Mayoral Mismatch

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Mayors have had little success in becoming president, with only one big-city chief executive, Grover Cleveland of Buffalo, later governor of New York, actually making it to the White House. Yet this year’s running of the donkeys includes several: a minor-city chief executive, Pete Buttigieg of South Bend; a former big-city mayor, Cory Booker of Newark; former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro; and John Hickenlooper, formerly chief executive of Denver before becoming Colorado’s governor. They may yet be joined by New York’s Bill de Blasio. Read more

After Amazon: What Happened in New York Isn’t Just About New York

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The fiasco surrounding Amazon’s recent escape from New York reflects a broader, potentially devastating trend. By driving the Seattle-based behemoth out of the Big Apple, New York’s increasingly militant progressives have created a political paradigm that could resonate in cities across the country.

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The Once-Lucky Country

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Planners and other elites threaten the long-established pleasures of life in Australia.

Few places on earth are better suited for middle-class prosperity than Australia. From early in its history, when it was a refuge for British convicts, the vast, resource-rich country has provided an ideal environment for upward mobility, from the pioneering ranches of the nineteenth century to the middle-class suburbs of the late twentieth. Journalist Donald Horne described Australia in 1964 as “a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.”

Over the last decade, though, Australia’s luck has changed, as the country develops many of the pathologies of crowded, socially divided societies like the United Kingdom or the United States. Read more

Our Suicidal Elites

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The French nobility, observed Tocqueville in The Ancien Regime and The Revolution, supported many of the writers whose essays and observations ended up threatening “their own rights and even their existence.” Today we see much the same farce repeated, as the world’s richest people line up behind causes that, in the end, could relieve them of their fortunes, if not their heads. In this sense, they could end up serving, in Lenin’s words, as “useful idiots” in their own destruction.

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The Twilight of America’s Mega-Media

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It’s far too early to predict which party will win next year’s election, but not too early to announce the national media as a clear loser in terms of national influence and prestige.

Pew reports that millennials have become as negative about major media as older generations, with their rate of approval dropping from 40% in 2010 to 27% today. Gallup tracks a similar pattern, finding 70% losing trust in the media, including nearly half of Democrats.

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The Unwitting Committee to Re-elect the President

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Given his consistently poor approval ratings, and growing concern about the polarization that he has exacerbated, Democrats should have little trouble ousting President Trump next year. But instead, with a series of outlandish and often deeply unpopular proposals, they have morphed effectively into the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

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Candidate of Big Tech

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In the free-form, roller derby race for the Democratic presidential nomination, few candidates are better positioned than California’s Senator Kamala Harris. She is a fresh and attractive mid-fifties face, compared with septuagenarian frontrunners Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, or the aging progressive Elizabeth Warren. Part Asian-Indian, part Afro-Caribbean, and female, Harris seems the frontrunner in the intersectionality sweepstakes that currently largely defines Democratic politics. Yet the national obsession with ethnicity and novelty obscures the more important reality: Harris is also the favored candidate of the tech and media oligarchy now almost uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party. Read more

The Opium of California

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The current frenzy of new IPOs — Uber, Lyft, Slack, Postmates, Pinterest and Airbnb — seems destined to reinforce progressive notions that California represents the future not just for the state, but the nation. It will certainly reinforce California’s fiscal dependency on tech-dominated elites — half of the state’s income taxes come from people making over $500,000 a year — and provide a huge potential multi-billion dollar windfall for the state treasury.

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A New Good Neighbor Policy

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Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump’s proposal to build a “beautiful wall,” it is unlikely to resolve the crisis sending ever more people—largely from Central America—to America’s borders. The problems that drive large numbers to leave their homes and trust their families to criminal gangs will not be solved by bigger fences but better thinking. Fundamentally, the United States should regard Mexico and Central America not as adversaries but as economic partners in a world increasingly defined by competition between the U.S. and an ever-more aggressive China determined to establish global hegemony—even in our hemisphere. In this context, a strong policy of investment and aid to our southern neighbors makes both economic and political sense.

The American relationship with Mexico and Central America is implicitly complementary. The U.S. and Mexico not only exchange products and services; they also produce them jointly. American manufacturing or value-added inputs represent 40 percent of every dollar Mexico exports to the United States. Chinese exports to the U.S. represent only one-tenth as much.

Mexico complements the U.S. in ways that promote regional competitiveness. Capital abundance and high-skilled labor in the U.S. are complemented by low-skilled labor abundance and capital scarcity in Mexico, factors that are, if anything, even more evident in Central America. The region’s weak human-capital accumulation has hobbled its integration with advanced trading partners like the United States. In Central America, more than half of youths between 15 and 24 are out of the educational system, and most work at poorly paid jobs. Only 38 percent of Central American youths aged 27 to 29 hold a high school degree, compared with 61 percent in the rest of Latin America.

