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Revival: Americans Heading Back to Hinterlands

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The famous New Yorker magazine cover showing much of civilization ending at the Hudson River, save for Chicago, D.C., and then the West Coast, had more than a grain of truth for much of the 20thcentury. The term “flyover country” was not just a snobbish put-down but a reality as a handful of core cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – exerted oversized influence over America’s culture, politics, and economy, with rural communities and smaller cities playing a relatively marginal role in the national drama. Read more

Progressive Geography’s Intellectual Dead End

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Americans are familiar with steep political divisions on issues like race, class, and gender. Perhaps less understood, but arguably more definitive, is the widening gap between the cognitive elites concentrated in big cities and the rest of the country. In our current “war against the masses,” to quote the late Fred Siegel, geography plays an increasingly dominant role.

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Bidenomics Isn’t Working

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With the announcement that inflation fell to 3% in June, the US President will no doubt be emboldened in his claim that Bidenomics — essentially a green-tinted government-led economy — is working. Read more

Secession Is a Threat Californians Should Take Seriously

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At the height of the anti-Trump hysteria after 2016, Democrats in California talked often about “Calexit”, which would allow the Golden State to secede and, no doubt, form an ideal Ecotopia of its own. Read more

What Really Divides America

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For almost a decade, the West has been engaged in a deepening conflict. Sometimes it flares up as a political debate; sometimes as a culture war. But whatever form it takes, it is inevitably framed as a disagreement between classes, races or ideologies.

This is a mistake. Demography may be destiny, but it is geography that determines its political shape. The greatest division today is to do with place: in particular, three basic terroirs — urban, suburban and rural — which reflect a divergence in economic interest, family structure and basic values, particularly between big city economies and those on the periphery.

This fracture is widening at a time when the demographic balance between these regions is shifting. For much of the past two centuries, the overwhelming inclination was towards urbanisation, with dense cores serving as the prime engines of economic, cultural and social change. Today, however, that pattern is shifting, particularly since the pandemic, which saw two million citizens move out of big US cities. Even in urban-oriented Europe, 63% of cities experienced a population decline during the pandemic.

Does this mean “the era of urban supremacy is over”, as the New York Times put it? Quite possibly. But don’t expect the urban leadership to acknowledge it. Even as they desperately attempt (and largely fail) to lure workers back downtown, urban political interests continue to dominate the national conversation — even amid high levels of crime, street-level disorder and the resulting shuttering of businesses.

Largely ignored by the city-dominated media, the world’s urban core has been losing this battle for generations. This is not only evident in the United States, but also across Europe and Australia. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, little more than 5% of growth from 1966 to 2021 was in the core cities. In Europe, barely 37% of people live in cities, with the rest in fast-growing suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

Of course, many cities have experienced some revival over the past decade, but that “boom” has largely benefited educated newcomers and their wealthy employers. Urban regions became both richer and poorer; according to Pew research, the greatest inequality in America now exists in “superstar cities”, such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and San Jose.

These shifts have, unsurprisingly, shaped urban politics. As middle-class families have left, the urban terroir has been gutted of the old urban bulwark of solid middle and working-class families; as Fred Siegel has observed, it is dominated by an “upstairs/downstairs” coalition of the affluent and dependent.

This demographic reality has driven a shift towards a more progressive politics. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan won 31% of the vote in San Francisco and 27.4% in Manhattan. In 2016, Donald Trump won only 10% of the vote in each. Between 1998 and 2018, urban counties — which sometimes includes suburbs — went from 55% to 62% Democratic. Today, there is not a single Republican Mayor of a city of more than one million people. Recent victories of progressives in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis, despite widespread social disorder and economic decline, suggest this pattern may well be inexorable.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: David Clow Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide

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In his drive to conquer China, Mao Zedong and his most famous general, Lin Biao, stoked “a peasant revolution” that eventually overwhelmed the cities. In those days, most Chinese toiled on the land, a vast manpower reservoir for the Communist insurgency. Today, in a world where a majority lives in urban settlements, such a strategy would be doomed to failure.

The small percentage of rural and small-town residents in most advanced countries — generally under 20 percent — lack the numbers to overwhelm the rest of society. Political and economic elites feel free to ignore the countryside, but they may find they do so at their peril. Although now a mere slice of the population, rural areas remain critical suppliers of food, fiber (like cotton), and energy to the rest of the economy.

Residents in agricultural areas have good reason to feel put upon. Their industries are often targeted by regulators and disdained by the metropolitan cognoscenti. They may not be hiding in the caves of Yan’an, but farming communities from the Netherlands to North America are rebelling against extreme government regulations, such as banning or restricting critical fertilizers or the enforced culling of herds. Meat and dairy producers are assaulted in a hysterical article in the New York Times that predicts imminent “mass extinction” caused by humans and suggests that to keep the planet from “frying” we will need to reduce meat and dairy consumption in short order.

