Rahm Emanuel pre­sides over a shoot­ing gallery.

Before becom­ing May­or of Chica­go, Emanuel’s career had been one of unbro­ken suc­cess: from finance direc­tor of the Clin­ton cam­paign, to senior advis­er in the Clin­ton White House, invest­ment banker, Con­gress­man, and ear­ly backer of Barack Oba­ma against his for­mer polit­i­cal patrons, the Clin­tons, a move that result­ed in his being named Chief of Staff in the Oba­ma White House.

Reli­ably pro­gres­sive and stub­born­ly prag­mat­ic, Emanuel seemed espe­cial­ly well suit­ed to the may­oral­ty, which demands that ide­ol­o­gy work at the pot­hole lev­el. To his con­ster­na­tion and sur­prise, it has not.

Homi­cides are its most obvi­ous fail­ure. Last Decem­ber 28, 40-year-old Nathaniel Jack­son became the city’s 500th mur­der vic­tim in 2012, the first time since 2008 that the body count had reached that mile­stone. There were 5 more before the year was out.  Most of the deaths were the result of shoot­ings, most of the dead from the city’s African-Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion. There were 433 the year before. This year’s total will prob­a­bly dip below 500 again. Through July 21, there have been only 228 mur­ders.  Only.

The decline is large­ly attrib­ut­able to rel­a­tive­ly low casu­al­ty totals in Feb­ru­ary (14) and March (17). This kept the body count for the first three months well below that of 2012. Some blame milder tem­per­a­tures for last year’s surge of win­ter­time mur­ders, though even the envi­ron­men­tal­ly-con­scious may­or did not pin them on glob­al warming.

He didn’t hes­i­tate, how­ev­er, to claim that his crime-fight­ing strate­gies are work­ing. The New York Times oblig­ed him last month with a head­line, “Chica­go Tac­tics Put Major Dent in Killing Trend.”  In ret­ro­spect, the “dent” looks more like a nick. The week­end after the Times ran the piece, there were 36 shoot­ings, includ­ing a bloody Fathers Day on which 6 died and 13 were wound­ed.  All told, there were 45 homi­cides in May and 43 in June; this month’s toll is like­ly to sur­pass both. It stood at 42 as of July 21.

The “tac­tics” the may­or is employ­ing look more like the Bagh­dad coun­terin­sur­gency than city gov­er­nance, with mobile police units deploy­ing to neigh­bor­hoods where shoot­ings have recent­ly occurred or are expect­ed to occur. Parts of the city, in short, have been reduced to war zones. Lit­er­al­ly. The Amer­i­can death toll in Afghanistan since 2001 stands at around 2,000; more than 5,000 peo­ple have been killed in Chica­go over that same peri­od of time.

This descent into may­hem pre­ced­ed Emanuel’s tenure. There were many more mur­ders in the ear­ly 1990s, when incar­cer­a­tion rates were low­er and shock trau­ma units less adept at keep­ing shoot­ing vic­tims alive. Rahm, as the Pres­i­dent he once served is fond of say­ing, “inher­it­ed” all of these prob­lems. So why not fol­low the President’s lead and blame his Repub­li­can pre­de­ces­sor? Because William Hale Thomp­son, the last Repub­li­can may­or, left office in 1931.  Democ­rats have run the city for 82 years, with a sin­gle fam­i­ly — the Daleys — in charge for 33 of those years.

Detroit has a sim­i­lar polit­i­cal pedi­gree. When its last Repub­li­can may­or, Louis Miri­ani, left office in Jan­u­ary 1962, Detroit had the nation’s high­est per capi­ta income. Today its $14,717 per capi­ta income ranks it among the poor­est local­i­ties in the nation, lag­ging even oth­er rust-belt towns like Erie (PA), Buf­fa­lo (NY) and Can­ton (OH). On a glob­al scale, its per capi­ta income ranks low­er than those of 88 coun­tries, includ­ing Latvia, Botswana, Lebanon and Mexico.

In tout­ing his first term accom­plish­ments, the Pres­i­dent said last Octo­ber that he’d “refused to let Detroit go bank­rupt.” Vice Pres­i­dent Biden joined in mak­ing this a point of con­trast with his oppo­nent, Mitt Rom­ney. Dur­ing his debate with Rep. Paul Ryan (R‑WI), the Vice Pres­i­dent charged that Mitt Rom­ney “would let Detroit go bank­rupt.”

Turns out that Detroit’s fate nev­er real­ly hinged on the out­come of the Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. In its bank­rupt­cy fil­ing, the city dis­closed that it was $20 bil­lion in debt and has no means of repay­ing its 100,000 cred­i­tors, many of whom are owed pub­lic pen­sions. The list of its fail­ures is by now famil­iar to most read­ers and needs no recount­ing. [Here are 25 facts about Detroit, for those in search of even more depress­ing reading.]

Though Detroit’s is the largest bank­rupt­cy fil­ing by a major city to date, we should not pre­sume that it is unique. Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty econ­o­mist Eric Scor­sone recent­ly told CNBC that Detroit is any­thing but.

“Every­one will say, ‘Oh well, it’s Detroit. I thought it was already in bank­rupt­cy.’ But Detroit is not unique. It’s the same in Chica­go and New York and San Diego and San Jose. It’s a lot of major cities in this coun­try. They may not be as extreme as Detroit, but a lot of them face the same problems.”

The same prob­lems that last week claimed Detroit are metas­ta­siz­ing in oth­er major US cities. Most of those cities have long been gov­erned accord­ing to pro­gres­sive nos­trums — that enti­tle­ment pro­grams should be enlarged and new ones cre­at­ed, that deficits are stim­u­la­tive and high lev­els of pub­lic debt are tol­er­a­ble, that the min­i­mum wage should be raised and pub­lic pen­sions made more gen­er­ous, that pay­ing teach­ers more will improve schools, that social spend­ing should be increased and tax­es raised, and the like.

Unen­cum­bered by Repub­li­can obstruc­tion­ism, a suc­ces­sion of Demo­c­ra­t­ic may­ors in Chica­go, Detroit and major cities through­out the coun­try have put this ide­ol­o­gy into prac­tice, often over the course of decades. The results are obvi­ous enough. I’m not sug­gest­ing that these cities would have fared bet­ter under Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions. That is a coun­ter­fac­tu­al that I nei­ther assert nor could prove. What I am sug­gest­ing is that Democ­rats should begin to rethink the truths they think they know in light of this record of failure.

Democ­rats frame their gov­ern­ing ide­ol­o­gy in terms of com­pas­sion. They should reeval­u­ate it in terms of competence.