If passed, the measure would open the door for similar assaults on the unrealized gains not just of billionaires, but for less exalted people with high net worth but hardly oligarchs. Ultimately, if California’s ever-expanding welfare state is to be funded, wealth taxes could enable the government to raid savings, property, and stocks held by a large and expanding upper middle class. That group comprises roughly a third of the population, many of them owners of successful small businesses. The billionaires are just the first easy targets; the socialists will be coming for the equivalent of Stalin’s kulaks next.

All this threatens a state and country whose ethos has always, on both sides of the aisle, been the accumulation of wealth. Of course, most Republicans, the natural allies of the rich, oppose the California ballot measure, but given their lack of popularity in the state, that is hardly decisive. The real battle is within the Democratic Party, where the establishment, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and his heir apparent, Xavier Becerra, oppose it. So, too, do many unions that fear the economic and tax consequences of the measure.

But even if Proposition 40 goes down — due largely to a record-breaking $350 million campaign against it, financed by the state’s oligarchs — its impact will linger. When the Democrats retake the US Congress this year, and perhaps the White House in 2028, wealth taxes will become a part of their agenda. Chastened by the initial support for Proposition 40, Gavin Newsom, the supreme Democratic weathervane, has already embraced the idea of adopting wealth taxes nationally.

The ascendant progressive wing of the Democratic Party will almost certainly demand a national wealth tax too. It will be led by Silicon Valley’s Rep. Ro Khanna, who, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, may be seeking the White House. This kind of redistributionist policy stretches to outright confiscation, as can be seen in the measures proposed recently by Bernie Sanders to nationalize AI companies. Such initiatives could define politics, particularly among Democrats, in the coming years.

It is logical that the wealth tax — which proposes a one-time grab of 5% of the net worth of all billionaires in California — arose in a state whose vast welfare system is dependent on the assets of a very few people, largely in Silicon Valley. According to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, the top 1% of its taxpayers generate about 40% of the Golden State’s personal-income-tax revenue. The huge growth of oligarch money, notably fueled by capital gains on stock, has allowed Newsom to expand the state apparatus by an inflation-adjusted 40%, albeit with management characterized by fraud, waste, and simple incompetence. 

New York, the other focal point for socialists, also depends on the rich. Wall Street supplies a fifth of state taxes; salaries in the securities sector are roughly five times higher than the private-employment average. Like California’s, the Empire State’s economy lives or dies on the AI boom, as recently warned by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. And to date, the high taxes in both states have not prevented the minting of new billionaires, upon whom the local government can depend, even as some of the very richest leave. Since 2022, California has gained 76 new billionaires, easily the most in the nation; New York added 24, third behind Florida.

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America’s new geography of opportunity

By Joel Kotkin

In both New York and California, the bargain has been this: you grow and get rich, but then help pay off our constituencies, notably teachers and other public employees. Then you extend more welfare to an increasingly redundant population that suffers poverty rates that rank among the nation’s highest, with California coming in second in the nation on the supplemental poverty measure index, which adjusts calculations for geographical cost of living factors, taxes, and non-cash benefits. New York City, the eastern mecca for the socialists, suffers a poverty rate that by some measures reaches 25%, almost twice the national average, with the Bronx reaching over a third, in large part due to high costs. 

The relationship between the billionaires and their socialist detractors reeks of contradictions. The Democratic Socialists of America want a bigger welfare state to tame capitalism but can only finance it by confiscating the wealth of the oligarchs they hate. The tax’s proponents in California, mostly from the government-funded health sector, claim it would bring in $100 billion, essentially underwriting medical services for much of the population. Others, including the Hoover Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research, think the short-term gains will be less than half the $100 billion windfall that the proponents suggest.

The indications that some of the wealthy will flee from ever greater taxation are clear. California’s tax rates, even before the proposed wealth tax, have already accelerated; much the same can be said about New York. In 2022-2023, the loss of affluent taxpayers reduced revenues by almost $12 billion in California; in much smaller New York, revenue dropped by $10 billion; blue states Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey also saw revenue loss from the flight of the rich.

The pain from this financial hegira has been cushioned by the stock market’s zany ascent, driven by AI. For example, the coming IPO for Anthropic could create more billionaires, with seven, all millennials, slated for payouts that could reach north of $30 billion. Bonuses on Wall Street, another beneficiary of the AI boom, are at record levels. Figures released by DiNapoli, the New York comptroller, show that New York’s security-industry profits for the first half of 2026 surged a stunning 51.3%, year over year, to $45.9 billion. 

But what happens when the music stops? This is not a theoretical question. The absurd valuations of tech firms are already making some analysts nervous. Indeed, a growing array of skeptics already suggest that the models for AI may not generate the income to offset the industry’s huge expenses; global research and advisory firm Gartner, for example, predicts that planned expenditures for AI infrastructure by 2030 are twice the projected revenue. Even if Anthropic’s coming IPO will expand billionaire wealth, some AI-oriented IPOs have been put on hold as confidence ebbs.

Equally worrisome, financing for new data centers is growing scarce while opposition to construction has burgeoned, even in deep-red states, notes energy analyst Robert Bryce. Pressure against the centers is, if anything, more intense in the very states — California and New York — most dependent on the bubble. 

Any serious slowdown in the AI boom could prove devastating to New York and California. Neither can afford a revenue drop. California, according to its own Legislative Analyst’s Office,  already faces structural budget deficits ranging from $20 billion to $35 billion annually over the next several years, even without a market downturn. New York State and New York City also face mounting deficits, even with all the new cash coming in from Wall Street.

After all, California’s economy was particularly battered when the last tech bubble burst, and today, as other industries have faded, the state is even more dependent on the whims of the technoids. In the dotcom crash at the turn of the millennium, the state’s income-tax revenue plummeted, and capital-gains revenue fell to $5 billion in 2003, down from $17 billion in 2000. This created a shortfall of more than $20 billion. Even the relatively small tech correction in 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 brought revenues $65 billion below estimates. Newsom has already sounded the alarm about a similar financial drought this time around.

New York faces an equally dismal prospect, given its dependence on Wall Street, as was demonstrated in downturns in both 2000-2001 and 2008, which greatly reduced the state’s revenues. And this dependence leads to dangerous volatility; California and New York are among the most exposed to rapid shifts in the market, notes Pew. They are far more exposed than Texas, Florida, and other big red states, where more diversified economies encompass sectors such as energy, construction, and manufacturing.

Yet these warnings won’t necessarily stop the demand for wealth taxes. Once seen as exemplars of American success and innovation, the tech firms in particular have become bêtes noires, widely despised and distrusted. The percentage of Americans expressing “a great deal” or even “quite a lot” of confidence in big tech has plummeted to 20% this year, down from 32% in 2020. Recent movies about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes portray not heroic entrepreneurs, but grasping, power-hungry, and amoral money gluttons. 

Conservative moralists may see this as simply envy over others’ success, but the oligarchs are not exactly making a case for themselves. Even as they make record profits, many of the top tech companies are laying off thousands of employees, and some like Zuckerberg have actively announced their intention to winnow employment at their own companies by using AI. Just this week, Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 workers, a quarter of its global workforce. 

To be sure, the AI boom does offer some advantages, including a demonstrable increase in productivity and potential vast opportunities for small-scale entrepreneurs. But more efficient companies, including small ones, can’t cancel out the stark reality of labor’s loss of its share of income to capital, now the most unequal in 80 years. The top 0.1% of the population’s share of net worth over the past two decades has soared to 15%, from 5%. Silicon Valley, once a beacon for democratic capitalism, has become one of the most unequal places in North America, with the wealthiest 10% controlling 75% of the wealth, while the bottom half of the population owns less than 1%. In a recent survey, 60% of Silicon Valley residents say the region is on the wrong track and almost half say they are likely to leave.

The AI pioneers, deeply entwined with the platforms like Meta, Google, and Microsoft, have been particularly inartful. Most Americans may not much appreciate the oligarchs’ notions of diminishing the value of labor, or even jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s vision of the future  is that many of our needs — and our tasks — will be fulfilled by “Machines of Loving Grace,” which will provide “a general labor substitute for humans.” Amodei adds: “It can’t be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.”

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Of course, not all non-elite work will disappear. Humans, notes a top Anthropic executive, can still find work in “grounds maintenance, like food and serving, personal care, personal service.” 

Not surprisingly, fewer than a quarter of Americans expect AI to have a positive impact on education, arts and entertainment, the economy, personal relationships, or happiness over the next 20 years. Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, openly suggests his systems could result in a global catastrophe, even if it makes huge profits for a handful of companies.

But even if the AI boom deflates, the notion of wealth taxes will not. And it won’t stop with billionaires, since they can move and have the best advice to reduce taxes. The real, and inevitable, target will be the largely boomer upper middle class. After all, the top 10% of boomers account for 71% of the generational wealth. 

Such efforts will divide the ascendant Democrats, as well-paid, highly educated professionals constitute much of their base. Opposing them will be the “Lulu-Lenins” driving the socialist revival emerging from the discouraged, underpaid, overeducated, and largely childless urban population. In recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California, 75% of young adults aged 18-34 say they plan to vote yes on the billionaire tax. This group of Californians makes up about a quarter of the total number of voters statewide. 

Some analysts, like Hank Adler, a professor of accounting at Chapman University, suggest there are better, less damaging ways to raise revenues. Wealth taxes, he argues, essentially target money that can be used for investment and remove the incentives for deductions tied to philanthropy. Adler has had clients among smaller firms who will essentially be forced to choose between investing in people and technology or paying up for the pensions of public employees and the programs of the NGOs.

A better alternative to wealth taxes could force the ultra-rich to pay up but not at the cost of prosperity. These include, Adler suggests, lowering the limits on exemptions to estate taxes, and charging higher fees for consumption of luxury goods. Adler and other critics note that similar billionaire-tax measures in Europe have largely been reversed. Indeed, the idea for the wealth tax comes from economists in France, a country whose combination of a huge welfare state and a poorly performing economy has generated bitter class and ethnic conflict, as is all too evident. 

The best solution lies in a tax program that seeks not class vengeance, but instead funds projects that increase jobs and create opportunities. This was done nationwide in the 1930s via investment in urban infrastructure and in New York in the 1960s, and — most spectacularly of all — by California Gov. Pat Brown’s building programs a half century ago. 

