My city’s mayor is retiring after a long time in office, as is the representative for my neighborhood’s city council seat. These are hard-fought political battles, so I attended two events over the last two days to hear what the various candidates have to say. These events were illuminating because they show the chasm between conservatives and leftists.

I live in an interesting city with a large black population and a large military population (active duty and retired). There’s a big overlap between the two populations. My city also has high-end industry, which brings money and white leftists, and a traditional religious population, which means black conservatives. It has one of America’s highest violent crime rates. The wealth is concentrated in one half of the city, the crime in the other.

The city’s had a building binge of late—new city hall, libraries, sports pavilions, etc. Meanwhile, older neighborhoods in the city, comprised of black residents whose roots often go back to the antebellum period and newly arrived Hispanic residents, are badly decayed. The city sprawls, and public transit, which is always half empty and operates at a loss, mostly fails to serve these poor communities.

Three problems bedevil everyone, regardless of race, politics, or economic status: Poor drainage, excessive traffic, and increasingly expensive housing. The latter problem, of course, falls hardest on the poorest residents.

This is a difficult city to govern, and rumor is that the departing administration ran on political favoritism. There’s a lot of tax, state, and federal money flowing in through the city coffers, but it remains in the hands of a favored few.

Image: Candidates’ debate by AI.

The council and mayoral candidates were clearly good human beings with impressive resumes. They were divided between blacks and whites. There were no Hispanics or Asians at the two events I attended, whether running for office or in the audience.

Regarding the leftist-conservative divide, there were a few stark differences. Basically, for leftists, every problem is one that the government can and should fix. The conservatives hopped on some of those bandwagons but also recognized that government cannot and should not do everything.

At both events, all the candidates acknowledged that the city’s police force is too small. Indeed, this large city, which mandated vaccines for city employees, lost 90 officers during COVID.

Leftist candidates wanted to pay the police more to entice them to come to our city. However, two conservative mayoral candidates noted that police have already had several raises and that, every time salaries go up, the surrounding communities meet and then exceed the salaries in a never-ending cycle.

But significantly, a city council candidate revealed the real problem: My state is one of two with only one facility producing qualified officers for the entire state. In other words, the problem is a statist one: Too much control over supply failing to meet demand. The candidates were all spinning their wheels on this one because even throwing money at the problem won’t alleviate it.

I believe the city can take one low-cost step to lower crime: Encourage fathers to be present as role models for their sons. I couldn’t find the statistics, but I am under the impression that, in the city’s impoverished areas, single-mother households are normative. Of course, that would also mean acknowledging that communities must stop looking to the government for solutions. Some things require work from within.

The most interesting moment at the mayoral debate was in response to a question asking the candidates what they’d do if a bus full of illegal aliens showed up at city hall. Five out of the six waffled about housing and services. Only one said that he would instantly demand ICE take the illegal aliens away because the rule of law cannot withstand forcing American communities to become de facto repositories for illegal aliens.

Fascinatingly, the blacks present in the room, the ones concerned about their broken, crime-ridden communities, enthusiastically supported using funds to house illegal aliens. When I walk around my neighborhood in this old southern community, I see that every gardener and contractor—every last one—is Hispanic.

My gut tells me that the high rent and unemployment rates in black neighborhoods are driven, in significant part, by the Obama and Biden administrations replacing blacks with Hispanics as the preferred political minority. And yet blacks are so enmeshed in Democrat ideology that they will repeatedly vote against their economic self-interest. As we see nationally, so we see locally.

And so it went for issue after issue. The conservatives want the rule of law and to keep money in citizens’ hands as much as possible. The leftists go by feelings and want the money for government solutions.

For me, the most illuminating moment came during the city council event. I informed attendees of something they didn’t know: The blue recycling cans they dutifully put out every week for garbage collection mostly end up in landfills. One of the candidates revealed that the city council knew this would be the case. However, a majority on the council authorized the expense of the blue cans to “train” us to recycle. I saw red. It’s not the government’s job to train me in anything. It is my servant, not my master.

If you’re not attending local government events, you probably should. What you hear may surprise you.