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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

The Retreat from Globalism

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In the wake of liberal globalism’s failings, a nationalist tide is rising today, not only in China and Russia but also throughout the West. It is a dynamic eerily similar to 100 years ago, when war, pandemic and economic insecurity brought national tensions to the surface. Yet today’s undoubted turn against globalism need not herald a return to the dark days of aggressive nationalism. Instead, we are seeing the rise of a new community-based and self-governing model of localism.

This new localism counteracts some of the worst aspects of globalism – homogeneity, deindustrialisation and ever-growing class divides – while eschewing the authoritarian tendencies often associated with nationalistic fervour. It essentially seeks to replace, where possible, mass institutions and production with local entrepreneurship and competition.

This approach has demonstrated remarkable appeal. The promising evolution of technologies like remote work and 3D printing is already creating opportunities to enhance local economies. In the US, strong majorities trust local governments, compared to the more than half who lack trust in Washington, notes Gallup. Big companies, banks and media receive low marks from the public, but small businesses continue to enjoy widespread support across party lines.

This is not merely an American phenomenon. In France there have been consistent protests against globalisation for decades. Poland and the rest of eastern Europe, recovering from decades of central control and imperial edicts from Moscow, have also favoured localism. There is also pushback against federal encroachment in Canada, while the UK’s turn against globalism was best exemplified by its withdrawal from the EU.

The movement against globalism constitutes an alternative to increasingly intrusive government: such as in Europe, where the unelected EU bureaucracy seeks ever-expanding powers, and in North America and Australia, where national bureaucracies work to undermine traditionally vibrant local communities. It also has strong connections to populism, particularly in Europe. Its base, small business, tends to tilt to the right in most countries, including the US.

Yet the new localism is not fundamentally a question of left vs right. It is about sustaining local economies and self-governing institutions. According to Kevin Albertson, professor of economics at Manchester University, in politics today it often seems that the only choice on offer is between ‘big state or big business’. Faced with this unenviable dilemma, he argues, the ‘only viable alternative’ is localism – that is, ‘small state and small business’.

Essentially, localism looks to humanise the economy. Whereas global or national conglomerates respond largely to capital flows, local businesses rely heavily on networks of customers and suppliers. In the food industry, many start off as home-based businesses, and then become food trucks. Some evolve into modest restaurants, and occasionally open numerous locations, usually in the same region. These offer an alternative to the sameness of chain stores, at a time when many once ubiquitous traditional venues – pubs in London, bistros in Paris, as well as kosher delicatessens and Greek diners in places like New York – have declined.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

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: Famartin via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License

How America’s ‘Big Sort’ Will Upend Politics

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The world may not be turning upside down, but it’s certainly tilting. In the long shadow of the pandemic, with war on the European continent and the West and China entering a new cold war, the “new economy” of bits and bytes that was supposed to connect and shape the world has hit a rough patch. Meanwhile, the much disdained “old” economy of manufacturing, agriculture and energy is thriving.

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The Great Train Robbery

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We will soon be leaving the first quarter of the 21st century behind us. But in the minds of our transportation planners, the punditry, and some real estate interests, the way forward is actually to step back to the glories of the 19th century. Read more

How the California Dream Became a Nightmare

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For Americans, California once looked like the future. It was a state defined by risk-taking and utopian dreaming. Yet for most Californians today, the upward mobility so central to the state’s ethos is rapidly disappearing. For decades, California was the primary destination for both other Americans and for foreign immigrants. Now, this trend has gone into reverse Read more

The Rise of the Single Woke Female

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Unmarried women without children have been moving toward the Democratic Party for several years, but the 2022 midterms may have been their electoral coming out party as they proved the chief break on the predicted Republican wave. While married men and women as well as unmarried men broke for the GOP, CNN exit polls found that 68% of unmarried women voted for Democrats.

The Supreme Court’s August decision overturning Roe v. Wade was certainly a special factor in the midterms, but longer-term trends show that single, childless women are joining African Americans as the Democrats’ most reliable supporters.

Their power is growing thanks to the demographic winds. The number of never married women has grown from about 20% in 1950 to over 30% in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70% in 1950 to under 50% today. Overall, the percentage of married households with children has declined from 37% in 1976 to 21% today.

The Single Wave

The Pew Research Center notes that since 1960, single-person households in the United States have grown from 13% to 27% (2019). Many, particularly women, are not all that keen on finding a partner. Pew recently found that “men are far more likely than women to be on the dating market: 61% of single men say they are currently looking for a relationship or dates, compared with 38% of single women.”

