy, the disgusting reality that the only thing we’re capital of now is murder.
The fifth turning — and the choice ahead
Every generation faces its challenges and choices: Whether to take them as cause for despair or opportunities for greatness.
Our ancestors rebuilt after the fire, industrialized to win world wars, and expanded after the depression. We, their heirs, must rebuild after decay.
We have the infrastructure. We have the markets. We have the location. We have the talent.
What we need is new leadership and the courage to act.
The city’s ruling class — Johnson, Pritzker, Preckwinkle, Stacey Davis Gates (aka the Notorious SDG), and their fellow travelers — cling to a politics of grievance and redistribution, not growth. They would rather divide the city into victims and villains than unite it in purpose.
They are not Chicago’s future.
That future belongs to those who still believe that enterprise and equality can coexist, that prosperity must be earned, and that the best social program is a good job in a safe neighborhood.
That is the new Chicago Manifesto: To reclaim our city, to restore its moral and physical order, and to make it once again a beacon of peace through prosperity.
If we can do that — if we can rise, as we have before, from the ashes of our own mistakes — then this Fifth Turning will not end in ruin but in renewal.
Listen: Opportunity is knocking. Let us resolve to seize it.