Ultimately, the solution lies somewhere between the socialist war on success and the libertarian “let-them-eat-cake” approach, which essentially ignores the fact that rampant inequality and concentration of wealth undermine support for the free-market system. The radicals may be wrong in their prescriptions, but the need to address today’s neo-feudal reality remains the greatest priority.

The numbers speak for themselves: the Energy Corridor covers some nearly 2,000 acres, 20 miles west of Houston’s central core. It is home to eight Fortune 500 companies, has 67,000 jobs, 27 million square feet of office space, and nearly 4 million square feet of retail and restaurant space. The residential population is 20,000 strong and growing, and should continue to thrive so long as fossil fuels continue to supply four-fifths of the world’s energy supplies. It and a host of new communities further west — many developing their own retail and residential centers — have accounted for nearly 86% of the region’s growth since the year 2000. 

Houston’s light touch regulation and openness to urban expansion accounts for much of the new development, according to Tim Cisneros, a local developer and architect. Over excellent steak at a local Uruguayan restaurant in the Energy Corridor’s City Centre dining-and-retail hub, Cisneros tells me his big opportunities are increasingly in the peripheries, in places like Sugar Land, Pearland, the Woodlands, and Cinco Ranch, all metropolitan Houston or adjacent communities created in the past few decades. “In places like this,” Cisneros says. “You get the urban experience even when you are not in the city.”

The conventional wisdom is that being big and dense is the key to success. As Neil Irwin wrote in The New York Times in 2018, the future would be one “where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities.” However America’s essential story has always been one of migration — first from New England to the Midwest in the early 19th century, then from the countryside to big cities, followed by mass migration to California after World War II. Today’s big shift is the movement of companies and people to business-friendly regions in the suburbs and exurbs.

Corporations are leaving the great urban cores of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles due to high energy prices, regulatory constraints and sky-high taxes. They are locating instead in less glamorous places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh. A ranking of American business climates by Site Selection gave top ratings to Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, Florida, and Midwestern states like Ohio and Indiana. 

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Tomorrow’s cities are here

By Joel Kotkin

Houston has emerged as first in job creation among the nation’s largest metro areas, growing 50% faster than New York, twice as fast as Los Angeles, and over seven times faster than greater Chicago in the past year. Overall, mid-sized metropolitan areas, with populations of between 1 million and 10 million, are adding jobs the fastest. 

It used to be that dense cities were considered to be inherently more productive. However, technology such as remote work, video conferencing, and instantaneous communication is enabling  worker dispersion, bearing out Frank Lloyd Wright’s prediction that in the future “the city should be everywhere and nowhere.” And a recent report from Brown University suggests that neither city size nor density strongly correlates with higher productivity. This merely reflects reality: today, the 50 fastest-growing counties, almost all in metropolitan peripheries, are gaining jobs at well more than two times the general rate.

In the once glittering downtowns, there has been a 90% decline in the prices of commercial real estate in some cases. This is not just a post-pandemic phenomenon. Office occupancy started to decline by the turn of the new millennium, and construction of new space also began to fall around that time. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of the year 2000.

This reflects an economy already dispersing at a rapid rate. Between 2010 and 2017, 91% of employment growth among major metropolitan areas was outside of central business districts. Remote work has proven a gift to some outlying areas, sparking growth even in parts of southern Appalachia. The 50 highest-growth counties, almost all of them in exurbia, experienced an employment increase of more than 2.5 times that of other counties in 2019. These aren’t “bedroom communities”; they are spread out cities.   

Some urban cores, notably Manhattan, remain powerful in terms of media and culture, but no longer dominate the country’s economic life. The rise of AI may accelerate this process by downsizing many of the activities key to urban centers. 

Growth in the business-services industry has also trended toward smaller metro areas of 1 million to 5 million people, particularly over the most recent five year period. Booming business service-industry hubs include smaller metros such as Austin, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Omaha, Orlando, and Portland, Maine. In contrast, San Francisco and San Jose are suffering the nation’s biggest employment declines, as well as stubbornly high vacancies for commercial real estate. 

Moving out of big urban areas used to mean a downgrade in earnings, but now, salaries across the 19-state American Heartland region, essentially the territory between the Appalachians and the Rockies, are above the national average.  The hinterland’s improving conditions are further buffeted by growth in jobs making material goods. Cities like Miami, Charlotte, and Knoxville — none of them historically associated with industry — have seen the most robust industrial growth, while the last generation’s industrial leaders — cities like Los Angeles, San Jose, and Seattle — suffered a marked decline. Traditional manufacturing-oriented communities such as  Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio, are also benefiting from re-shoring businesses and foreign investment.  

Increasingly, great urban centers play an essentially symbolic role, known for glamor and high-income residents. In New York, while the overall population has declined, the number of ultra-wealthy residents has also increased. The result is a bifurcated urbanity, more like that of a stratified Medieval city rather than an engine of upward mobility; for example the Bronx, just across the Harlem River from increasingly bourgeois Manhattan, remains the country’s poorest urban county. Even as poverty in suburbs has increased, the suburban poverty rate is only half of that found in big cities. 

These stark class divisions have helped progressives to gain elected office in blue cities like Seattle, Chicago, Washington, LA, and Portland, Oregon. These groups, notably the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, embrace policies that weaken law enforcement, allow for public camping, and seek an expansion of the welfare state by imposing higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals. Ultimately, such policies backfire as technology allows key executives to become more mobile.

The second shift lies with migration of people, particularly young families. America’s urban core counties lost 3,259,000 net domestic migrants from 2020 to 2024, which was three times the rate of loss in the previous decade, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Growth has shifted to peripheral areas, largely to areas 20 miles or more from the central core.

This is a longtime trend. In 1950, nearly 24% of the US population lived in the core cities. Today, according to one MIT study, roughly 80% of the nation’s metropolitan population lives in suburbs or exurbs, while barely 8% live in the urban core and another 13% live in traditional transit-oriented suburbs. Since 2010, suburbs have accounted for about 90% of all US metropolitan growth.

In many ways, this represents a return to deep-seated patterns. Americans have long tended to favor single-family houses in lower-density neighborhoods. In the 2020 Census, 92% of the population lived in counties with typical suburban population densities. In contrast, the urban cores, with population densities of at least 7,500 per square mile, accounted for barely 4% of the population, mostly located in and around New York City.  

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These trends seem likely to increase as the two key demographic groups, Millennials and immigrants, continue to move to suburbs, and increasingly the exurbs. In the past, many younger people headed for big cities like New York, as well as places like Seattle and Denver, but high  housing prices make settling in these places more difficult, particularly for families. Instead they are moving to affordable regions, such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Houston, where Millennial homeownership has surged. 

The key is that Millennials, born between 1981 and 1994, and now the largest portion of the population, are entering middle age. Lured by lower crime rates, single family homes, and better schools, educated Millennials now are migrating to suburbs or smaller cities. In contrast, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and even Seattle have lost some of their once magnetic appeal. The top 10 cities for Millennials include Austin, Dallas, Jacksonville, Tampa; Salt Lake City, and Henderson, Nevada.

Attitudinal swings associated with entering middle age are responsible for this shift, according to Robert Schottenstein, CEO of Columbus-based builder M/I Homes, Inc. “This is a flight to safety and security,” Schottenstein told me. “The Millennials are getting older and they are transitioning as they start families.” Even before the pandemic, two-thirds of Millennials preferred suburban living. One clear sign: high-growth exurban counties have added residents ages 25 to 34 by almost four times the national rate.  

Minorities and immigrants, who make up a large share of new buyers, favor not dense metros but sprawling areas such as South Florida, Houston, and Dallas-Ft. Worth, all of which now attract more immigrants than gateway cities like New York and Los Angeles. This reflects a preference for affordable single-family houses; something particularly marked among Latinos.  Roughly half of all Asians and Latinos live in single-family homes.  

Meanwhile it seems likely that migration patterns out of the dense, blue states will continue for the foreseeable future. In a poll taken in early 2026, roughly half of Massachusetts residents said they have considered leaving the state. Similarly, one-third of New York residents already plan to leave within the next five years, as do 4 in 10 Californians. Recently, more are moving not just to Texas and Florida, but even to “hillbilly states” like Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. By 2050, according to the most recent projections, Texas is on track to surpass California as the nation’s most populous state. 

Over time, birthrates will further propel these trends. Dense urban areas such as Los Angeles, Portland, San Diego, Boston, and Chicago, have experienced the most rapid decline in birthrates. The next generation of high school graduates will be concentrated in places like Texas, Florida and the Carolinas, while huge drops are expected in California, New York, and Illinois.  

These trends suggest an America that will look more like the Energy Corridor than like a historic urban core. This prospect may not thrill urban sophisticates, but developers like architect Tim Cisneros are not about to miss an opportunity to meet the aspirations of America’s perpetually restive population. “You go there,” he says, “because that’s where the action is.”

Romero was the Democratic majority leader in the state legislature between 2005 and 2008, and known as something of a Leftist hothead. She was particularly concerned with the degraded state of K-12 education in the Golden State but found that when bills came up for discussion, her colleagues didn’t ask for expert opinion or even consult with each other about the legislation. Instead, they went on their phones, waiting for instructions — from the 2-million-strong California Teachers Association.

Now 71, Romero is running for lieutenant governor. As a Republican. She hasn’t lost her passion for improving education, particularly for minority students. But she is more convinced than ever that the unions and their Democratic allies only have only three priorities: more union jobs, higher salaries, and even richer pensions. “I could have played the game with the unions,” she recalls, looking back on her time as a Democrat, “but I couldn’t stand it. We have to make a pivot if we don’t want the schools to get worse.”

The educational market suggests the failure of the union model. By 2041, union hotbeds like New York, Illinois, and California are projected to lose nearly a third of their high-school students. Big-city school districts like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago already are losing students at rapid rates. Yet whenever possible, they still want to hire more staff; while losing 130,000 students so far in this decade, the Los Angeles Unified School District has managed to add 11,000 employees.

This isn’t primarily an issue of money. California’s system — the largest system in the country serving nearly 5.9 million public-school children — burns through nearly $20,000 per pupil. The results? Two out of three California students didn’t meet state math standards, and more than half didn’t meet English standards on state assessments. 

