LIBERALS DECRY URBAN DECAY THEY DID MUCH TO CREATE

Former Sen. Tom Eagleton's column, printed alongside here today, makes many valid points and is, as usual, worth reading. He concisely and accurately describes the crushing burdens of urban governance that have shrunk his beloved City of St. Louis, leaving huge stretches of its north side looking almost like Berlin, 1945. Few there are who would dispute the Eagletonian conclusion that "Metropolitan St. Louis cannot flourish with a cancerous core."

What prescriptions exist for a remedy? Sen. Eagleton is an amiable, delightful man, and he's been a dedicated, principled public servant his entire adult life. For answers, though, we must do more than chronicle depressing urban decline, as Sen. Eagleton so ably does in his brief piece. We must ask precisely how America's urban cores arrived at this pitiable condition. The answers are crucial, for Sen. Eagleton is describing a catastrophe that is the inescapable result of pursuing policies he, his heroes and allies have sincerely believed in, and fought for, all his life.

For decades, the answer of liberals such as Sen. Eagleton took these forms:

More government spending (We'll have a War on Poverty!). More public housing (Isn't Pruitt Igoe great!). More social programs and ever higher educational spending (Condoms-in-the-schoolrooms!). More welfare, with looser qualifying rules and greater incentives for sloth, corroding families and encouraging fathers to leave the children they spawn (Unto the third and fourth generation!).

Not every social program of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was bad; Head Start, for instance, is a promising program with much to commend it. But it is that rare exception in the liberals' urban desolation.

The liberals charged on: Bureaucracy! Government action! New and ever larger federal programs, agencies, departments and bureaus! And of course, higher and higher taxes, placing ever heavier burdens on the work, the saving and the investment that make our economy hum. Unceasingly, liberal politicians and their news media allies fostered the notion that support for huge government redistribution programs was the sole litmus test for "compassion." Anyone who failed that rigged "compassion" test was a Neanderthal, unfit for the liberals' brave new world of modern governance. The tax-and-spending machine rolled on, and a more efficient vote-buying mechanism was never devised.

Let's take care to recall what liberals did to our criminal justice system. During the extended period of liberal ascendancy, stretching from FDR's presidency through the late 1960s, they appointed their liberal judges to the U.S. Supreme Court, and to all other levels. These judges went feverishly about the business of tilting the game against police, against prosecutors, against victims, all in the name of expanding the rights of the accused.

The Gospel says, "By their fruits you shall know them." What happens when several decades worth of liberals have their way with our criminal justice system, and the rights of victims are ignored in an orgy of expanding rights for criminals? Answer: An explosion of violent crime, unmatched in any other modern society. Example: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, flagship paper for the Eagleton column, has taken to running a grim "box score" on that declining city's runaway murder epidemic. On Saturday, August 3, 1991, as part of an article detailing the drive-by shooting of a 17-year-old boy, the box read:

Homicides in St. Louis

Year To Date 1991: 144

Year To Date 1990: 93

Total For 1990: 177

During the 1970s and '80s, organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) applied the liberal "compassion" test to the mentally ill, and discovered the "right" of deranged persons to be released from mental institutions. The ACLU sued on behalf of the mentally ill, and these sick people were released to roam the streets, where they took to drugs, to alcohol, and to menacing behavior. The deranged comprise a large percentage of "the homeless", which may be defined as a new class of people discovered by 1980s liberals, in time to blame their pathetic plight on old Dutch Reagan.

The New Left radicals were liberalism's shock troops, its vanguard. These New Left crazies spent all the '60s, and much of the '70s, preaching that mind-altering drugs were a positive experience. Who can deny that these attitudes contributed to an epidemic of crack cocaine that has metastasized throughout the ghetto, a fulfillment of the devil's own work?

When middle class, working families began voting with their feet, moving out of the urban center for the greensward of Hillsboro and St. Charles, of Chesterfield and Ballwin, squads of liberal judges, academics and politicians were ready. Their answer: Area-wide, forced busing of schoolchildren to square with some Ph.D. sociologist's notion of a proper racial balance. Liberals turned a deaf ear to the outraged cries of their former voters, and then took to wondering why they lost five of six presidential elections, four by historic landslides.

For at least 15 years, progressive conservatives have pressed enlightened answers to many of these problems. The most promising ones can hardly be separated from their most eloquent proponent: Housing and Urban Development Secretary (and former Congressman) Jack Kemp.

These proposals comprise a compelling strategy for empowering the poor, and for addressing our desperate uraban problems. To mention a few:

Federal Enterprise Zones for our distressed urban cores, where taxes would be forgiven so that new businesses would have incentives to locate there and hire their residents.

Tenant ownership and management of public housing, so that residents can begin to enjoy a stake in the American Dream.

A cut in the capital gains tax, which is now so high that it locks up the seed corn for the new businesses that urban residents so desperately need.

Parental choice in public schools, so that the urban poor can enjoy the kind of freedom in selecting a school that wealthy liberal senators and Big Media gurus have always enjoyed.

All these meet with implacable opposition from liberals. Sen. Eagleton supplies an answer to St. Louis's plight that is straight out of the liberal playbook: "... there has to be a rescue from outside sources. This time it will be the federal government."

Earlier this year, President Bush proposed his exciting new educational reform program, including the critical feature of parental choice. Sen. Eagleton responded with a column we published, which flat-out accused the President of wanting to dismantle the American public school system.

Behold, the voice of an exhausted liberalism. It is a liberalism frozen in the past, no longer willing to engage in real debate but instead hurling empty accusations, whining for still more federal aid, and thwarting real reforms conservative reforms the only ones that enjoy any chance of success.