In Detroit, Democracy Isn’t Worth Saving—Privatize It All

The recent water crisis in Detroit
has brought renewed attention to the plight of the city, where many
residents have not
paid their water bills and are in danger of having their pipes
shut off. It’s just one symptom of the disease that’s all but
killed the now bankrupt Motor City.

Republican Gov. Rick Snyder has prescribed a cure: the
installation of emergency city manager Kevyn Orr. Orr has broad
authority under state law to change city policy, cancel contracts,
slash spending, and privatize services.

That solution has rankled some on the left, who seem to have
rediscovered the concept of federalism now that they have an
instance of a Republican-controlled government taking over a
smaller municipality. Sally Kohn wrote in
The Daily Beast that the state takeover of Detroit amounts
to white Republicans stripping black people of their autonomy:

So in the fall of 2013, Detroit voters went to the polls to
elect a new mayor and City Council, but it didn’t matter. The
powers of the mayor and City Council have effectively been
suspended. Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, appointed by
Snyder, has all the power and then some. A Democratic city that
elected Democratic leaders is now controlled by the appointee of a
Republican governor.

Or, to put it differently, Detroit—a majority
African-American city—is now controlled by a governor
elected by a majority of
white voters in the state. It really doesn’t matter that
Kevyn Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager, is black, nor
that Mike Duggan, Detroit’s mayor, is white. What matters is that
half of the state’s black population lives in Detroit. So through
the state takeover, “half of black Michiganders have essentially
lost the right to vote,” says Ife Kilimanjaro, co-director of the
East Michigan Environmental Action Council.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. Local actors are typically
better positioned to address their community’s needs, and mandates
handed down from on high by distant government bodies are often
ill-advised. By the same logic, Kohn must surely oppose the
Affordable Care Act as an unjust usurpation of states’ sovereign
right to set their own healthcare policies? Alas, no: Kohn
found 317 million reasons to support the law.

Writing in
The New York Times, Yale University philosophy professor
Jason Stanley bemoans that the imposition of an emergency manager
has stripped Detroit residents of their “freedom and equality.” Woe
to our democracy:

The Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt was a fierce critic of
liberal democracy. He argued that liberal democracy was incoherent
because of what he called the problem of the exception. In
emergency situations, there is not enough time to act
democratically. In an emergency, someone would have to declare an
exception to suspend the normal democratic process and handle the
emergency. Schmitt argued that whoever had the power to declare an
emergency situation and override the democratic process would be
tempted to overuse that power, and declare nonemergency situations
to be states of exception. This person would be in effect the
sovereign.

The language of the emergency manager laws is that of exception.
Calling the situation an “emergency,” and the undemocratically
selected financial manager an “emergency manager” is nothing other
than a declaration of the anti-democratic nature of what has
occurred. Detroit does not face an immediate threat from a hostile
invading army. To suppose that financial exigency or advancing an
agenda of privatization for corporate gain are reasons to suspend
democracy is to capitulate to its worst enemies.

Okay, democracy has been suspended. Meh?

I will note that prior to state intervention, Detroit languished
for decades under
extremely corrupt but technically democratic (and also Democratic)
management. Its city officials—from the lowest public employee
to the mayor—were not merely criminally negligent but also
negligent criminals. Evil bureaucrats bribed, stole, and swindled
Detroit into utter ruin. It seems inhumane to me that anyone could
think this result was what city residents deserved as long as some
chunk of them cast ballots authorizing it on behalf of everyone
else. What about all the people who didn’t approve of their city
government’s criminal dealings? 

Now, if people like Kohn and Stanley are actually suggesting
that Detroit suffers from too much big government
planning, I could work with that. Indeed, there’s a great
case to be made that large swaths of the city should be turned
over to private individuals with better ideas and management
skills. Privatization of city services is actually one of Orr’s
goals, and I look forward to the day when neither the state nor the
local government has much say over how city affairs are
conducted.

That’s not what these left-leaning critics of the
emergency financial manager law are suggesting, of course. It seems
they aren’t too concerned leaving Detroit to rot under the corrupt
tutelage of Kwame
Kilpatrick, Monica Conyers, or some other crime lord, as long
as precious democracy is maintained (in this case, at least).

For more on fixing Detroit, watch Reason
TV’s “Anarchy in Detroit.”