The Solid Cities

Ed Driscoll calls our attention to a column in the New York Post:

Today, America's urban areas have evolved into a political monoculture that increasingly resembles the "solid South" that provided a base for Democrats from the late 19th century to the 1960s. Since 1972, the year of the Nixon landslide, the Democratic share has grown 20% or more in most of the largest urban counties. . . .
The shift began in the late 1960s, when urban regions, from financial centers such as New York and Chicago to old industrial cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, began to suffer a massive exodus of predominantly white, middle-class residents.
This left behind an increasingly impoverished, highly minority population with very little proclivity to support conservative or even moderate Republicans.

Beyond economics and ethnodemographics, the collapse of public education and the disappearance of marriage in major urban areas probably explains a lot of this phenomenon. City public schools suck, and thus married families with children -- the bedrock of American conservatism -- refuse to live in big cities. As a result, cities are now populated mainly by (a) gays and childless singles, (b) rich yuppie couples who can afford private schools, and (c) people too poor to afford to live anywhere except in government-subsidized housing.