What’s Wrong With Illinois?

I rarely read The Weekly Standard but I wanted to commend this article there by Andrew Ferguson on the mess that Illinois is in to your attention. I wish the article had started with this paragraph because it sets the stage:

A few years ago a pair of NPR reporters worked with a demographer from the Brookings Institution on a silly but revealing project. They set out to find the “perfect state”—the state that was most representative of the USA as a whole. They tested five criteria for a state’s population: racial makeup, educational attainment, age, median income, and religiosity. Illinois took the prize, mapping the country more closely than any other state in one category after another. In some important respects, Illinois is the country built to scale. You don’t have to be a native deeply attached to your home state to worry that if Illinois can’t make it, then maybe the country can’t either.

and it should give you a certain sense of foreboding. Illinois is the state most representative of the U. S. as a whole. If the U. S. adopts the practices that has caused Illinois’s decline, it will suffer from the same problems as Illinois.

What are those practices? Sadly, the article doesn’t really do much to explain them. The closest it comes is this. Political machines are like single-celled organisms:

The purpose of the machine is to keep the machine alive. This is the evolutionary stage that the Chicago machine, downstate version, has reached over Madigan’s long reign. There’s little chance that Rauner, given a second term, could reverse it, and no sign that Pritzker, once elected, would care to. Governor Pritzker’s political destiny will likely resemble that of Louisiana’s Oscar K. Allen, a puppet that the state’s true ruler, Huey Long, installed in the governor’s chair in the 1930s. He earned the nickname “OK.” “A leaf blew in through OK’s office window yesterday,” one observer said. “He signed it.”

So, what happened in Illinois? Political corruption is the obvious response but that’s no answer. Why the political corruption? You can’t blame old man Daley—the corruption preceded him. He was part of it rather than its cause.

In Illinois’s case I think the answer is complacency born of prosperity. You come to accept political corruption as long as the trains run on time and once the trains stop running on time it’s too late.

Illinois is not California or New York. I do not know a single person in Illinois who, like so many Californians or New Yorkers, cannot imagine life outside their home states. Illinois is a place that people live in and come to for work and Chicago, once known as the “city that works” is its epitome. When the work is gone, driven out by political corruption and politicians who think that Illinois is California or New York, the people will leave and it’s happening even as I write.