The 1994 passage of NAFTA led to a period of unprecedented growth and optimism. Mexico enjoyed macroeconomic stability, during which inflation, exchange-rate volatility, and short-term interest rates converged with those of the U.S. Economic cycles in industrial production also converged in both countries. This emergence was derailed, first by China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization and then by the Great Recession.

The recession is now a bad memory, but China’s influence has only grown. By 2003, China had surpassed Mexico as the second-leading importer to the United States, behind Canada. By granting WTO membership and most-favored nation status to China, the U.S. opened the door for an expansion of Chinese-manufactured exports, to the detriment of traditional sources such as Mexico, which lost around 650,000 manufacturing jobs from 1995 to 2016. A big overlap exists in the kinds of products—clothing, automotive, and consumer electronics—in which both Mexico and China excelled; the two countries’ export mixes to the U.S. became similar just when China increased its manufacturing export capacity. Mexico specialized in industries and activities in which, in some cases, China would eventually develop a comparative advantage. In 2006, Mexico’s maquiladoras—mostly lower-tech factories requiring semi-skilled labor to do assembly and finishing work—generated more than $25 billion in foreign exchange and accounted for 44 percent of total Mexican manufacturing exports; 94 percent of maquiladora exports went to the U.S. As China’s access to U.S. markets grew, the maquiladora industry lost jobs, largely to China’s benefit.

The increase in Chinese exports to the U.S. hurt Mexican labor markets, which faced a negative demand shock after 2001. These shocks may have been disproportionately large in the case of manufacturing establishments that use unskilled labor, especially for maquiladoras in the border region. These factories’ production structures resembled those of Chinese firms, and they were thus more vulnerable to China’s enhanced presence in the U.S. import market.

The displacement of Mexican manufacturing products in the U.S. market led to a decrease in Mexican wages, and the negative effects spilled over to wages paid in non-manufacturing industries. The decline of manufacturing in Mexico has had a devastating impact on the country. As China’s dominance as a U.S. trading partner has grown, Mexico has seen a rapid rise of crime and corruption. The once-bright hope seen for the country, largely as a result of close cooperation with the United States, has faded, and led, most recently, to the election of its most aggressively left-wing president in 50 years—Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The results south of Mexico were even worse. In the pre-China era, Mexican manufacturers would move some their more labor-intensive operations to Central America, where costs were lower. But as the Mexican economy has failed to expand, such movement has decreased. Instead of new production, many of these countries simply import manufactured goods from China, rather than building industries for “liftoff” while they export commodities to Beijing. Chinese merchandise imports by Central American countries (Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) rose from $4.7 billion in 2011 to $8.5 billion in 2017, according to United Nations statistics.

What we now see at the border—the desperate movement of families—reflects this sad reality. As in Mexico, the nations of Central America are afflicted by high unemployment, slowing growth, and rising criminality. If prosperity never fully arrived in Mexico, it was only scarcely glimpsed farther south.

This situation, and mass migration, can be addressed only through a strategic repositioning by the region’s dominant economic power. This would include more incentives for American businesses that have already decided to move operations out of the country and shift them to Mexico—where they would at least benefit both countries—instead of to China. For President Trump, whose comments about Latin America are often both ill-conceived and poorly received, this initiative would deprive China of markets and allow our closest neighbors to share in a new North American prosperity. It’s an idea that has gained some support within the administration, and from both Republicans, such as Marco Rubio, and Democrats, like prospective presidential candidates Julian Castro and Joe Biden.

A bold program that steers American investment, and that of allies, to Mexico and Central America could be critical to bolstering our trade position and creating newly receptive customers. And it could reshape the immigration debate by slowing migration—a win both for America and those countries desperately in need of creating opportunity for their citizens.

It also would serve to address the historic gap between our neighbors and ourselves. There’s an old saying in Mexico, ascribed to the nineteenth-century dictator Porfirio Díaz : Pobre Me’xico, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos, which means, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the U.S.” A reimagined American-Mexican alliance would make both sides happy to be neighbors again.

This piece originally appeared on City Journal.

Photo Credit: Martin D, via Flickr, using CC License.

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. He authored The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, published in 2016 by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He is executive director of NewGeography.com and lives in Orange County, CA.

