My most wonderful memories of Washington, D.C., the place where I was born, have nothing to do with politics. They involve music, romance, sports, and, most importantly, God.

I note this because as D.C. collapses from crime and liberal politics, its demise is painful for us natives in a way it is not for outsiders.

I love Washington. My friends, family and history are all here. My grandfather was a professional baseball player here, arriving from New York in 1915. My brother once won the Helen Hayes Award for best actor in D.C. I fell in love here, have lived in most parts of the city, and love its history and culture.

Like Watching a Loved One Slowly Die

So watching car jackings, murders and muggings rise, even as two professional sports teams, the Capitols and the Wizards, decamp for Virginia, is like watching a loved one pass away. D.C. is collapsing.

I know it’s common for people to mock Washington as a worthless swamp. But my heart is here. I can drive from one end of the city to another and on almost every block there is a touchstone of an important event from my life. Start at Catholic University, where I went to school. It is in the cool little neighborhood of “Brookland,” sometimes called “Little Rome” for its high concentration of Catholic organizations. Brookland is the location of the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, one of the largest churches in the Western world. It is at the Shrine where I prayed for sobriety and peace when I stopped drinking in 1990.

Drive from there to Howard University, a storied historically black college, and down the hill to U street. U street was once known as “the black Broadway” because it had so many theaters and jazz clubs. Duke Ellington was born here. I heard some amazing music here. There are also black churches here, and walking through on some nights I would hear a great Gospel choir praising Jesus.

Cut over to 17th Street and you’re at the offices of National Geographic, where my father worked for 30 years. On Fridays, I would take the metro from school and pop in for a visit. Then I would walk over the Phillips Collection, the oldest museum of modern art in America. It’s where I learned about Matisse, Edward Hopper, Picasso and Renoir.

Then it’s down to Georgetown, once the incredibly dynamic hub of hundreds of shops, clubs and restaurants. Of course on the hill is Georgetown University. It’s gone crazy liberal, but I still think of it as the home of Fr. Edmund Walsh, one of America’s great anti-communists.

To me and other natives, Capitol Hill was “the bubble,” a place kind of separate from the real city we actually lived in. We never ran into any politicians. If we did, we usually just kind of laughed at them. We rightly considered most of them buffoons.

“Riot Ideology” Is the Cancer Killing Our Cities

What you run into in D.C. these days are boarded up businesses — even in Georgetown — stores with empty shelves from looters and truant kids. Crime is up by almost a third, violent crime almost 40 percent.

America’s cities enjoyed something of a renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s. They had finally started to shake off what the great urban historian Fred Siegel called “riot ideology.”

Siegel passed away earlier this year. As the obituary in City Journal noted, his work “was central to the renewal of American cities beginning in the 1990s, especially New York, where he was a senior adviser to Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign and later wrote speeches for the mayor.”

Central to Siegel’s work is opposition to what he called “riot ideology.” Riot ideology got its start in the turmoil of the 1960s. In his 1997 book The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, Siegel wrote that this ideology entails “public officials … reluctant to confront public disorder and crime for fear of violent opposition.” Now the main weapon of leftist groups such as antifa, the riot ideology was once a hallmark of Marxist groups such as the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. It is ignored by the media even as it has helped redestroy America’s cities.

Reading Siegel in the 1990s inspired me to research the riots that had torn apart my native city of Washington. Siegel was right: The violence had been fueled by radical politics. In the book Ten Blocks From the White House, by reporter Ben Gilbert and the staff of the Washington Post, there is a theme that has reverberated through urban riots for more than 50 years. That theme is Marxism.

It All Started with Marxists

Ten Blocks from the White House tells the story of the riots that erupted in Washington, D.C., in 1968, after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. More than 1,200 buildings were burned, and the cost was almost $25 million, the third-highest in U.S. history. As with the summer 2020 riots, the mayhem was caused by Marxist radicals.

Four months after the D.C. riot, in August 1968, Gilbert, a black reporter for the Washington Post, made contact with three men who claimed responsibility for the violence following King’s death. The men were left-wing agitators who had been planning violence for months before King’s death. They used King’s death to spread chaos, from fires and bricks to using dynamite to blow up buildings. Many of the rioters were looters, criminals, and children who, according to at least one witness, cared little or nothing about King — just as today’s anarchists care nothing about George Floyd.

For a few brief and exciting decades, city leaders and the people like me who lived in places like D.C. were winning the battle against chaos and the riot ideology. Cities were fun, dynamic places. Kids like me could not wait to escape the suburbs to get to the action.

Now we avoid the action at all costs.

Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C. His new book is The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.