The failures seem even greater when we compare the Golden State’s performance to that of other states, especially for Latino children. California Latino students perform worse in both English and math than their counterparts in similarly diverse states like Florida and Texas; in fourth-grade reading, the state ranks behind longtime laggard Mississippi. By contrast, Texas spends about $13,000 per public student, and Florida spends about $10,000. Florida’s fourth-graders scored nine points above the national average, according to “the Nation’s Report Card,” put out by the National Assessment of Educational Progress; California’s came in two points below the average. In the Golden State, moreover, where Latino students account for more than 56% of all public-school students, only 36% met standards for English language, and just 23% for math. 

California’s performance has been so bad that even The New York Times editorialized about how some new enrollees at the once-elite University of California now don’t even know algebra.“Most dispiriting,” the paper found, is the “betrayal of California’s glorious history” as an educational leader.

Similar failures can be seen on the national level. The most recent national assessment found that barely around a quarter of California’s students are proficient in reading, and they perform even more poorly in math, geography, and US history. American eighth-graders are performing worse not only than over-achieving East-Asian countries, but also than such places as Poland, the UK, South Africa, Turkey, and Sweden.

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The lobby at war with learning

By Joel Kotkin

A recent federal survey suggests the share of Americans at the lowest levels of literacy has now reached 28%, up from 19% a decade ago. With the support of the unions, many schools have abandoned phonics and tried-and-tested approaches for teaching literacy in favor of “whole -language” and other trendy theories; 60% of American fourth-graders are poor readers. As the usually true-blue Atlantic put it, “declining standards and low expectations are destroying American education.”

The biggest losers here tend to be minorities. Recent California testing results show that only a third of Latino students meet or exceed English-language standards, and fewer than one in four exceeds the standards for math. Nearly 70% of black students failed to meet state standards for English Language Arts in the 2021-2022 school year, while about 84% didn’t meet math standards. It can’t be the press of too many students that’s causing this decline; California is expected to lose 1 million more students in the next five years.

The scandal-plagued LA district is a case in point. Its superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, recently resigned due to alleged conflicts of interest involving educational-tech procurements. But the district replaced him with an official who also reportedly has conflicts of interest, in the form of senior teachers-union leaders in his own family. Recently, the district, threatened with a strike, gave away some $1.2 billion in raises for teachers and other school staff in a district on the road to bankruptcy.

The overwhelmingly Latino district has been dominated by far-Left union activists for more than a decade and it consistently underperforms state, regional, and national averages. Besides losing students, the district also suffers chronic absenteeism and high levels of violence.  

New York City schools tell a similar tale of losing students and suffering poor test results, even as soaring salaries now consume roughly a third of the city’s budget. Barely 3% of New Yorkers think the district, once a model, should keep going as is.

Illinois, another union bastion, also fits the bill. Under the state’s ultra-rich governor, JB Pritzker, himself a product of expensive private schools, Illinois has dismantled much of its fledgling charter program — publicly funded schools that aren’t bound by union contracts and thus can drive student achievement more aggressively. And the results? The Land of Lincoln boasts 53 schools in which not one student can do grade-level math and 30 in which none can achieve this in English. Despite major increases in spending per student in recent years, there has been extraordinarily little apparent improvement in results.

As in LA, failure seems to have little consequence for the Chicago Teachers Union. The teachers have won large raises and even managed to elect one of their former organizers, Brandon Johnson, as the Windy City’s mayor. In keeping with his far-Left identity, Johnson has sought to allow Chicago students to celebrate May Day as “an opportunity to elevate the consciousness of our civic responsibility.” That’s a pompous way to describe a blanket permission slip to skip class to attend protests, without consulting parents.

The great irony is that as schools continue to fail, the increasingly radical teachers unions are achieving remarkable political success. Since 1990, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the two largest teachers unions, have regularly been among the top-10 contributors to federal electoral campaigns, expending an estimated $1 billion for political purposes over the past decade, overwhelmingly steered to Democrats. It is almost impossible to imagine a successful Democratic presidential candidate winning the party’s nomination without genuflecting in their direction.

But perhaps the most malicious powers are those exercised at the local level. In much of the country, union political operations ensure school boards are dominated by union-backed candidates, winning 70% of races — and a remarkable 90% in New York.

One critical priority for the teachers unions is crushing the aforementioned public charter schools. They do this despite charters’ superior academic performance. School choice, including charters, is one reason why the most rapid advances in test scores have come from unlikely places, such as Tennessee and, most amazingly, Mississippi, where union power is weaker.

Instead of driving educational improvement, the unions increasingly seek to control curricula in schools in favor of their radical politics. They have been a key force driving curricula that focus on race, gender, the evils of Western civilization, and climate catastrophism. In the United States, this starts at the top, with the AFT’s boss, Randi Weingarten, an unabashed progressive and critical powerbroker in the Democratic Party. She is even trying to integrate DEI-friendly artificial intelligence into classrooms.

Weingarten, who has written a book titled Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, dismisses any criticism of her 2-million-member union. The enemy of education is not poor education, she insists, but the proliferation of screens, as well as President Trump and his team of know-nothings. 

Instead of improving results, union members now do such things as inform on the movements of ICE agents — activism that the head of the United Teachers of Los Angeles described as “really beautiful.”  

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The scale of radicalization seems to have few bounds. As the anniversary of the 9/1l attack approached, both the AFT and the NEA embraced teaching that all but elided the jihadist motives of the attackers, suggesting that the worst impact of the slaughter was a rise in “Islamophobia” and “Right-wing extremism.” In some lesson plans, it was America, not Islamist terror, that was to blame. Such indoctrination is found even in New York public schools, a horror to anyone who saw the devastation at the World Trade Center.

A similar orientation can be seen on issues regarding transgenderism. In California, unions like the California Teachers Union have backed efforts to make it illegal to inform parents of their own kids’ gender issues. Similar actions have been taken by Minnesota schools. 

Perhaps the most obvious ideological push comes on issues of race, and its related theology of “settler colonialism.” In schools in California, the ethnic-studies program backed by the California Teachers Association generally sees Western culture as a victimizer, with a particular animus for the annoying Jewish state. In one far-from-unusual case, a northern California school district’s ethnic studies curriculum teaches that Israeli “settler colonialism” led to Palestinian “dispossession.”    

But it is not just the social sciences that are being warped. Union-backed progressive indoctrination has little interest in promoting broad knowledge of the past, or even the basics of science or mathematics. California, in fact, has rejiggered its math curricula to emphasize not high achievement but “social justice,” something akin to the kind of education perfected in Stalin’s Russia.

Ultimately, the real issue is not politics, but the kids. America’s future relies on having an educated population, trained not in ideology but in critical thinking and knowledge. Instead of pushing this goal, the teachers’ representatives seem more concerned with their own agenda. Turning this around will be difficult, particularly in teachers-union dominated blue states. It will take not just one Gloria Romero, but many of them, running not just statewide but also at the local level.

Romero admits that it will be an uphill climb. But, she says, “I am not doing this for my health or mental state, but because I believe California is a place where dreams still happen.” She hopes that eventually parents and employers will join her to demand change.  

Josh (not his real name), a New York public-school teacher, told UnHerd about an assault that happened to him. “I usually hide [the skullcap] under a cap, but my hair was wet,” he said. Thus he was walking down the stairs of a subway stop in Brooklyn, daring to be a visibly practicing Jew, when someone pushed him from behind; the resulting fall left him with a head fracture and gash requiring 18 stitches.

Later, Josh found out that he was hardly alone. Locals said there had been an estimated 30 such attacks in recent weeks. The more recognizable Hasidic Jews, he says, no longer take the subway. “This was one of the guys who keep doing this,” he noted, “but the police now do nothing.” 

Or take the case of 22-year-old Dawood Faisal, who was charged in late July with manslaughter when he allegedly lost control of his car and ran over the Jewish journalist Cara Trager, resulting in her death. Faisal has now also been charged with vandalizing a Jewish-owned bagel shop in Queens. “The fact that this guy did a hate crime … days before means that he could have been apprehended before my mom was killed,” Trager’s daughter told the Forward. 

The deteriorating situation for New York City’s Jews is no accident. It follows years of antisemitic agitation on college campuses and even in high schools, and then the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has identified himself, first and foremost, with militant anti-Zionism. By threatening Gotham’s multi-ethnic middle class, and in particular its large Jewish component, this type of violence endangers not just the city’s economy but the very essence of what has made the Big Apple so great for so long.

Assaults at subway stations, particularly in heavily Jewish enclaves in Brooklyn, happen regularly. Overall, despite a drop in violent crime and homicides, hate crimes are up almost 10% since Mamdani took office, with the vast majority directed at Jews. 

That all this is happening in New York, the longtime capital of American Jewry, is shocking to a third-generation, Jewish former New Yorker — me. These attacks are directed at almost every aspect of Jewish life. 

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Can Los Angeles be saved?

By Joel Kotkin

Throw feces at a synagogue here, trash a kosher market there, ransack a bagel shop, ban a Jewish lawmaker from a coffee shop, bar Israeli products from the local food co-op, or, worse, perform a stabbing on a city street in broad daylight. You can even turn Columbia from a heavily Jewish school with thousands of Hebraic alumni and donors to the epicenter of anti-Israel activism and an antisemitic hotbed. 

This is the new Gotham, very different from the old one. The New York I grew up in was home to some 2 million Jews; today, the number is closer to half that many. And given the rising number of antisemitic incidents in the city and the current administration’s lack of concern, it is likely many more will leave.

In his brilliant mayoral campaign, Mamdani won roughly a third of the Jewish vote, although he did poorly among both older people and native New Yorkers — you know, the kind to whom you can’t sell the Brooklyn Bridge. As opposed to the campaign, when he sought, with the help of friendly mainstream media, to tone down his anti-Israel fanaticism, in office Mamdani has been far more explicitly hateful towards Israel, and disdainful of the vast majority of Jews who support it. 

The mayoral hostility comes in many flavors. It includes refusing to restrict demonstrations around temples, refusing to attend the Israel Day parade, bloviating about arresting Benjamin Netanyahu for “war crimes,” and supporting the candidacy of a Brooklyn democratic district leader who cites such sources as Henry Ford’s The International Jew as a factual guide.

