With the election already upon us, I just wanted to highlight this one aspect of your presumptive next Governor's campaign I don't think has been centered in the press the way it probably should have been. Of course, there's a lot we can say about Jeff Landry's venality or his stupidity, or even his bigotry. But the most alarming matter that confronts us this month is his outright hostility toward the city of New Orleans in particular.
A win by Landry would return unified control of Louisiana’s government to the GOP. But it would also elevate and empower a man who has tirelessly sought to undermine the political power of the state’s major cities and shield law enforcement from local and federal reform efforts.
“The place is being run like a third world-country,” the attorney general said of New Orleans during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last October. “Why doesn’t the state just take it over?” Carlson asks. “It’s a great question,” Landry responded. “In Louisiana, we have one of the most powerful executive departments in the country. The governor is extremely powerful. He has the ability to bend that city to his will, and he [Edwards] just doesn’t.”
“But we will.”
This is something that has been a long time coming. The political independence of the city and its capacity to protect its residents from the worst abuses of state government has been under constant attack since Katrina. The privatization of the schools, the destruction of public housing, the rampant and unchecked gentrification has chipped away at the city's heart.
We semi-sarcastically lament from time to time that nobody actually lives here anymore. But the truth is, New Orleans is the state's leading city in name only. It isn't even the most populous parish anymore. More to the point, the political base it once held has reduced to a shadow. In recent cycles, local elections have taken on a chaotic nature. The so-called "machines" and patronage networks that once defined city politics don't really exist anymore. Their surviving remnants, inheritors of diminishing sinecures in the con-profit space, or in neighborhood churches, or in bail bonds, etc. operate in ad-hoc coalitions but none of them command the GOTV apparatus that was once overwhelming and automatic. Intra-city politics in the Cantrell era is the age of incoherence and power vacuums.
In state politics, that manifests as a lack of clout for the city overall. Once upon a time, a gubernatorial candidate with a strong showing out of New Orleans was at least a third of the way to winning. That's no longer the case. In 2019 it took a massive, unlikely to ever be repeated, effort to shake out every last vote in order to save John Bel Edwards's reelection. Even just four years later, there are fewer votes to shake out now. The COVID and (I know it's a problematic term) post-COVID era has brought an accelerated exodus as housing and insurance costs rise, and as the threat of hurricanes and sea level rise makes life here seem ever more tenuous. The city never fully recovered from Katrina and what remains is fading away.
And it won't end there. Like I've been saying all these nearly twenty years, now, this is more or less a deliberate project of our city and state's ruling classes who are just as happy as ever to swim in a smaller pond as long as they remain the big fish. Last year's recall petition was a flex by that class in more ways than one. Even though it didn't remove the mayor from office, it did impose a kind of discipline on the mayor by demonstrating a threat. The fact that a millionaire can always throw the administration into chaos on a moment's notice by funding a recall establishes who is the real boss. The concurrent emergence of the NOLA Coalition and crime panic reaction shows how effective this tactic is at setting the agenda. The other thing the recall did was open up the voter rolls to scrutiny by dishonest and politically driven actors. Regardless of who becomes the next Secretary of State, there will almost certainly be a full purge of Orleans voters in the coming term.
The goal in view now is a state whose politics turns less on the concerns of a political base in the city and the people who live there and is more at the whim of the Governor and his much smaller base of a few millionaires and associated kleptocrats with little or no friction from outside. Kind of like some other states we know.
.@jefflandry says his vision is to make Louisiana more like Mississippi. #lagov
— Jan Moller (@jmollerLBP) April 26, 2023
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