This is occurring at a time — following decades of remarkable boosts in agricultural productivity — when food insecurity and high prices are again plaguing even wealthy countries but particularly the poorer countries in Africa. This shortfall has worsened, in part due to the Russia–Ukraine conflict, which has reduced the reliability of food exports from the Ukrainian bread basket, making Western production more critical.

Regardless, the inhabitants of the periphery — the vast area from the metropolitan fringe to the deepest countryside — and the farming that flourishes there will face an extraordinarily well-funded green movement that is now depicting “industrial farming” as one of the principal villains in their ever-expanding climate melodrama. Although greens may support the notion of small farmers using artisanal methods, and the wealthy certainly can afford the much higher food prices, niche farming cannot support most farming communities or provide ordinary consumers with reasonably priced groceries.

The regulatory tsunami reflects attitudes in the media, the academy, and the bureaucracy that generally disparage the periphery, too often regarded as depopulating, depressed places without a future. Rural residents are seen as primitives, driven by “rural rage.” They tend to be more skeptical about climate-change policies and a promised “just transition,” which only makes them even more deplorable.

Read the rest of this piece at National Review.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Drenaline via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

The Rural Revolution a Welcome Counter to the Liberal Green Agenda

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The current deceleration of globalism can herald either a greater period of nationalism, with its tendency towards authoritarianism and xenophobia, or we could return to a more decentralized political system that comports with both American and Canadian traditions and popular preferences.

For some, the nationalist call is irresistible, even if it tramples on local rights and promotes autocratic power from Ottawa or Washington. This was seen particularly during COVID, notably in Canada, with centrally directed assaults on the rights of pandemic dissenters, ranging from the forced cutoff of private bank accounts in Canada, or in the American censorship regimes designed by a partnership of the Washington bureaucracy and the tech oligarchy.

The abating of the pandemic seems unlikely to curb the centralist fever. In Canada, the federal government continues to seek more control over everything from the Ontario Greenbelt to basic energy policy. This all sets the stage for an expanding conflict between the provinces and Ottawa, as the distinct priorities of various regions sometimes conflict with priorities set out by national elites, sometimes with the connivance of large corporate interests.

Much the same is occurring in the United States. In an almost evenly divided legislative branch, U.S. President Joe Biden has managed to expand federal power to unprecedented levels. Some of this has been done through the Stalinist-style bloc voting by Democrats in Congress, or simply by executive fiat. With the GOP in a slight majority in the House, Biden will almost inevitably expand his rule by executive order in the next two years.

But the situation is far from helpless. In Canada, there is growing resentment towards federal power. Energy and agricultural policies that follow the globalist green script may appeal to denizens of Toronto’s towers and swankier neighbourhoods, but can be regarded with horror by farmers in Manitoba or oil-riggers in Alberta. Suburban and exurban residents may be less than thrilled by Ottawa rumbling to force densification — hardly a natural fit for a country with an enormous surplus of land.

Some may see these localist attitudes as defending dying ways of life, but the demographic story tells us something very different. In Canada, people are dispersing, with most growth, even before the pandemic lockdowns, in the outer exurbs and smaller metropolitan areas, particularly in Ontario. After decades of moving to larger cities, data shows that while the population continues to urbanize, people are often moving to smaller communities.

As demographer Wendell Cox has demonstrated, Canadians are moving primarily to exurbs and suburbs, some closer to the big cities, but some quite distant. This was driven largely by high housing prices, and the increase in remote work by Canadians, which sparked a move away from the largest metropolitan areas, particularly ultra-expensive cities like Vancouver and Toronto. Even the Maritimes, long losers in the demographic sweepstakes, has reversed its long negative internal migration, attracting migrants from denser, more urbanized centres.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Homepage photo: composite with photo by Tom Corser via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License

Is America Entering a New Age of Democratic Capitalism?

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Most everyone outside the Biden administration knows that a recession is now more than likely. We could be entering what economist Noriel Roubini describes as the “Great Stagflation: an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions.” Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labor participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times.

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Can the South Escape its Demons?

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Out on the dusty prairie west of Houston, the construction crews have been busy. Gone are the rice fields, cattle ranches and pine forests that once dominated this part of the South. In their place sit new homes and communities. But they are not an eyesore; the homes are affordable and close to attractive town centres, large parks and lakes. These are communities rooted in the individual, the family and a belief in self-governance.

The new American Dream has its heart in the states of the old Confederacy. But its allure does not merely lie in a conservative embrace of lower taxes, less regulation and greater self-reliance, although these surely matter. More important are the opportunities that come from building businesses and owning new homes, not for the privileged few but for an increasingly diverse, and growing, populace.

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The Fading Family

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For millennia the family has stood as the central institution of society—often changing, but always essential. But across the world, from China to North America, and particularly in Europe, family ties are weakening, with the potential to undermine one of the last few precious bits of privacy and intimacy.

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