The passing this last week of Joe Lieberman, a long-time Connecticut Senator and former vice-presidential candidate, stands as reminder of how far the Democrats have moved from the kind of centrist politics that he so epitomised.
For years, American urbanists and city planners have looked at Canadian cities with envy, as they had managed to avoid the searing decline of their American counterparts. And Toronto was where the late Jane Jacobs chose to make her home, largely due to her enthusiasm for urban neighbourhoods.
The technological revolution once promised a new era of expanded democracy and enhanced opportunity. Instead, we face today a reality that blends the worst aspects of George Orwell’s Big Brother and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World controllers.
Three decades ago, author Steve Toulmin published a book in which he argued that the cosmopolis constitutes the true “agenda of modernity.” Driven by increased trade and movement of peoples, it would create a universal order that “binds all things together” on the basis of Enlightenment ideals.
You have to be utterly delusional – or a member of a teacher’s union – to think that the US education system isn’t a total disaster. The most recent National Assessments of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”) found barely a quarter of students are proficient in reading, geography and American history. Read more
“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Winston Churchill. And judging by the state of education in America, it seems both of those empires could soon crumble. The dysfunction is evident from top to bottom: from Ivy League outposts down to the secondary schools. Both are producing a generation that is ill-informed, illiterate and innumerate. In other words, a generation increasingly ill-suited to function as productive citizens in a democracy.
The recent announcement that Ian Jacobs, a scion of the famous Toronto-based Reichmann real estate clan, was coming to buy upwards of $900 million of San Francisco real estate, has offered the beleaguered California city a rare moment of hope. Some suggest that we could see a repeat of New York’s recovery from its nadir in the 1970s, during which the Reichmanns made a fortune gobbling up depressed buildings shortly before the city’s resurgence. Read more
For generations, education has been a primary means to make countries like Canada and the United States stronger, more productive, and self-confident. Now the education system is not only failing to perform its primary mission for young people, but increasingly works to undermine and divide nations.
At a time when the western world desperately needs some backbone, Canada seems to be swaying. It appears to have moved away from its long-term commitment to protect our now wobbling western civilization. Read more
Americans, with little help from government, are reinventing themselves and boosting their prospects by settling in less expensive, less regulated regions where rents and house prices are more affordable.
Much of this is taking place in “red states,” leading some to link this movement to a conservative ideological agenda. But this is not primarily a political movement. It is a reflection of a largely apolitical grassroots and market-driven trend.
America’s Geographic Pattern
American history has been defined by its vastness. Colonial America provided an outlet for Britons hemmed in by scarce land, enclosures, and aristocratic domination. The early America republic was largely shaped by an epic expansion to the West, driven both by immigrants and by domestic migration from the more heavily settled, class-bound coastal areas.
Through the 19th century, millions migrated further into the interior of the continent, even to the so-called “great American desert” that Daniel Webster, among others, considered inhospitable to human habitation. Ultimately, the path of manifest destiny extended to the Pacific coast, shifting political power, economic, technological, and cultural influence from its historical northeastern base.
Today’s American geographic trends favor the South, the intermountain West, and the desert Southwest. In the past decade, five southern states — Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina, along with Arizona in the west — exceeded the growth in all of the other (44) states and the District of Columbia, according to the Census, notes demographer Wendell Cox. This pattern has accelerated since 2020, with southern states gaining 1.7 million, while the other three Census regions (Northeast, Midwest, and West) all had net domestic migration losses. In 2023, southern states accounted for 87 percent of all U.S. population growth.
Over recent decades the settled areas of the northeast and the West Coast have become ever more expensive and highly regulated, driving both businesses and people away. Recently the net losers include green “utopia” Oregon, and California, blessed by nature but also now the most heavily regulated state and among the highest taxed. Those running California managed to create a situation where housing prices have soared, even as the state has lost population.
The Triumph of Suburbia
The emergence of the New America is not just a move to red states but includes population shifts within blue states. In California, San Francisco and Los Angeles may be experiencing declines, but outlying areas such as the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland Empire continue to grow, a trend expected to continue for the next several decades.
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: suburban sprawl in Southern California
Join the conversation at Twitter
or Facebook. Visit our YouTube
channel or subscribe to RSS
to read our latest articles.
Daniel Oberhaus, used under CC 4.0 License