Wall Street Journal is predicting a massive exodus of normal, average Americans out of lawless, chaotic, and economically faltering cities. Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal predicts:

We may now be on the cusp of a great reordering of the nation’s population as many people decide it is time to separate themselves and their families from the social, political and moral turbulence of this country’s large urban areas.

A familiar story line of recent years has described the rise to economic and political power of urban centers such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington as young, politically progressive workers in the knowledge and service industries poured in. This, by popular account, increased tension and division between urban sophisticates on the forward edge of everything and the stodgy suburbs and conservative rural communities. I think the coming urban exodus will be different. People with all sorts of political beliefs are going to get out because they are watching city after city reach a tipping point of social disorder and political disorganization. [Wall Street Journal]

In fact, according to the Brookings Institute, large urban areas have already been seeing major slowdowns in growth in the last five years.

As we approach the end of the 2010s, the biggest cities in the United States are experiencing slower growth or population losses, according to new census estimates. The combination of city growth declines and higher suburban growth suggests that the “back to the city” trend seen at the beginning of the decade has reversed.

These trends are consistent with previous census releases for counties and metropolitan areas that point to a greater dispersion of the U.S. population as the economy and housing market pick back up, perhaps propelled by young adult millennials who may be finally departing dense urban cores as they make a delayed entrance into marriage and the housing market. [Brookings]

At the current moment, none of our cosmopolitan, globalist political leaders have the political will nor the fortitude to enforce law and order in America’s cities. Many are not even pretending to be acting in good faith, and seek to stir up the forces of chaos, anarchy, and anti-white, anti-American, and anti-Christian hatred for political advantage, or out of genuine ill will.

Henninger believes these political trends will continue to hold.

The message being sent is that progressive governance is, at best, ambivalent about maintaining civil order. The net result the past three months has been a sense in many cities of irresolvable chaos, stress and threat.

I think many younger, often liberal families would stick it out if they thought there was anything resembling a coherent strategy to address this mess—the new health threat, the homeless, the rising crime, the filth, the increasingly weird school curriculums. But there is no strategy.

The quality of the response by both political and institutional urban leadership to the pressure of these two events has been so uniformly unproductive that it sends a message: The cost-benefit just isn’t working anymore, with incentives mounting to move out.

The unhappy result as young families and well-off retirees leave is that these cities will increasingly become more divided between upscale progressive singles able to afford the political incompetence and the residents of inner-city neighborhoods that will fall further behind.

For those who’ve always wondered what the 1960s were like, you’re living it, but this time without much love. [Wall Street Journal]

To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, within every crisis lies opportunity. It is well past time for men of good faith to take power, restore law and order, and put the American people first.