Chicago hosts DNC and glimpse into a Kamala Harris presidency

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago is the Democratic Party’s opportunity to lay out a vision for the country over the next four (or eight) years. But the DNC will come and go and leave behind a city decimated by Democratic policies for decades, an unintentional warning of how the country could end up looking if Vice President Kamala Harris is elected.

As Democrats bring out celebrities and political elites to celebrate the party’s presidential ticket, Chicago has hit its lowest population since 1920. The city has lost population for nine years in a row and is projected to drop from the third to fourth most populous city by 2035, behind Houston.

It is hard to find one thing Chicago does right. Residents cite better job opportunities elsewhere as a reason for moving out, as Chicago has the highest unemployment rate for a metro area in the country. Jobs in Chicago are so unappealing in part because of the taxes. So, naturally, Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to drive taxes up even further.

Johnson’s “leadership” may not have been the start of Chicago’s decline, but it has been a prominent factor over the past two years. In 2023, Chicago voters chose to boot failed Mayor Lori Lightfoot in favor of a choice between two options: Johnson and the more centrist Paul Vallas. Rather than recognize that Lightfoot’s failures were because of her left-wing outlook, voters chose the even more left-wing Johnson.

That has led to such ingenious decisions as wanting to raise taxes on Chicago’s remaining residents as many leave because of the tax burden, but that is not all. Johnson’s administration has been soft on crime in both rhetoric and policy. Johnson thinks violent teenage criminals are just being “silly.” His idea of fighting crime is “holistic solutions” that don’t actually address crime. His administration removes things such as SpotShotter systems that help law enforcement identify the origin of gunshots in high-crime neighborhoods.

Johnson's version of criminal justice “reform” has contributed to “food deserts,” where certain communities lose easy access to grocery stores because the ones that were previously in those communities shuttered due to losses from crime. Johnson’s solution? State-run grocery stores, socialism for the modern Chicago that somehow won’t backfire the same way socialism has in every other place and portion.

To top it all off, even as Johnson panders to black voters and makes being black the central point of his mayoralty so much that it has become a weird obsession , he has left behind black communities in Chicago by prioritizing illegal immigrants. Chicago is a sanctuary city that invites hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to cross the southern border and moves quickly to fund shelters for those illegal immigrants while black communities watch their schools permanently close and reopen as well-funded illegal immigrant shelters.

In a way, it is fitting for the DNC. Chicago replacing Lightfoot with Johnson eerily tracks with the United States replacing President Joe Biden with Harris. In both instances, you have left-wing failures tossed aside in favor of mediocrities who are even further to the left.

Pick a problem from a hat, and you can see the similarities between Johnson’s administration and what a Harris administration would offer. Johnson chose to turn to socialism for grocery stores when his own policies helped run grocery stores out of business. Harris was the deciding vote on the climate spending bill that caused inflation to accelerate, and her solution to the problem she created was communist price controls, which are proven failures that go against every basic element of economics.

Crime? Harris will tout that she used to be a prosecutor while ignoring many of the decisions she made while serving as one or the fact that she has run far away from the prosecutor image on the national stage. Johnson called rioters “silly” and dismissed their crimes, while Harris did her best to help bail rioters out of jail while Minneapolis was on fire.

Immigration offers much of the same. Harris also has invited illegal immigrants to the U.S., and she has done so since she stepped onto the political scene. She enforced San Francisco’s sanctuary policies when she was elected district attorney, and she said during her 2020 presidential campaign that illegal immigration should be decriminalized. She also supported government-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants, even as she proposed kicking people in the U.S. off their current health insurance plans.

Even on race, Harris’s worldview closely tracks that of Johnson. Since becoming the Democratic nominee for president (without earning a single vote in a primary), Harris’s campaign has been organizing fundraisers that divide supporters into racial groups. “White Women for Kamala” and “White Dudes for Harris” were as weird as fundraisers can be, with the identity groups in question shaming themselves over their immutable characteristics while focusing on Harris only as a black woman.

Look at Chicago, and you see a mayor driving the city off a cliff, bleeding residents because of exorbitant taxes, a lax attitude toward crime, an embrace of socialist policies, racial division, and an out-of-control illegal immigration crisis. Look at Harris’s record and campaign promises, and you see runaway inflation, a lax attitude toward crime, an embrace of communist policies, racial division, and an out-of-control illegal immigration crisis.

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With the antisemitic “pro-Palestinian” protesters flocking to Chicago to try and flex their control over Democratic policy (and Harris’s agenda), the Windy City happens to be a perfect representation of the modern Democratic Party’s agenda and of what it would bring to the country. Chicago is the trial run, and if you enjoy socialism, racism, antisemitism, and prioritizing illegal immigrants over the nation's citizens, you will love a Kamala Harris presidency and the direction it pulls the Democratic Party in.

As the DNC comes and goes, the Democratic Party and its liberal media allies will leave Chicago behind to its fate, just as they have for years. The vast majority of people are able to ignore Chicago’s self-inflicted decay because nothing Johnson does affects them. The same can’t be said for a Harris presidency, though, when a single-party Democratic government such as Chicago’s is the end goal. Harris intends to bring the same ideology to the rest of the country that Johnson is bringing to Chicago now. You can imagine that the results of such a plan would not be drastically different than what we have seen from the DNC’s host city.