There’s clearly far less stigma attached to being single and unpartnered. Single women today have many impressive role models of unattached, childless women who have succeeded on their own – like Taylor Swift and much of the U.S. women’s soccer team. This phenomenon is not confined to the United States. Marriage and birthrates have fallen in much of the world, including Europe and Japan. Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, columnist Emma John observed that, “Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is increasingly seen as a valid choice.”

Rise of Identity Politics

The rise of SWFs – a twist on the personal ad abbreviation for single white female – is one of the great untold stories of American politics. Distinct from divorced women or widows, these largely Gen Z and Millennial voters share a sense of collective identity and progressive ideology that sets them apart from older women. More likely to live in urban centers and to support progressive policies, they are a driving force in the Democratic party’s and the nation’s shift to the left. One paradox, however: Democrats depend ever more on women defined in the strict biological sense while much of the party’s progressive wing embraces the blurred and flexible gender boundaries of its identity politics.

Attitudes are what most distinguish single women from other voters. An American Enterprise Institute survey shows that married men and women are far more likely than unmarried females to think women are well treated or equally treated. As they grow in numbers, these discontented younger single women are developing something of a group consciousness. Nearly two thirds of women under 30, for example, see what happens to other women as critical to their own lives; among women over 50, this mindset shrinks to less than half.

Read the rest of this piece at Real Clear Investigations.

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.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Michael Hicks via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

A Nation of Giants Led By Pygmies

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The United States today stands as a living contradiction to the ‘great man theory of history’. For the US is a great country led by small minds. Read more

North America Has An Opportunity to Lead the World

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For generations, pundits the world over have insisted that the future will be forged elsewhere — Europe for some, Japan for others and, more recently, China. Yet, in reality, the United States and Canada may well be best positioned for a changing world, if our leaders can leverage our natural advantages.

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The Collapse of the Progressive Economy

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In recent decades, progressive politics has been underwritten by the ascendant economic titans of capital, technology, and communication. Big Tech and financial firms have long financed Democratic causes, led by those such as George Soros and the now-disgraced crypto-master Sam Bankman-Fried, who was released last month on a $250 million bail deal.

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Prisoners of Ideology

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The tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge, is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society.
~Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, 1969

A persistent pragmatic streak has long been one of the great assets of American society (and, indeed, most English-speaking societies) in the modern age. To be sure, these societies have endured their share of ideological spats, and even occasional outbreaks of political extremism. But for the most part, they have managed to adjust, albeit too slowly at times, to changing conditions without facing a society-wrenching conflict.

That tradition is now threatened; a victim of partisan zealotry on a host of issues — climate, race, and gender being the most obvious — where advocates pursue only extreme solutions to pressing problems. Rather than find ways to accommodate the views of diverse populations, the current tendency has been to ram through draconian policies by whatever means are at hand.

The good news, however, is that most Americans are not buying this from either party—they do not readily embrace the ideological purity or the authoritarian agenda of radicals on either the Left or the Right. Trump and his backers are losing support as their desire to undermine the Constitutional order becomes increasingly apparent. Like their opponents on the far-Left, they have become impatient with democracy and contemptuous of gradualism that voters instinctively prefer.

Reviving the American creed

The country needs to return to a politics informed by what the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called “the American creed”—an “abiding sense that every individual, regardless of circumstances, deserves fairness and the opportunity to realize unlimited potential.” Given the country’s ideological, regional, and racial diversity, we can address our “American dilemma,” best by adopting pragmatism as our guiding philosophy.

This approach enabled the country to address many of its longstanding environmental, racial, and gender-related ills in past decades. It was not an ideological calling, but a practical approach to solving real problems, and it allowed Daniel Bell to proclaim “the end of ideology” in his 1960 book of the same name. Americans, Bell maintained, had “an extraordinary talent for compromise in politics.” The parties were largely non-ideological—each was essentially “some huge bazaar, with hundreds of hucksters clamoring for attention,” while organized labor focussed on material rewards. Frustrated ideologues on the Left and Right may have decried the “radical dehumanization” of American daily life, but “our politics and civilization run like a machine.”

Although those ideologues may have seethed, America became not just wealthier, but more just and more powerful. The move to cleaner water and air began in earnest under Richard Nixon, while African Americans and other minorities made their best economic progress in the three decades after the Second World War. African Americans have served now in virtually all the highest offices, including those of president and vice-president, and have doubled their numbers in Congress since 1991. In the 1960s and ’70s, American women began to enter college in greater numbers, and by the 1990s, had begun to outpace men in terms of college graduation. There were outbreaks of outrage—particularly regarding race and the war in Vietnam—but overall, the society was moving in a positive direction.

Read the rest of this piece at Quillette.

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 using image by Tyler Merbler via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.