St. George Finally Slew the Dragon

Some of our regular readers — perhaps many of you, in fact — will likely remember a column that appeared in this space almost two years ago commenting on a segment Tucker Carlson did on his then–Fox News broadcast about the efforts of the citizens of Buckhead, a well-to-do section of Atlanta beset by crime and other manifestations of weaponized governmental failure, to incorporate a municipality of their own in an effort to restore sanity to the out-of-control life in Georgia’s capital.

I said this:

Carlson’s report talks with a rather matter-of-fact tone about efforts to pass legislation at the Georgia capitol enabling the birth of Buckhead. Why wouldn’t Buckhead’s residents attempt to form their own city? After all, upscale, law-abiding homeowners in nice areas like Buckhead are more or less members of an oppressed minority in Atlanta these days, particularly when a city like that one is governed by an “incompetent demagogue” (Carlson’s words) like Keisha Bottoms.

All of this is completely true. What Carlson’s report leaves out is the why.

Let’s introduce you to a term you should be familiar with if you want to fully understand urban Democrat governance and its effects on the population of a city. That term is Weaponized Governmental Failure.

Because Keisha Bottoms might well be an abject fool, and she is unquestionably terrible at running a major city. This is not in question. But Keisha Bottoms, like any urban Democrat mayor, is not an island unto herself. She’s more of an iceberg. She’s what you see, but beneath the surface is a vast political machine, an army of political fixers and operatives and assorted grifters, bureaucrats, lawyers, and street hustlers. Most of them are educated, at least to a degree, almost all of them have lots of experience in politics and government, and even if Bottoms is a fool they are not.

So how does Atlanta collapse from a world-class city to one that has its nicest area trying to escape? Not by accident.

Look, what makes a place livable is not the presence of lots of rich people. Rich people put themselves behind high walls, and rich people do what they can to keep the riffraff out. Having lots of rich people makes an area exclusive, not livable.

What makes a place livable is the presence of lots of middle-class people. Middle-class people are the ones most plugged into a community. They’re the volunteers, they’re the tax base, they’re the shopkeepers, the professionals, the volunteer coaches, and the churchgoers. A thriving community has lots of middle-class folks mowing their lawns on Saturday mornings, participating in bowling leagues, opening businesses and buying clothes, TVs, and furniture.

But the problem with middle-class people is that, while they bring a good deal of money in taxes, they also want lots of things for that money.

They want schools that teach the basics well, and they aren’t happy when the schools start indoctrinating kids into exotic sexualities and foreign theories on race relations, for example.

They want streets not full of potholes. They want public safety. They want trash picked up in a timely manner and litter cleared from roadsides. They want flood protection, sound drainage, potable drinking water.

In short, they want what they’re paying for with property and sales taxes. To keep them happy means giving them value for those tax dollars.

That doesn’t leave a lot of room for the pigs to feed at the trough. When the potholes in the streets have to be filled, it’s harder to steal the pothole budget.

And a city full of middle-class people will quite often turn out incompetent demagogue politicians like Keisha Bottoms, even in favor of a Republican. That, simply, will not do.

The whole thing is well worth a read, even for those of you — and there were many! — who already read it back in 2021. It talks about how urban Democrats have done the political calculus and realized that pandering to the scum of society while refusing to provide the basics in public governance is profitable, as counterintuitive as that seems. Why? Because doing those things chases away the voters who would turn them out of office, and when those people alight for the suburbs, there is no longer the possibility of defeat for the ever-more-communist Democrat machines that run those cities.

That’s how you get a Fani Willis or an Alvin Bragg. Or a Brandon Johnson.

But how do you stop that process? Well, the people in Buckhead are on to something.

The folks in St. George, Louisiana, a nice-sized burg of 86,000 people that just came into being thanks to a ruling of the Louisiana Supreme Court, are several years ahead of the Buckheaders, or Buckheadians, in what’s undoubtedly a difficult but worthwhile quest to defeat weaponized governmental failure by simply taking the power away.

It took about a decade to make St. George happen, but the reason for incorporating the new city, made up of a well-to-do area just outside the city limits of Baton Rouge but inside East Baton Rouge Parish, goes back a little longer. A group of citizens in the far southeastern part of the parish decided they were tired of the local school system busing their kids to lousy schools halfway across town and began advocating for the creation of an independent school district.

They were told — principally by a state senator, Sharon Weston Broome, from the heavily Democrat side of town — that forming an ISD without incorporating a city was a non-starter.

So the movement to create the city of St. George begun.

And every single lever the Powers That Be in Baton Rouge — whether politicians representing the black Democrats mostly residing in the northern part of the city or the wealthy white liberals living in the old neighborhoods near downtown — could use against the St. George organizers was utilized.

They challenged the initial petition to put the new city on the ballot, and thanks to a receptive (read: corrupt as hell) registrar of voters, they managed to disqualify it in an Obama-style coup. And when the St. George organizers came back a couple of years later with a tighter city map that didn’t include several of the neighborhoods in which very few signed the petition the first time, they were called “racists” for leaving out black neighborhoods. Every kind of dirty politics imaginable was brought to bear to stop St. George, and yet the voters in the area that was to be the new city gave it a thumbs-up by a 54–46 margin.

This despite a massive, massive disadvantage in funds spent at the hands of the Baton Rouge in-crowd, headed by Broome, who by that point was in her first term as mayor-president of East Baton Rouge Parish.

She didn’t admit defeat when she was beaten at the ballot box. Broome, Mayor Pro Tem LaMont Cole — whose district included none of the St. George area — and a couple of “concerned citizens” (read: white leftists with city contracts) filed a lawsuit alleging that to incorporate St. George would unduly damage the public fisc of the city-parish government — or, alternatively, that St. George, a city full of well-to-do subdivisions, office buildings, and retail establishments, was not economically viable.

Those arguments were stupid in the extreme, and yet the trial judge ruled in favor of the old guard. It took more than four years of appeals before the state Supreme Court finally cleared away the roadblocks and created the city the voters chose to incorporate.

And now the people of St. George awake to find that Broome has spent some $125 million of their sales tax dollars since that suit was filed, rather than escrowing the money. Every year the city-parish of East Baton Rouge has taxed them and spent their money outside of the St. George area, mostly on heavily Democrat areas like the northern part of the city or downtown, and that lawsuit prolonged this injustice for half a decade.

It’s messy. But St. George is born, and its organizers are promising it’ll be run on a tight budget and with a maximum of contracting out of city services rather than building a large public-sector bureaucracy, together with the most business-friendly urban government in the state and a maximum amount of choice in education.

If they hold to those preferences, they’ll have the best-run city in Louisiana — and almost assuredly the fastest-growing.

The Baton Rouge political mob has been screaming at the sky since Friday. They’re still calling the St. Georgians a bunch of mouth-breathing racists.

Nobody cares what they think right now.

It’s too bad, because the creation of the new city came just a few days after the Christian religious festival honoring its namesake. The annual Feast of St. George generally occurs on April 23. The city of St. George, Louisiana, was created by that Louisiana Supreme Court ruling on April 26. But next year the city and the festival should line up nicely.

In Louisiana, we celebrate good things with a party, and particularly a parade. So don’t be surprised if you hear about a parade for the ages around this time next year in a brand-new city you haven’t heard of until now.

Perhaps that’s something else the folks in Buckhead, who are just starting their long fight to gain some measure of independence from the weaponized governmental failure gang, can emulate down the road.

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