I suppose I am naïve.

I engaged two young Democrat legislators from New Orleans in a Facebook debate over the decades long economic and social decline of the New Orleans.

My point was there has been no response or actions taken to mitigate the city’s continuing downward spiral resulting from the disaster of the decampment of the energy industry more than forty years ago. Instead, with no real organized civic or business influence, the response from socially populist Democratic leaders has been a turn away from addressing the root causes of economic decline, ignoring its linkage to poverty, social ills, crime, and crumbling infrastructure.

I pointed out to them that the city’s population was but half of what it was at its peak in the mid-20th century. Though out-migration to the suburbs initially drove that decline, economic irrelevancy has caused city and regional population growth, what we expect a strong city to encourage, to be stagnant for a long time.

Did I say naïve? Well, when their responses turned to how hypocritical conservative distrust of big government policies was and the importance of liberal efforts on behalf of prostitutes and marijuana use it became clear that these future leaders of the city couldn’t see beyond the veil of that same social populism that has held us back.

Blinded by their own prejudice, they don’t realize that in the big political world New Orleans is an increasingly small player; that to win at city success it is not necessary to surrender liberal values, it is only necessary to pay homage to economic realities, something many Southern cities have been doing with great success.

Too bad, but with logic that places popular, but trivial, social issues above economic realities, I fear that the future does not bode well.

We can only hope that these two are not indicative of the entirety of upcoming Democrats who will undoubtedly inherit the city’s leadership. If they are, then New Orleans will continue to sink into irrelevancy in an otherwise booming South, even as it watches its state political power decline as it becomes a shrinking island of today’s new far-left liberalism (socialism?) in a sea of Trump era popular conservatism.

Such decline is playing out all over the nation as far-left, even socialist leaders are increasingly isolated to urban centers, supported, until the money runs out, by a voter base expecting promised free stuff! That makes for great local politics but is an anathema to a healthy American city.

New Orleans should have long ago, and now still can, look to growth orientated blue cities in red states such as Atlanta and Dallas as examples of good practice.

Not to New York or Chicago.

But the allure of a fractured, increasingly socialist Democratic Party to young Democrats that aspire to control our urban centers is strong. I fear that we may be just beginning to feel its cataclysmic effects on our city.