Understanding the Appeal of Democratic Socialism Key to Defeating It

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In their race to save an unpopular president and their lack of a positive agenda, many Republicans and conservatives increasingly identify the rise of “democratic socialism” as their ultimate, if you will, Trump card. Given the fact that most Americans, particularly older ones, still favor capitalism and are less than enthusiastic about expanding federal power, this approach might work.

But conservatives, in or out of the White House, underestimate the intrinsic appeal of the resurgence of neo-Marxism at their own peril. Already more Democrats have a favorable view of socialism than capitalism. Some millennials — soon to be the nation’s largest voting bloc — even see neo-Marxism as “hip” and even “sexy.”

These same urban hipsters, as opposed to working class ethnics, elected the left’s political stars like Alexandria Ocosio Cortez. Bizarrely, socialism even appeals among the educated young workers so coveted by tech firms. This rise of woke progressivism represents a threat both to the right as well as the super-affluent gentry left.

Ignore socialism’s appeal, at your own peril

I grew up in an atmosphere where socialist ideas were taken seriously. My paternal grandmother was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, and a strong supporter of Norman Thomas (my paternal grandfather was a successful dress manufacturer and Republican). My maternal grandfather, a union window washer, spoke openly of the class struggle as if he was still in Russia.

Socialism’s appeal stemmed, as it does today, from the failures of capitalism. Until the 1950s, working class people in most industrial countries suffered harsh conditions, crowded into bleak city apartments or isolated in hardscrabble smaller communities. For them, what many conservatives deemed as “socialism” — social security, the GI bill, the New Deal infrastructure program — was seen as helping expand the middle class.

The experiences of the working class were very real. My mother was raised in the slums of Brownsville, Brooklyn, and my maternal mother, a seamstress, lived her last years in union housing in that fair borough. Even though most of us were from middle class families, we naturally embraced expanded social democracy, if not of the Norman Thomas variety, certainly that espoused by President Harry Truman, California’s Pat Brown and even President Lyndon Johnson.

A historical perspective

Conservatives often link today’s socialism with the massive failure of the Soviet Union and the Maoist regime in China. And to be sure, some of today’s firebrands have long demonstrated sympathy to dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba, and for Rep. Ilhan Omar, even a soft spot for anti-Semitic radical Islamists like Hamas. But even the most addled firebrands know they can’t sell third world despotism, much less sharia law, to the average American.

Generally our new socialists pitch European welfare states as their model, with much higher taxes and greater regulation of private businesses. The shapers of modern democratic socialism, such as Michael Harrington, whose The Other America, exposed the vast extent of poverty in early 1960s America, favored a similar system but favored decentralization over of the oppressive Soviet regime. Remember this was a time when most northern European economies were stronger than ours. In recent decades, some of these countries, notably Sweden and Germany, have adopted a more free-market approach as a means of reviving their economies.

What’s the matter with the new socialists?

With rampant inequality and shrinking middle class, the case for socialism should be stronger than any time since the Depression; many, if not most Americans, certainly would not object to taxing the uber-wealthy much more. But socialism’s leading messengers, reared in the ideological hot-houses of elite universities, also constitute the wealthiest and whitest of America’s political tribes.

Not surprisingly the neo-socialists carry attitudes ill-suited for capitalizing, as did Donald Trump, on the mass middle and working class disaffection. All too often they adopt the intersectional, and sometimes openly anti-American, agenda incubated throughout our culture and educational system. Their obsessions with racial redress, including reparations and open borders, seemed ill-suited to winning over most working class voters, something that more seasoned socialists, like Bernie Sanders, recognize.

Worst of all, the much hyped Green New Deal would spell disaster for millions of blue collar workers, as the AFL-CIO recently pointed out, particularly those who work in the construction, energy, transportation, farming and manufacturing industries. The original New Deal, recently excoriated by Ocasio Cortez, was about improving the lives of ordinary Americans, not forcing them to downgrade their ambitions, give up meat, live in small apartments and perhaps not even have children.

Having never studied the history of the Soviet Union, the new democratic socialists seem oblivious, unlike Harrington, George Orwell and other 20th century social democrats, about the dangers implicit in the centralization of economic and political power.

But it’s not just the ditzy left-wingers who need a history lesson. Those on the right, with all their fulsome defense of capitalism, need to be reminded that free markets need to create increased opportunity as well as the better living conditions. Our increasingly hierarchal, and feudal, capitalism all too often fails this test. My fellow capitalists, please remember that only a broadly inclusive version of capitalism can exorcise the ghost of socialism.

This article first appeared at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. He authored The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, published in 2016 by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He is executive director of NewGeography.com and lives in Orange County, CA.

Homepage photo credit: Office of Sen. Bernie Sanders [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons