A San Francisco think tank, the Bay Area Center for Voting Research, has concluded that Detroit is the most liberal major city in America, ahead of even Berkeley, Calif., birthplace of the so-called counterculture of the 1960s.

The nonpartisan outfit attributes Detroit’s liberalism to the fact that it is “impoverished, black….” And certainly Detroit votes heavily, indeed, almost exclusively, Democratic, the think tank’s main criterion for judging a city’s politics in the survey. Gary, Ind., was ranked second most liberal; Washington, D.C., 4th; and New York 21st. (Provo, Utah, was ranked most conservative.)

But Democratic isn’t necessarily the same as liberal. If anything, today’s Democratic dominated cities might be considered profoundly reactionary. Far from representing the interests of the little guy, for example, Detroit’s mostly black power structure tends to represent the interests of … itself. And like most reactionaries, it bitterly resists any change.

A case in point: the revelation last week by a bond rating agency, performing due diligence on a planned bond issue to paper over Detroit’s growing deficit, that the Detroit school district has been illegally continuing to collect $259 million from a millage that lapsed in 2002. A vote of the people would have been required to extend the tax. But the vote was never held.

Mayor Kilpatrick professes himself shocked, shocked, that such a thing could have happened. But now that the lapse – which city officials are rushing to assure us was inadvertent – has come to public attention, the schools are attempting to concoct a rationale for keeping the money rather than paying it back. Indeed, the City Council is considering a measure to retroactively approve the millage pending a vote by the people this fall.

What’s important, you see, is not that the taxpayer in Detroit suffers from an onerous, even illegal tax burden. What’s important is that business as usual be allowed to continue. Even after pocketing the illegal revenue, the school district managed to overspend, racking up a serious deficit. Nevertheless, there is talk of a strike should wages and benefits be cut – and never mind that strikes by public employees themselves are illegal under Michigan law.

To be liberal used to mean protecting the individual from the powerful. Today it seems to mean augmenting the power and wealth of public employees at the expense of the citizen – and even at the expense of children who badly need a good education. Only recently, the school system was content to order a high school closed rather than turned into a charter school that might compete with existing public schools.

Real liberals also would be fighting to bring competent government to the beleaguered city. Under Michigan law, cities that can’t manage their finances can be subjected to a state appointed emergency financial manager. But Democratic Governor Granholm has shied away from this option when it comes to Detroit. No wonder a Census Bureau estimate released last week confirmed that black middle-class flight to the supposedly conservative suburbs is accelerating.

Equal treatment before the law also used to be a rallying cry for liberalism. But the civil rights era has given way to the racial spoils era. Detroit’s political leaders are leading the charge against permitting a vote on the issue of whether the use of race-based preferences should be allowed in state hiring, university admissions, and contracting. The people – damn them! – might not understand that it’s now “liberal” to treat people unequally based on their skin color.

By contrast, the same “liberals” are backing a union-sponsored hike in Michigan’s minimum wage to nearly $2 an hour above the federal standard, even though that’s likely to discourage the formation of entry-level jobs most needed by the poor. Michigan already has the second highest unemployment rate in the land, better only than Mississippi, but a higher minimum wage will mean less wage competition for the aristocracy of labor.

At the core of much reporting about politics these days is the notion that the voting public has turned conservative. It’s more likely the case, however, that liberalism has turned reactionary. Detroit and other “liberal” cities are simply the forward edge of that unhappy trend.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.