One particular illustration of Mamdani’s disdain for Jews was his appointment of an 18-member judicial advisory commission without a single Jewish member. This is amazing, given that close to half of Gotham’s lawyers are Jews. Judaism is a legalistic religion, whose parsing of the Torah and Talmud has long been excellent training for lawyers and judges.

To be sure, Mamdani is a very effective politician. Already, he has successfully backed three Democratic Socialists of America candidates for Congress and made inroads on the city bureaucracy, turning key segments into jobs programs for his cadres. He has consolidated his power at the expense of the previous, long heavily Jewish, establishment, which stupidly backed Dracula, also known as Andrew Cuomo, as its hope to beat him. 

Now that establishment, Jews and gentiles both, are mostly on the outside looking in, while the mayor hides his hateful politics behind a seemingly permanent benign smile. His election was first and foremost driven by young, college-educated Leftists struggling with mediocre jobs in an impossibly expensive city. In addition to this segment, Mamdani also won the powerful backing of mostly recently arrived Muslims, whose numbers are rapidly equaling those of the Jews.

The surge in hate crimes will likely deepen Jewish hostility to Mamdani, but if there’s any hope for change, it will be resistance to his economic agenda that unsettles his coalition. His assault on small property owners certainly hits many affluent Jews; bashing “greedy Jewish landlords” is a popular meme for Mamdani supporters such as activist Thomas Lopez-Pierre, who compares them to enablers of the Nazis — yes, Jews.

But not all landlords are wealthy, nor are they primarily Jewish. Hasidic and Orthodox communities tend to invest in real estate, but so too do many middle-class New Yorkers. Mamdani’s assault on property owners is also receiving opposition in heavily African-American and Asian areas like Queens. People don’t much appreciate Mamdani’s designated tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, who calls property ownership an instrument of  “white supremacy.”  

This population, whom Marxists might label as “petit bourgeois,” will be increasingly opposed to Mamdani’s socialist economics, unlike the privileged “Lulu Lenins” who are more insulated from it. He is clearly alienating working- and middle-class New Yorkers such as bodega owners, many of whom are minorities, who will soon be competing against city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s socialist Mini-Mes will keep shopping at Whole Foods, but for the bodega owners, subsidized city stores will be a matter of business life or death. 

The great irony here is that Mamdani’s South Asian base is also highly entrepreneurial and owns small businesses, including bodegas. Indeed, in capitalistic New York, there should be harmony between Jews and Muslims, both enterprising, family-oriented peoples. American Muslims, notes the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam, may not start as anti-American, but their children’s exposure to academic culture produces young, affluent, educated Leftist cosmopolitans like Hasan Piker and of course Mamdani himself.

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Ultimately, only when the ethnic areas begin feeling the pain from Mamdani’s policies can the situation change. The city’s future is now a race between how quickly the economics unravel and how rapidly its mayor chases out the Jews and other kulaks. We have seen such things before, during the Michael Curley era in midcentury Boston or Coleman Young’s disastrous turn as mayor in 1970s Detroit. 

Such divisive politics “work” on one level: a city with fewer middle-income people will be a clear field for the political apparatus, the NGO-industrial complex, and the dependent poor. But this is a tragedy: the Big Apple is not Detroit or Boston, but a great world city that has ambition in its DNA. Even the Lulu Lenins may get tired of diminishing opportunity — growth is hardly a prime DSA objective — as well as an infarcted infrastructure, a tent-city crisis, and high property crime. Perhaps a few years off campus will inject the mayor’s base with a dose of reality.

But if the Jewish population and other elements of the middle class leave, it could foreshadow a  future New York reduced to a playground for the rich and their pampered offspring, government workers, and welfare recipients. Stopping hate crimes — not seeming to wink and nod at it — is one way to keep people like our teachers from looking for the exits.

“You feel like no one will protect us,” Josh told me. “Is it getting worse? Are you kidding me? We used to see the police but now the subways are a no man’s land. People are now looking at Long Island, New Jersey — or Texas, Arizona, or Florida. There’s less reason to stay.”

“I don’t want to bring my kids up here,” he added. “It’s very scary.”  

Galicia owns a small construction business and is also a minister at a primarily Latino Pentecostal church downtown. He tries not to fume against his misfortunes, but he has a beef with the city, which to this day can’t even identify the owner of the lot. Repeated calls to his city councilman, radical DSA member Hugo Soto Martinez, have proved fruitless.  

“There are millions for the homeless, but nothing for those who work hard,” Galicia notes. “The sidewalks are never fixed and the police are slow to come. It would be easier if the government would not make everything so miserable.” 

LA is currently hosting the World Cup, and two years from now, it will host the Olympics. The city should be ready for its closeup —  but it isn’t.  

This is a painful change for anyone who, like me, came to the City of Angels 50 years ago and embraced its eclectic mix of cultures and businesses. In the 1980s, LA was what the conservative historian Fred Siegel called “the entrepreneurial dynamo.” Unlike New York or the Bay Area, where academic pedigree and family ties were the keys to success, LA was an everyman city, a place where you could afford to start a business and live in a house like Galicia’s, all within the perimeter of a great metropolis.

Aesthetes long preferred New York or San Francisco, but the masses headed to LA. Between 1900 and 1940, the city’s population surged to 1.5 million from barely 100,000. After the war, LA expanded again, enriched by its huge oil and defense sectors, and by 2020, hit its peak population of 3.8 million, with another 6 million living in surrounding Los Angeles County. These areas once domiciled 13 Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Northrop Grumman, Security Pacific Bank, First Interstate, Union Oil, Getty Oil, and Arco, and a long list of successful growing businesses, as well.

Since then, the Fortune 500 locals have dwindled to seven, with just one, Farmers Insurance, inside city limits, and that just barely, on the furthest fringes of the San Fernando Valley. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times, once a critical part of the city establishment, has abandoned Downtown for El Segundo, amid severe financial strains and a paid circulation that’s a fraction of its once vast readership. 

Most critically, Los Angeles County now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. As you drive the streets of South Los Angeles and along the historic main street of black LA, Central Avenue, now predominantly Hispanic, the ambiance is increasingly reminiscent of the colonias of Mexico: broken pavements, battered buildings, outdoor swap meets, and fly-by-night food stalls.

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Mamdani heralds the radical American city

By Joel Kotkin

The county is shrinking too. Once celebrated as “the city that grew,” by 2070 it will suffer a reduction of more than a million people — 14% of its current population. Since 2000, the area has experienced a devastating loss of 750,000 people under 25, and it has the second-lowest birthrate among the 53 US major metropolitan areas, according to the American Community Survey. 

And while it is still home to more than three million immigrants, newcomers are increasingly headed elsewhere, notably to Texas, Florida, and other Southern states. The political class may be proud of creating a “sanctuary city,” but since 2010, the area’s foreign-born population has declined.

One reason is a lack of civic leadership. LA is increasingly a headless city. For many years, an almost exclusively white, male, and Protestant business elite embraced manifest destiny and dominated the surrounding region. These leaders fostered the creation of the kind of infrastructure that makes a great city — roads, universities, observatories, aerospace plants, a massive streetcar grid, as well as car and tire factories.  

This ruling alliance was transformed during the mayoralty of Tom Bradley, who won office in 1973 and served for 20 years. Now the old business establishment shared primacy with unions and rising Jewish and African American communities, an alliance that fostered long-term planning rather than cosmetic and rarely effective “short-term fixes,” according to Nick Patsaouras, an urban planner and public official with a long history in LA development.

Today, groups like the Chamber of Commerce have little influence over the city’s direction. “There are no ‘civic’ leaders left,” Patsaouras told UnHerd. “Just parasites feeding from public trough and crooks.”   

The optimism that once defined the city has withered as well. Once it was widely believed that LA was developing into a true rival of New York, with its own subway system and a downtown filled with sparkling high-rises. By the 1980s, trade at the Long Beach-Los Angeles port surpassed that of the Port of New York. And investment, much of it from Asia, suggested a future “capital of the Pacific Rim.” As the popular slogan had it: LA’s the place.  

Today, the Entertainment Capital of the World can’t even fend off challenges from places like Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, and Miami. Michael Kelly, director of the Drucker Institute at the Claremont Colleges, suggests that virtually every basic industry — including manufacturing, finance and business services —  has lost jobs, or at best has stagnated, since 2019. Only government-funded education and health jobs showed significant growth. If LA had grown as quickly as the national average, he calculates, it would have created 300,000 more jobs. 

Instead of focusing on development, the city’s establishment increasingly resembles the rulers of the late Roman Empire, offering the people the distraction of bread and circuses. Even as the signature industry, entertainment —  down 42,000 jobs in the past three years — shrinks, a passion for showiness and glamor remains. Diversions include the Dodgers, the Lakers, the World Cup, a sparkling new George Lucas $1 billion Museum of Narrative Art, due to open this fall — and most particularly, the Olympics. 

The city’s business “leaders,” Drucker’s Kelly suggests, aren’t fixing the weak economy, the dysfunctional schools or the increasingly dilapidated and dangerous LA parks. “All they care about is the Olympics,” he says.  

But the City of Angels today hardly resembles the brash upstart that held a successful Olympics in 1932 or the emerging world capital that, in 1984, under the brilliant leadership of businessman Peter Ueberroth, ran the Olympics with little incident and a profit. The LA 28 organization, the official host committee, claims it has enough sponsorships and TV deals to pay for what is needed, although there are growing doubts whether the city can absorb Olympics-related security costs, given its near-disastrous fiscal shape. Officials should hope that visitors, particularly journalists, will not see eyesores like Juan Galicia’s burnt-out home, and will skip the visit to Skid Row, close to the city’s downtown business district, which has a murder rate 17 times the city average. 

This was once a city that, like Marlon Brando’s broken boxer in the movie On the Waterfront, “could have been a contender” to challenge New York and other more established metropolises. But since the end of Republican Richard Riordan’s mayoralty in 2001, power has shifted to a motley coalition of political operatives, those using the city’s infrastructure to enrich themselves, and increasingly powerful public-sector unions. A focus on “social justice” and green virtues has thoroughly replaced the old growth-oriented vision. 

Homelessness is the most obvious failure. Even as San Francisco, under reform Mayor Dan  Lurie, aided by the local tech community, has turned back the homeless tide, Los Angeles retains roughly 70,000 “unhoused” people. It has spent billions but has refused to take such steps as shutting down the camps. Half of the homeless are known to be from somewhere else, attracted by the salubrious climate, free needles, and lack of police enforcement. 

