In this era of heightened racial and ethnic tension, few academic concepts have enjoyed as much success as “settler colonialism.” This approach has been used to explain conflicts taking place in Israel-Palestine, Australia, Russia-Ukraine, Latin America, and the African continent, as well as within the Western world. Yet the most fervent “anticolonial” regimes have generally done little to improve the lives of the oppressed…
Read MoreDisdain for the people inhabiting the periphery has long been embedded in the media and academic worldview, dating back even before the writings of Lewis Mumford. It is also ultimately terrible politics. Demeaning non-city dwellers as racists, homophobes, and fascists may not be the best way to start a conversation with the roughly 90 percent of Americans who live outside the urban core…
Read MorePerhaps nowhere is the gap between America’s cognitive elite and its populace larger than in their preferred urban forms. For nearly a century, Americans have been heading further from the urban core, seeking affordable and safe communities with good schools, parks, and a generally more tranquil lifestyle. We keep pushing out despite the contrary desires of planners, academic experts…
Read MoreThe Covid-19 pandemic brought tragedy and disruption to America. But it has also provided another stark warning concerning the country’s disastrous overreliance on overseas production. It has demonstrated that without a strong, self-reliant industrial base, this country’s ability to forge a healthy, prosperous future—and even its ability to defend itself against foreign enemies—will be severely compromised. The fact that the world’s largest, and theoretically most advanced, economy could not provide…
Read MoreEven before 2020, America’s great cities faced a tide that threatened to overwhelm them. In 2020, the tsunami rose suddenly, inundating the cities in ways that will prove both troubling and transformative, but which could mark the return toward a more humane, and sustainable, urbanity. The two shocks—the Covid-19 pandemic…
Read MoreFor roughly the past half century, the middle swath of America has been widely written off as reactionary, backward, and destined for unceasing decline. CNBC recently ranked the “worst states” to live in, and almost all were in what is typically defined as the Heartland.1 Paul Krugman of the New York Times sees the region…
Read MoreRather than the vanguard of a more egalitarian future, California has become the progenitor of a new form of feudalism characterized by gross inequality and increasingly rigid class lines, a trend that could be exacerbated in the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, which has devastated much of the blue-collar economy. But the shift is likely to only further enhance those at the top of the state’s new class structure, those best suited for the inexorable and expanding shift to digital platforms…
Read MoreAmerica’s emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a dramatic break from the past. The United States came on the scene with only vestiges of the old European feudal order—mostly in the plantation economy of the Deep South. There was no hereditary nobility, no national church, and, thanks to George Washington’s modesty, no royal…
Read MorePerhaps no song has been belted out more often than the one that claims that America is moving “back to the city.” Newspapers, notably the New York Times, devote enormous space to this notion. It gained even more currency when the Obama administration secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, proclaimed that the suburbs were “over” as people were “voting with their feet” and moving to dense, transit-oriented urban centers. This celebration perhaps reached its crescendo when Amazon initially announced its move to Crystal City, Virginia, and Queens…
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