This is news that should send horrified chills down the Democrats’ spines: Mayor Eric Johnson, the black Democrat mayor of Dallas, Texas, announced in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that he’s switching to the Republican party. The reason: The Democrats are destroying America’s cities through a combination of fiscal mismanagement and soft-on-crime policies. May he be the first of many.

When you look at the history of black well-being in America, black loyalty to the Democrat party is one of life’s great mysteries. Think about these facts:

• In the lead-up to the Civil War, the Democrats were the pro-slavery party.
• The Republican party was formed to champion abolition.
• The Republican party was the party of the Union Army, which fought a devastating war to end slavery on American soil.
• The first black person elected to the United States Senate was Blanche Bruce, elected in 1874. He was a Republican. The first black Democrat in the Senate was Carol Mosley Braun, elected in 1992.
• The first black person in the House of Representatives was Joseph Rainey, who took office in 1870…as a Republican. The first black Democrat in the House was Arthur Mitchell, who was elected only in 1934.
• Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat, segregated the federal civil service immediately upon assuming office in 1913.
• The Ku Klux Klan was the paramilitary arm of the Democrat party.
• Jim Crow was a purely Democrat political movement.
• Before Democrats brought welfare to the black community in the 1960s, black incomes were going up, crime was going down, and most children were raised in two-parent homes. LBJ’s “Great Society” and welfare state reversed all those trends.
• Black incomes went up during the Trump years. They’ve gone down during the Biden years.
• Crime in black communities has exploded since the 2020 Democrat-led BLM “defund the police” movement.

Given that Democrat policies since at least the 1850s have systematically destroyed blacks in America, whether economically or socially, you’ve got to wonder why blacks remain relentlessly loyal to Democrats. And yet they do. That seemed to change during the peak of the Trump years, but then, in 2020, they snapped right back to supporting Democrats. I seem to recall something that Albert Einstein is reputed to have said about insanity…

But maybe, finally, things have gotten so bad thanks to Biden’s policies that blacks will abandon their harmful fealty to the Democrat party and start looking at politics through the lens of common sense, not blind loyalty. Certainly, that’s the case with Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas, Texas, one of America’s largest cities:

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed with the headline “America’s Cities Need Republicans, and I’m Becoming One,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson explains that he is leaving the Democratic Party because “the future of America’s great urban centers depends on the willingness of the nation’s mayors to champion law and order and practice fiscal conservatism.”

“Our cities desperately need the genuine commitment to these principles (as opposed to the inconsistent, poll-driven commitment of many Democrats) that has long been a defining characteristic of the GOP,” Johnson wrote.

“In other words, American cities need Republicans — and Republicans need American cities,” he continued. “When my political hero Theodore Roosevelt was born, only 20% of Americans lived in urban areas. By the time he was elected president, that share had doubled to 40%. Today, it stands at 80%. As America’s cities go, so goes America.”

Good for Johnson. Let us hope that he represents the leading edge of a trend that can help renew America as a whole, one community at a time.

Image: Eric Johnson. YouTube screen grab.