The problem is no longer confined to the infamous Skid Row, but has spread to once stable neighborhoods, even as those charged with improving conditions have been charged with corruption. In a neighborhood close to where I used to live, homeless people hang out in the supermarket and eat in the aisles. Others harass business owners and illegally draw power from the city grid.

In part due to homelessness and the largely unchecked gangs, many of LA’s once great public places, like MacArthur Park, have become crime-ridden dystopias, filled with the mentally ill, firebugs and gang members. Even the libraries are increasingly unsafe. As long-term LA journalist Sam Quinones suggests: “in Los Angeles, private spaces have become public threats.”

But the homeless are just one element of the growing disorder. Add to this attacks by gangs of kids, vandalism, and theft throughout the city, particularly downtown. Thieves removed the copper pipes from Galicia’s burnt-out home. Criminals are now so bold that they have started stripping copper wire from street lights, leaving some of the city in the dark. 

Not surprisingly, the middle class is heading for the exits. Since 1980, the percentage of city residents who own their own home has fallen from 40% to roughly 33%, compared to rates of roughly 65% home-ownership nationally and 56% in the state. 

The loss of the middle class has transformed the political landscape, largely to the benefit of the Left. When Republican Riordan ran in 2001, Republicans could account for as much as a third of the electorate, notes longtime GOP strategist Arnold Steinberg. Today, amid the expansion of mail-in ballots and lax control over who votes, they barely constitute half that amount. Add to this ultra-permissive voting rules and legal “ballot harvesting,” including from the homeless, and changing the political direction seems almost impossible. 

Spencer Pratt’s mayoral campaign may have thrilled conservatives around the country, but few of his greatest admirers vote in LA. He came in third behind current Mayor Karen Bass, a long-time Leftist who organized help for Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the 1970s, as part of the Venceremos Brigade, and Nithya Raman, a 44-year-old Mamdani clone, who lives in a $1.9 million house in fashionable Silver Lake and has a planning degree from MIT. 

Bass’s disastrous mishandling of the Palisades fires has made her vulnerable to an even further Left challenger. Raman’s handlers hope to sell her as a “change agent” and a competent manager, something Bass is clearly not. Raman is currently, by some polls, in the lead. But whoever wins, nothing much will change, at least not for the better. Political power will continue to remain in the hands of militant public unions, notably the SEIU, which represents generally low-income service workers, and the teachers, who demand ever more taxes to pay their salaries and generous pensions. 

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Homelessness will remain a massive problem whoever wins. Raman has opposed restrictions on public camping and sleeping. “Raman’s record on homelessness is worse than Bass — if that is possible,” notes westside activist Tim Campbell, a longtime Angelino and former government auditor. “She’s incompetent and arrogant, which is a fatal combination.”  

Raman’s managers will paint her as pragmatic, but her political allegiance belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform includes seizing private housing, a 100% renewable energy system, making all public transportation free, the decriminalization of drug use, and the decommissioning of the central jail. Her purported moderation only makes sense when compared to her fellow DSA council member Ysabel Jurado, who favors not just defunding the police but abolishing them.  

Whoever wins in November, Los Angeles seems likely to continue its masterclass in urban dysfunction. As in New York, Seattle, Washington, DC, and other cities, the DSA is cementing a coalition of public-employee unions and the welfare-dependent with a crop of young college graduates who predominate in neighborhoods such as Echo Park, Silver Lake and Hollywood,  LA’s version of New York’s “Commie Corridor.”  

If the City of Angels is to come back, don’t look to the business elites but to working and middle-class immigrants from places like Mexico, Central America, China, Taiwan, India, and increasingly, Africa. Many of them now settle in smaller cities in Los Angeles County — Paramount, Bellflower, Downey, and South Gate, among others — that are showing that you can build a successful city amid the big city’s dysfunction. 

These cities pride themselves on the basics like law enforcement, street maintenance, and schools, and demonstrate that such initiatives can work in today’s Southern California. Indeed, in a study I conducted with researcher Bheki Mahlobo, we found that these south Los Angeles County cities, once seen as backwaters, have managed to outperform the city itself, particularly its South Side, in terms of employment, public safety, and school scores.

Los Angeles retains a magnificent collection of neighborhoods, and is home to remarkable institutions like the Getty Center, a striking museum in the Santa Monica Mountains. And there are some tentative signs that the LA electorate is capable of pushing back to defend it. In 2024, voters ousted Soros-financed District Attorney George Gascon; they have also displayed a growing resistance to tax increases. You can still feel the area’s potential in places like El Segundo, where space and aerospace firms are flourishing, and at a charter school in Granada Hills, where largely minority students — Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Latino — routinely win the national academic decathlon. Hollywood still possesses a reservoir of entertainment-industry talent. And, of course, the weather and topography remain daily reminders of why people came here in the first place. 

The key to renewal lies with people like Juan Galicia who, despite everything, is pursuing permits to rebuild in his neighborhood. Sustained by his faith and his commitment to making Los Angeles a better place, Galicia, like many Angelinos, is staking out a claim for a better future. Some, like me, may have fled — in my case, south to Orange County — but I will cheer Galicia and people like him as they try to restore a city to which I owe much, and would be delighted to see ascendant once again.      

“I want my trees back and my home back,” Galicia tells me. “I have to work every day and rebuilding this house is my dream. It will happen, you’ll see. I still feel blessed to be here.” 

Today, the education industry is no longer marginal and the university faculty no longer fits the awkward-brainiac stereotype. Professors have become powerful politically — they are the core of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and they predictably hold Leftist views, treating us to spectacles such as the University of Michigan faculty senate accusing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth of “war crimes.” Much of the Leftist elite, in fact, comes from academia — for example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren taught at Harvard Law School for 20 years, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the son of a famous radical academic, who teaches at Columbia University. 

Meanwhile, Luigi Mangione, the Left’s favorite alleged assassin, has two degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution. The parents of Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new socialist mayor, are both professors. Globally, elite university graduates have been the primary promoters of the most hysterical climate change theses, epitomized by British politician Ed Miliband, an Oxford graduate and Labour MP, who has served as the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy Security since 2024, and who is clearly oblivious to the economic consequences of his “net zero” fanaticism.

However absurd its beliefs, what academia thinks and how it imposes its ideology matters. Leftist professors are shaping generations, sending youth into the world spouting the standard progressive script and displaying proud ignorance of the achievements of Western Civilization. 

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Goodbye, Information Age

By Joel Kotkin

Virtually no major job category is more uniform in ideology. In 1990, 42% of professors identified as “liberal” or “far Left,” according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. By 2014, that number had jumped to 60%. Today, roughly three-quarters of faculty are left of center, a trend that feeds on itself in hiring; even moderates are rare. Since 2002, at least 70% of political contributions from academics have gone to Democrats; the University of California faculty and staff sent $10 million to Democrats in 2004, but less than $300,000 to Republicans. Even at DePaul University, America’s largest Catholic university, almost 90% of contributions went to the Left.

This political skewing has the effect of turning universities into ideological re-education camps. For example, prominent schools of journalism, including those at Columbia and the University of Southern California, have moved away from teaching the fundamentals of reporting and now openly advance a social justice agenda. This enforced conformity isn’t good for students, or the quality of the pedagogy. Even some progressives, like the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, recognize that “students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.” 

At the university level, students coming to class, particularly in the liberal arts, are deficient in knowledge of such things as the failure of socialism in the USSR or the repressive nature of contemporary China. After all, socialism’s lethal failures are inconvenient facts for Marxist professors, who have, notes author Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, “surrendered to revolutionary kitsch.” Progressives would rather accuse Israelis, Americans, and Britons of genocide, while ignoring the fact that the greatest mass murderers in history did so under the Red banner. 

In this sense, today’s academics resemble Medieval clergy — or Marxist propagandists in the old USSR — more than open-minded and flexible intellectuals. Church authorities in the Middle Ages trained clergy in the defense of orthodox doctrine in order to combat heresies, a trend that also infected the universities of the time. The University of Paris became a staunch guardian of religious orthodoxy, and in the 1300s, it held a conclave to affirm the supposed reality that demons were afflicting society. 

Just as medieval universities resisted many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, today’s academics increasingly seek to banish the great liberal traditions that underpinned their own institutions’ ascendancy. And just as the medieval clergy preached against materialism, leading figures in today’s academia look askance at the idea of a dynamic economy, a spirit of innovation, and a commitment to improving everyday life. Some even suggest that progress is a myth. 

These approaches have consequences. Many college students who embrace socialism do so uninformed. Graduation speakers chosen with student preferences in mind are overwhelmingly from the Left, and those few non-Leftists who haven’t been canceled, such as Jonathan Haidt, are heckled. Yet when I taught a class on socialism at Chapman University, where I teach, only one student in 30 could identify a picture of Lenin. The exception was an Armenian who grew up in Moscow.

The academy’s unwillingness to teach the failings of Marxism helps explain why a recent Yale Buckley Institute poll found that a majority of all American college students express sympathy with socialism. In a global survey covering 28 countries and almost 21,000 respondents, half of respondents at least “somewhat agree” with the statement “at present, socialist ideals are of great value for societal progress,” including 39% of American respondents.   

Increasingly, university professors see their mission “to promote” a particular set of beliefs rather than “to teach,” notes British author, architect, and urban-planning expert Austin Rhys Williams. Not surprisingly, according to recent studies of cognitive behavior, today’s university graduates are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues. Confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity, students tend to be intolerant of other views. One recent study found that only 47% of people ages 18 to 34 said speech that might offend minorities should be allowed, compared with 70% of those over 55. 

Yet even as academia sticks to its radical agenda, the relevance of higher education becomes increasingly dubious, particularly due to artificial intelligence, which has turned schools into factories for slop, and displaced the remaining vestiges of intellectual formation. Professors, in their turn, have been slow to recognize the threat. They often seem in their own world, more like a guild or religious cult, with arcane rituals and folkways. Half a century ago, the Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin called this tendency “a frantic eagerness to know ‘more and more about less and less.’”  The vast majority of academic articles — so crucial for getting tenure — are almost never cited, especially in the social sciences and humanities. 

