What can you do about a problem like Brandon except wait him out?
After a certain point here at National Review, I self-consciously gave up writing about Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and that despite the fact that I live here with a front-row seat to his serially moronic hijinks. I suppose I told myself a story — that people would get bored of my constant return to the same poisoned well — but the truth is that I’ve also grown tired of “why don’t you just move” as a mindless riposte from readers. You don’t know my reasons, nor I yours; suffice it to say I’ll fight against being chased from a land I’ve long since come to regard as my own as long and as stubbornly as I possibly can, like a treed bear clinging by its claws onto a precariously sheared branch. I love this town and lament its decline as only one who truly does can.
So what can you do about a problem like Brandon except wait him out? What else, save sit through the Windy City mayoralty of one of the stupidest and most incompetent politicians to ever draw breath, and wait to see whether whoever replaces him is worse? Readers are free to peruse my back catalogue — you can even find the February 2023 piece where I dismissed his possibility of even making that year’s mayoral runoff if you really wish to dunk on me — but even back then Johnson’s manifest unfitness for the job was apparent. He was a purebred creature of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, their paid lobbyist for years, a man whose governing priorities (goal No. 1: pay off the CTU, Chicago’s most infamous mob since Eliot Ness took down the Mafia) were so obvious that I failed at first to consider the possibility that he’d make it to the mayoral runoff, much less eke out a victory against wounded horse Paul Vallas.
But Chicago voted by one percentage point to elect the union stooge. They lived to regret it. In retrospect, Chicago caught the last true wave of “wokeist” urban politics first nationally unleashed by the 2020 George Floyd protests (which Johnson prominently excused). That means we are self-condemned to suffer through his four years in office, which began in 2023 and are surely guaranteed to end in February of next year. (The city’s mayoral race begins first with an all-party primary in February. If the choices are Johnson versus a strangely charismatic rutabaga and an old potato from under the sink, then bank on a vegan runoff in April.)
In the meantime, suffer we shall! Johnson almost immediately lost governing credibility in the city (again, check my archives for details), but the freshness of his public disgrace wore off long ago, leaving us only with the lingering stench of his everyday haplessness. I just thought I’d spotlight the mayor’s most recent public appearance, this Wednesday, April 15, because it perfectly encapsulates everything desperately doomed about Johnson’s brand of politics. Chicago’s city council — which is 100 percent Democratic — recently passed a measure to prevent the city from forcing restaurants to immediately raise wages to Chicago’s $16.60 per hour minimum. Johnson vetoed the bill, and the council failed to gather enough votes to overturn it.
Leave aside the terrible economics; what matters more is how Johnson handled it. The man is utterly lost politically and knows it — he’s at war with an ultra-progressive, all-Democratic city council — so he’s merely playing out the string of his term and boasting with as much bilious rhetoric as his wee brain can muster at the occasional Pyrrhic victory. And so he boiled the issue down to the true heart of the matter: “You just watched the entire city council, in transparency, try to take wages away from the very people who are part of an industry that has its ties to slavery and is hiding from that.”
Yes, slavery! Did you know that — whether you eat foie gras straight from a goose in the kitchen or order fries at McDonald’s — you are either way adding to the historic burden of the black man? I didn’t myself, which means my next trip to Nando’s for “peri-peri” African chicken is going to feel doubly weird. But as all in the city know, the legacy of slavery is one of Mayor Johnson’s pet obsessions — one of those core “quality of life” issues fundamental to all Chicagoans — and securing slavery reparations for all black residents of the city is his policy response.
I kid you not! In the Land of Lincoln, Johnson has decided that slavery’s dark legacy has crept so far north as to justify blowing an even bigger hole in an already hopelessly sunk city budget. (He started a task force on the matter two years ago.) “I am boldly declaring we need reparations in this city, and that is why I am funding it,” Johnson said last Wednesday. “I’m a black man in America calling for the reparations of black people. There is no hiding or escaping that. I’m taking a bold statement here!”
“I’m taking a bold statement here!” The malapropism — common for Johnson — says it all in a way: It’s like he knows the rhythm of what a sentence should sound like, but not the correct words that belong in one. He is no longer capable of even simulating that he knows what a politician should behave like; he is merely an activist in power. Rest assured, scenes like this are a weekly occurrence. Pray for us all, out here in the City by the Lake.