After decades of surging enrollment at American colleges, the numbers are beginning to drop, a trend hastened by the shrinking population of college-age potential students. Since 2010, undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 18.1 million to 15.4 million, and the percentage of BAs headed to graduate school has fallen precipitously over the past two decades. Over the past decade, 500-plus US private colleges have closed, three times the rate of the previous decade. 

In addition to the demographic reasons for the decline, students also appear to be concluding that academia is less valuable to them. At Harvard, 60% of grades are As, compared to 25% two decades ago. But this is no measure of student accomplishment: a recent NIH paper asserts that college students’ cognitive abilities are increasingly diminished by time spent online. And employers report that recent graduates are short on critical thinking skills. Overall, Gallup reports, the percentage of Americans who express “a great deal of confidence” in education has fallen in the past decade from around 60% to around 40%.

In particular, liberal arts majors are deciding their degree isn’t worth it. Producing such degrees has been a fertile source of employment for academics, but has also seemed oddly removed from basic reality. There are very few choice jobs in academia for such graduates, particularly at the tenure level. Roughly half of all faculty members today are part-timers, compared to one-third in 1987. Tenured positions have dropped from about 40% of all university teaching jobs in 1987 to around half that number in 2021. And capture by the ideological Left seems not to be helping: high-capture fields like history, English, and philosophy tend to be those that are losing the most students.

In contrast, less radicalized fields such as business, engineering, and hard sciences, although also under pressure to conform to such things as racial quotas, generally offer more promise both for students and society. And, for many, an increasingly likely option is to go to a trade school or simply get into the workforce. Both the federal government and companies such as Google, IBM, Apple, Ernst & Young, Starbucks, and Hilton, among others, are de-emphasizing credentials in favor of skills. It is in the skilled trades, as well as engineering, that the great opportunities of the future will be found. America is running low on skilled workers, doctors, and aerospace engineers; it faces no such problem with postmodernist English teachers.

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These shifts may ultimately weaken the current academic elite, but they also generate a potentially dangerous class of underemployed and overeducated people. Educated professionals, particularly younger ones, have replaced blue-collar workers as the radical constituency. We are seeing what one Marxist scholar described as a “swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs.” Historically, since the popularization of higher education, such people have played a role in revolutionary upheavals in Europe, Russia, and Latin America — and, potentially, they could do so in the United States as well. 

What happens at universities matters, and correcting the current situation requires a revised approach. To succeed, colleges need to focus less on activism and more on the basic task of imparting skills and educating young people as critical thinkers. Fortunately, there are some signs of a shift back to basics. This is occurring in schools such as Chapman, as well as numerous universities in the South, such as the University of Texas, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University. 

Simply put, we must rescue academia from the academics. This is particularly true in the humanities, where the number of doctorates has fallen by 15% in the past two decades. Rather than radical agitprop, students need a curriculum rich in classic literature and history, which naturally stresses eternal values and inspires debate. 

Today, university policies on curriculum largely ignore writers such as Homer, Confucius, Shakespeare, Milton, de Tocqueville, and the Founding Fathers. Some books are scorned for having been written by dead white males, who as a group are linked to such horrors as slavery, the subjugation of women, and mass poverty. 

Any return to basics will be fought bitterly. The academic establishment, as well as the serfs struggling to get any university-level teaching job at all, will fight like dogs over a bone, and will mount a rearguard action to preserve the regime, including DEI, until the end of President Trump’s term. In some places, notably the Northeast and California, they might even prevail, although perhaps at the cost of their own region’s economic prospects.

Ultimately, the fate of higher education will determine the future of the West. If students come out of college despising their own culture’s past successes and the value of merit, there is little hope of competition against societies where education is controlled by a state that values skills, even if such regimes aren’t strong in intellectual curiosity. Independence of thought may be the greatest strength of Western societies but, unless the academy changes, it will continue to recede, to the detriment of us all.

High-school graduates being trained for jobs in fields such as machining or plumbing were confident that their skills were in high demand — and would remain that way. These young people, not the nerds and “symbolic analysts,” may prove the winners of the next great transition, one that is more tied to the production of tangible goods than the manufacturing of digits and images. 

A world dominated by digital technology once seemed to be the inexorable future, yet we are exiting the Information Age. 

This transition has many implications: political, economic and social. It benefits investors, regions, and individuals tied to producing the tangible world, from consumer goods to missiles, spacecraft to oil and gas. The big stock winners so far in 2026 have been firms in energy, materials, consumer staples, and industry.

More important still, the transition is creating a cultural revolution driving young people away from traditional four-year colleges towards practical skills. The next generation of American workers, in other words, is skipping Joe Biden’s famous advice to “learn to code.” Goodbye to “my son the computer geek,” and hello to “my son, the plumber.”   

To be sure, the information economy has had a remarkable run and has elevated seven of the world’s eight richest people. The companies founded by these multibillionaires are worth more than most countries, at least on paper; put together, their valuation exceeds China’s gross domestic product. Apple alone is worth more than Canada’s GDP and has a valuation at about the GDP of Italy.

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By Joel Kotkin

This agglomeration of wealth and power and the prospect of a populace thriving as “symbolic analysts,” as the political economist (and Clinton labor secretary) Robert Reich described it in the 1990s, persuaded political elites of both parties not to stress about the demise of the country’s industrial base. Christina D. Romer, the former head of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration, dismissed “manufacturing policy” as nostalgia driven by “sentiment,” declaring: “American consumers value health care and haircuts as much as washing machines and hair dryers.” 

The great transition should put an end to such thinking. As long as countries eschew energy and industrial development, they will inevitably fall behind those that either control energy or make real things necessary in the real world, including for military purposes. This is why China, now using its industrial wealth to pursue technological supremacy, matters most after the United States; and why the oil-rich Persian Gulf region still matters a great deal. In contrast, Western Europe, deindustrializing and seemingly committed to energy scarcity, becomes ever more irrelevant.  

The pandemic and now the Hormuz crisis demonstrate why countries need strong energy and industrial sectors. Covid exposed America to the bleak reality that it could not provide basic medical equipment like masks or the basic components of pharmaceuticals. The inability to shift energy primacy from the fundamentally unstable Persian Gulf and Red Sea, places America and (even more so) the rest of the industrialized world at the mercy of unstable regimes. 

The great transition offers a way out of the West’s decline. The allure of a software-led economy has diminished, in large part because incremental increases in algorithmic technology have done  very little to expand wealth beyond the elite classes. This is epitomized by the bastion of the digital economy, California, where great wealth has been created for a relative few, while middle- and working-class prospects have deteriorated and poverty has reached alarming levels. 

Even within the tech world, things are changing. Firms specializing in space and defense are on the upswing, as I reported earlier for UnHerd. “Hardware,” notes the City Journal’s James Meigs, “is back.” Increasingly, high-tech firms are looking to apply technology to actual things, such as drones and satellites, whether in the form of Artemis, Space X, or on the battlefields of Ukraine and the Middle East. In some ways, the resurgence of the space industry, championed first by entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and now once again via a renascent NASA, returns America to its traditional self, as a builder and innovator in the material world. 

High-flying defense-tech firms like Anduril, Palantir, and Space X epitomize this shift to “deep tech” that uses software to build actual gizmos that could both protect the country and enrich its people. This includes new companies that are building space platforms and surveillance satellites, as well as robots that can conduct surgeries or fight on a battlefield. “People are shifting to harder tech,” suggests El Segundo-based Varda Aerospace co-founder Delian Asparouhov. “There is an aerospace renaissance. This can’t be done with AI — you need people to build spaceships. It’s a paradigm shift.” 

At the same time, the appeal of the digital realm has declined. After a period in which software employment surged, and the number of students seeking degrees in computer science tripled, overall software employment is down to where it was in 2017, according to the economist Gad Levanson. Few would have expected this just a few years ago. Had the previous growth patterns remained, there would be 250,000 more jobs in this sector that there are today. 

Even practiced geeks who write code are vulnerable to what economists refer to as “skills-based technological change.” Despite soaring profits at Big Tech companies like Amazon and Meta, AI programming tools are allowing for massive layoffs. Even a startup like Block, a fintech run by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has recently laid off nearly half its employees. Indeed, this is an industry-wide phenomenon. In just the first three months of 2026, there have been 52,000 tech layoffs, up 40% from last year. 

Of course, geeks aren’t the only victims. AI will clearly accelerate the loss of some blue-collar jobs, such as warehouse workers, as now projected by Walmart. Overall, MIT predicts at least 10% of all US jobs are at risk. But in the early days of the AI era, layoffs seem to be concentrated among college graduates and those with masters degrees, rather than affecting students with high-school or trade-school diplomas.

Silicon Valley, the epicenter of AI development, is particularly exposed, as jobs contract and public services dwindle. A recent study by Joint Venture Silicon Valley predicts that upwards of 400,000 jobs in the area are threatened. So, too, are jobs in those occupations built to service the marketing, accountancy, and legal needs of the tech elite. San Francisco and San Jose are suffering the nation’s largest employment declines in these fields.

This pattern is also spreading to the broader professional classes. Employment in most business-service fields, such as publishing, marketing, educational services, and content creation, have either flatlined or declined. Goldman Sachs, for example, now claims that AI is reducing jobs at their shop far faster than new ones can be generated. Two-thirds of business leaders, in a recent survey, suggest ChatGPT will lead to large layoffs of white-collar workers over the next five years, particularly for “coders” and “symbolic analysts” 

So, who survives the AI onslaught? Some elite AI engineers could experience a windfall, until they are surpassed by their own machines. Big global investors could become much richer, at least until the bubble pops. But the opportunities seem to be in the production of tangible goods, which could be very good news indeed for the majority of young Americans who lack a four-year degree.

Arvind Kaushal, leader of the manufacturing practice at Booz & Company, estimates that there will be some 600,000 new manufacturing jobs opened in this decade. Part of the reason is an aging workforce: The portion of the skilled manufacturing workforce over the age of 55 has doubled in the last 10 years — half of the active workers are above the age of 45. The most recent study on welders, estimated a shortage of 340,000 in 2024.

This process is changing the attitudes of both younger people and their parents. One survey from 2023 found that roughly 83% of Gen Z  — including 90% of those who already hold college degrees — feel that learning a skilled trade can be a better pathway to economic security than college. Even as total undergraduate enrollment has fallen, enrollment at trade schools has grown by 10% since 2020.

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By Richard Greenwald

Skilled workers are already doing better financially than college kids. Overall, there has been steady growth in demand for those who can actually build something — skilled tradespeople or industrial, chemical, or civil engineers, who are critical to the production of goods as opposed to bytes. There is already, by some measurements, effectively no occupational advantage for a four-year degree. 

As of now, our education system, with some exceptions, is not keeping up with demand. When Ford recently opened 5,000 positions for mechanics, some paying $150,000, the company struggled to find takers. There’s clearly an unmet demand for such workers.

The future job market, Palantir’s Alex Karp notes, favors either the extreme tech whizzes (at least until the machines catch up) or professions difficult to replace with robots. AI entrepreneur Rony Abovitz suggests that the “sophisticated, technically capable blue-collar worker” could prove to be among AI’s biggest winners.

The great transition is also reshaping the geography of opportunity. Areas with energy and material resources — think Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska, and North Dakota — are likely winners. The massive wave of new investment in manufacturing by companies like Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor, and Mercedes are taking place largely in the Sun Belt; the expansion of the Intel foundry in Austin to service Space X (and potentially Amazon and Google, as well) reflects how much the silicon is trickling away from Silicon Valley. Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio and North Dakota now enjoy the most robust industrial growth, while coastal states, such as California, New York, and Massachusetts, have experienced either little growth or contraction. 

Long-time laggards Alabama and Mississippi now produce more vehicles annually than Italy or Britain. Many of the new data centers are in the rural areas of red states, including places like northern Louisiana, where Meta is building its new massive data hub. Similarly, corporate headquarters are moving from the Northeast and California to cities like Miami and Dallas.

This drive to revive the industrial sector should not be seen as a partisan issue. The Biden administration, like the Trumpians, also looked to promote reindustrialization; the vast majority of Americans favor the large-scale reshoring of industry, primarily from China.  Reshoring so far has been reflected in higher output, rather than employment, but the process is ongoing.   

The great transition will, however, impact the political balance of power, as more Electoral College and congressional seats shift from the coastal metropoles that dominated the information age to the Sun Belt and the South. As one progressive urbanist complained recently, data centers and energy policy mean that “the countryside retains its power over us.”   

In the blue states, particularly those dominated by green policies that stand in the way of re-industrialization, expect a growing radicalization: as professionals and techies lose out, they’re even seeking union protection for their threatened jobs. There will be pressure from insecure college-educated voters who are currently the base of progressive parties — Liberals in Canada, Democrats in America, and Labour in Britain and Australia — to secure the incomes they once expected, even at taxpayer expense.

The employment impacts of the great transition are clearly creating opportunities for the neo-socialists to take over in places like New York, Seattle, Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. This Leftward movement increasingly focuses on attacks on artificial intelligence companies and proposed bans on data centers. These efforts create the basis for a political conflict between the alienated largely Left-leaning educated professionals and the Democratic party’s traditional funders, who, like Silicon Valley’s Reid Hoffman, promise that AI will serve to the cause of  “elevating humanity.”  

How the great transition plays out is still uncertain; for now, it is likely to divide the country between the renewed industrial sectors and those tied to the information economy. But no matter who wins in 2026 or 2028, technological and geographic changes are inevitable. The great transition is on, and it will shape our future — just as the Information Age, now waning, shaped decades past. 

An example of this type of future “urban” development is Bastrop, a small city located 30 miles east of Austin, with a population of 15,000. Bastrop has a historic, brick commercial district, streets of painted Victorian residential homes, and a roaring economy. Celebrity chefs from Austin are opening restaurants here, and are able to afford land for their kitchen gardens nearby, and podcaster Ryan Holiday of The Daily Stoic recently moved in, and can often be seen jogging in the city center. 

Bastrop is located in a still largely rural and agricultural county of cattle, cotton, and bees. Even so, it has a population of well more than 100,000, up from about 25,000 in the 1980s. Elon Musk has built the sprawling, ultramodern headquarters of SpaceX here, along with the headquarters for four of his other projects. There’s a new movie studio under construction, launched by two Hollywood production companies, and roughly 5,000 new housing units underway to support the influx of workers. 

This, perhaps, is what the “city” of the future looks like — sprawl, but a pleasant, livable variety. 

Across the Austin-adjacent region, more than 90% of population growth is taking place in the periphery — and places like Bastrop are welcoming it. “You might think that small-town Texans would not be so open to change,” says Vivianna Andres, an assistant Bastrop city manager who grew up in town. “But we are not limited in our ambitions. We want a great future.” 

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By Joel Kotkin

This kind of growth is a national phenomenon. In the last decade, suburbs and exurbs accounted for about 80% of all US metropolitan growth. The trend is fueled by people seeking to escape high taxes, poor schools, and unsafe streets. The pandemic — which normalized remote work and accelerated the existing exodus to the periphery — intensified the trend. The best of these new areas have attractive lifestyle features like the downhome charm of the city of Bastrop, or plentiful green space, or smaller village-like hubs that create community. These new cities come in varied forms. Some — like Irvine, Calif., or the Woodlands, outside Houston — are planned. Others, such as the developments around Bastrop, are a series of subdivisions. Some are organic, but others simply grow on their own.

Some design visionaries have always seen suburbs and exurbs as a path toward a better future. In the 1940s, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright saw dispersed communities as “a means of liberation” for families, because they allowed residents to work at home or nearby, while also being close to the blessings of nature. Wright’s vision is being carried out, particularly in Texas, in scattered new subdivisions as well as in planned communities.

The Lone Star State’s liberal land regulation allows developers in county lands to develop their own water, sewage, roads, and other infrastructure. Texas has more than 900 Municipal Utility Districts that average about 1,000 acres each, about two-thirds in the Houston metro area. Texas is also the site of the first development of 3-D printed homes, in fast-growing Georgetown, located 30 miles north of Austin.

To some, this outward expansion represents useless sprawl or poor urban planning. But Americans have been birthing cities from the earliest colonial times. In the 20th century, the nation even created a new urban archetype: the high-rise downtown epitomized by New York and Chicago. The world had never seen anything like them before. Today, Americans are once again creating something new. 

In some ways, the trend is merely bowing to reality. Jobs began to spread out as early as the 1950s. Since 2000, office occupancy and the construction of new office space have experienced major declines. But these facts have been either decried or ignored by a media based overwhelmingly in dense urban centers.  

In 2008, for example, CNN asserted that “America’s suburban dream” was “collapsing into a nightmare.” One prominent urbanist writing in The Atlantic predicted the exurbs would become “the next slums,” an idea widely embraced by the planning establishment.

These critics claim, often rightly, that much suburban development has lacked character, not to mention public places for people to gather. But there are now many communities that combine suburban densities with public and open spaces, plus good schools and robust public safety. Cinco Ranch and Houston’s the Woodlands, and Columbia and Reston outside Washington, DC, are prime examples. Rather than purposeless sprawl, these communities embrace the great British urban visionary Ebenezer Howard’s ideal of  “garden cities” that could exist without dependency on the big city. 

Irvine, south of Los Angeles — a city of 320,000 founded around 1960 and developed by the Irvine Company — epitomizes the new paradigm. Irvine has one of the most extensive urban park systems in the country, with 270 parks and one-third of its land dedicated to open space. Its largely affluent, increasingly Asian population has been attracted by a safe and well-maintained community with good schools, lots of jobs, and a low crime rate. Many of its workers are based at home; others enjoy short commutes to industrial parks and offices spread throughout the area. More workers come in from outside the city to work than depart from Irvine to work elsewhere.

Irvine’s advantage, notes long-time planner Rob Elliot, who still consults for the Irvine Company, lay with having a large amount of undeveloped land and a good supply of money that was willing to be patient over time. The city has been laid out meticulously and in accordance with resident demands. Irvine, Elliot admits, lacks a walkable downtown, but it meets consumer needs with a polycentric series of town centers located in its many “villages.” “We didn’t want to build another New York City,” he notes. “Suburban urbanism is what people want.”

Today, the focal point for such development lies with market-oriented states such as Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and Ohio, home to the fast-growing New Albany area near Columbus. Over the past two decades, New Albany has relied on master planning to grow to more than 10,000 residents, up from 3,700. Meanwhile, employment at its business park has grown to 15,000. Lifestyle features such as a system of parks, distinct neighborhoods, and walking paths have attracted more than just residents. Since 1998, New Albany has gained more than $4 billion in private investment, 15,000 jobs, and some $100 million in income-tax revenue, according to the New Albany Finance Department. 

Overall, communities like these represent 43 of the nation’s fastest-growing regions. Most are within a two-hour commute from a major urban county. In rapidly growing Houston, the nation’s fifth-largest metro region, peripheral areas saw the vast majority of all growth since 2020. 

Much of this growth is driven by the migration of young families and professionals, who have been abandoning central cities in droves. In the past decade, the fast-growing counties that are home to most of the nation’s planned-community development, significantly increased their population of people earning more than $75,000, especially those between the ages of 30 and 44. This cohort is avidly seeking single-family homes. In Bastrop, the median house costs $350,000, one-sixth the median price in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley. 

The Golden State provides a telling counterexample. Once a leader in building new communities, California is now a laggard; three-quarters of new city-making is concentrated in states like Texas, Florida, and Nevada. The test will be the massive, proposed “California Forever” project, covering 100 square miles of what is today mostly grazing land, some 50 miles from San Francisco.

Backed with tech-oligarch billions — including from heavyweights such as Michael Moritz, Marc Andreessen, and Reid Hoffman — California Forever has the formula of space-plus-capital that worked so well in Irvine. The plan is to develop housing for 400,000 people, as well as new factory and ship-building facilities. The goal, founder and CEO Jan Sramek told UnHerd, is to build affordable housing and provide good blue-collar jobs, essentially “what Silicon Valley used to do.”

You would think such a project would be welcome in a state with a particularly torpid economy.  Recently, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute released a report that examines the potential economic and fiscal impacts of the new city and shipyard, and estimates the projects will create 530,000 new jobs and $16 billion in annual tax revenue. And California Forever, whose home prices are to start at $400,000, would seem ideal in a state where housing is scarce and many families are leaving. The development should also offer better-paying jobs, and safe areas with good schools. 

Critically, the project also marks a major shift in what I’ve called California’s oligarchic socialist attitudes, which have stressed support for dense development near transit stops over the suburban expansion that once birthed the Valley. “Once the techies’ top employees started getting married and having kids, they realized the value of safe streets and backyards,” one top official told me. 

Yet what would be seen as no-brainer in Texas is running into opposition from California progressives, who want single-family suburban owners replaced by urban apartment renters. Pro-density YIMBYs, themselves a creation of the oligarchs, are deeply divided by the plan.  There’s also an apparent lack of support for the project in the area, which is currently largely home to middle- and working-class residents who like their semi-rural existence as it is.  

The opposition that keeps California Forever CEO Sramek and his staff awake at night comes from well-funded, intensely anti-growth nonprofits. “We face radicalized degrowth types who are rich kids, who want to stop building everywhere,” Sramek says with distaste. He calls the influence of California’s anti-growth greens as “insidious,” and says it is undermining “the spirit of the state” that once symbolized American aspirations.

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The plan itself also could prove flawed. California Forever’s lead planner, Gabe Metcalf, envisions a city of tightly packed row houses. Many young families — the project’s potential constituency — may not want to live cheek to jowl when they could get a better bargain on a single-family home in other parts of the interior, or in another state.    

California may still muff this ambitious and badly needed project, but other states seem more than willing to engage in city building. A new city, with a planned 100,000 homes, is being built at Buckeye, thirty miles from Phoenix, long a magnet for dissatisfied Californians. These new communities have shown they can attract a younger workforce, as many “new economy” jobs move out of traditional hotbeds like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.   

This movement will be greatly enhanced by wage rates that are increasingly similar in different parts of the country. As Brookings Institution scholar Mark Muro has noted, salaries across a 19-state American Heartland region, essentially between the Rockies and the Appalachians,  adjusted for the cost of living, are above the national average. In contrast, those with the lowest adjusted incomes were entirely on the ocean coasts.    

Traditional cities, furthermore, will be challenged by the rise of socialist-leaning politicians, not only in New York, but in Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle. The deep-blue cities, led by people who often denounce the idea of home ownership, and even capitalism, could become increasingly unattractive for both workers and  employers. Despite media accounts that young people do not want to start families or own homes, most surveys show that the vast majority of Americans in their 30s want to replicate these foundations of middle-class life. One key fact: some one million millennials become mothers every year.  

To this generation, the appeal of safe, reasonably priced housing near good jobs cannot be underestimated. And for the country, the new cities represent a revival of an America that is eager to build a future that will be better than the past. This is already becoming a reality in places like Bastrop, where not only people, but new factories, offices and most importantly schools are being built at a rapid clip. 

“Ultimately,” suggests Vivianna Andres, the assistant city manager from Bastrop, “this is about making things better for our children, and our children’s children.” If only other communities had the same perspective.

The takeover in Venezuela brings under US control the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Under Trump, Washington saw Venezuelan energy bolstering hostile countries, especially oil-import-dependent China. For now, the Venezuela coup deprives the Middle Kingdom of upwards of 800,000 daily barrels, while taking away a valuable customer as well as an intelligence asset for the Russians and their Islamist allies.

This naked neo-imperialism could prove beneficial, not least for the hard-pressed Venezuelans. American supermajors like Chevron are also natural beneficiaries, with huge resources being placed to modernize the country’s shambolic energy industry and thus to restore its once proud relative prosperity.

The larger point is that successful economies either have fossil fuels or need easy access to them. Gas reserves, and the revenues they generate, grant places the Persian Gulf monarchies far more influence than populous Arab states like Egypt, which lack oil and gas. Russia has been able to underwrite its invasion of eastern Ukraine and withstand severe Western sanctions thanks to its hydrocarbon reserves. China and India look to secure imports of the same wherever they can, especially at bargain prices. Core European powers like Britain, France, and Germany, meanwhile, could punch far above their weight if they would but tap their own plentiful supplies of shale gas, but their governments refuse to do so owing to irrational green phobias about hydraulic fracturing.

Beyond Europe, however, the recognition of fossil fuels as a key element of geopolitics puts a stopper on decades of green campaigns designed to instill fear of emissions and promote wishful thinking about how to reduce them. In academia and the media, dissenters from the narrative, even academics who accepted anthropogenic climate change, are hounded if they fail to submit to the green papacy’s encyclicals.

But the green doomerism has failed to meet the reality test. We now know that predictions of climate crises, some of which date back to the 1970s, have turned out to be exaggerated or even plain wrong. For example, both ABC and NBC boldly predicted in 2008 that New York would be under water by 2015; last time I visited my familial home town, however, it seemed very much on dry land. Extinction rates, often blamed on climate change, have slowed, with even the polar bears continuing to thrive in somewhat warmed temperatures.

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By Joel Kotkin

A 2021 paper by Carnegie Mellon University researchers David Rode and Paul Fishbeck tracked apocalyptic predictions dating from the first Earth Day in 1970. Across half a century, 61% of the forecasts of planetary collapse have come and gone (and the planet is still here, chugging along). Even the committed climate sirens at Nature journal have been forced to retract a study that claimed the world economy would contract due to climate change.

The collapse of the worst-case scenario goes hand-in-hand with the continued strength of fossil fuels, which remain the dominant source of energy; even coal is ascendant. Despite billions spent by Western taxpayers to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use is 30 times bigger than wind and solar combined, as the energy analyst Robert Bryce notes; in the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar, but 13,000 from fossil fuels.     

Fossil-fuel energy remains “the blood” that wins economic battles, including the drive to build data centers for artificial intelligence. For a while, China was catching all the upside from the fossil-fuel resurgence by going on a coal-plant building spree (this, even as the People’s Republic invested heavily in green technologies). Meanwhile, the West, including the United States under President Joe Biden, hamstrung itself.

Americans and Europeans suffered. Living standards in the de-industrializing West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe, especially, has endured a decade of stagnation. Americans laboring under the joint rule of green capital and green government likewise suffered.

In my adopted home state of California, electricity rates have surged a staggering 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. Once a major oil producer, the Golden State now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign sources in South America and Saudi Arabia.

High energy prices most hurt those in California’s less temperate, heavily Latino interior. The crisis has driven an erosion of industrial jobs; since 1990, one-third of California’s manufacturing jobs — 1.3 million of them — have disappeared. The disparate class impacts have been confirmed recently in a study by the California Air Resources Board, which projects that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

If they stick to the climate agenda, the only way places like Europe and California can get to “net zero” by 2050 — a goal China put off for at least another decade — is by squelching future growth. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes that such policies would have  catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West. But China’s leaders won’t sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost.

But America under President Trump is pulling in another, better direction. And even some Democrats are going along in recognition of geopolitical reality. In the United States, Axios recently reported, Democratic lawmakers have all but abandoned use of the Green New Deal, even amid their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump. “Today,” notes longtime Democratic policy expert Will Marshall, “the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality.” Among Democrats in Congress, mentions of the once-hyped program have fallen to a bare handful, down from more than 1,000 citations in 2020.

Only 6% of Americans rank climate as a top concern, a sliver of those who see inflation as their major problem. As these concerns have faded, even ultra-green California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been begging refiners to stay in the state.   

The prospects for greens are even worse in the developing world. In Africa — the only continent whose population is growing strongly; also now home to five of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies — governments generally recoil from adopting net-zero ideologies. Leaders choose to ignore the scolding of Greta Thunberg and the green nonprofits. Instead, they prioritize bringing electricity to the roughly 600 million in sub-Saharan Africa who do not have it now.  

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Former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, for example, has warned that the climate policies favored by Western nonprofits and aid agencies could precipitate a continent-wide energy crisis. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, launched a scathing attack on European climate policies in November 2022, declaring it “morally bankrupt” for Europe to use African fossil fuels while denying Africa the same right. Museveni accused Western nations of imposing “one rule for them and another rule for us”, while expecting Africa to sacrifice development for climate goals Europe has failed to meet.

“The climate-industrial complex,” as Bjorn Lonborg has put it, is, well, running out of energy. Even before the return of Trump, many green companies, despite subsidies, were failing, the product of high costs and poor delivery. 

Yet it is far too early to proclaim the permanent demise of the climatistas. They remain deeply entrenched in the universities and the mainstream media and are busy grifting in the massive nonprofit sector. A generation of children who have already been schooled in climate-change science, however exaggerated, may help them resurge. Also, those who have invested in “renewables” will be interested in recouping their losses under Trump.

Rather than ruin the basis of our prosperity and hopes for the developing world, humanity needs to adapt, much as our species has done during previous, and often more dramatic, climactic changes. In the coming years, the world must muddle through reducing emissions through practical steps like adopting natural gas over coal and restoring nuclear power.  Trump’s successors may not fully embrace these realities. But for the immediate future, at least, fossil fuels are back, for better or worse, shaping history much as they have for the past century.  

It is a challenge, and an opportunity, for reformers in government and business: unless policies address the fundamental economic crises shaping this socialist surge, our market system, particularly in cities, will weaken in the face of collectivist urges. Capitalism can only be saved by addressing issues like housing affordability, lack of upward mobility, and a dearth of good jobs. In doing so, the forgotten midcentury model known as social democracy offers a promising blueprint.

The social-democratic model rescued capitalism from overthrow in the last century, in both Europe and America. The model’s origins lay with fiercely anti-Communist politicians like Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein in Germany. In the United States, it took shape as the New Deal tradition, running from FDR even to Richard Nixon.

Conservatives, then as now, framed social-democratic and New Deal initiatives as a “communist plot.” The very opposite was true: measures like Social Security, Medicare, and the Wagner Act (which legalized and encouraged labor organizing at a national level) were intended to mitigate socially destabilizing inequality and thus served to ultimately preserve the enterprise system.

The key is to try to make the system work better for the asset-poor majority and create more wealth to distribute. By contrast, even in our supposedly populist age, the predominant conservative response to capitalism’s crises is to offer free-market bromides. Figures like Phil Gramm refuse to even acknowledge massive and growing inequality, and debilitating concentrations of wealth, treating complaints about such phenomena as a kind of Leftist plot. Others point to heart-warming cases of ordinary workers getting rich through shares in companies like AutoZone, Nvidia or Microsoft, even though such cases represent a sliver of the population.

Chanting mantas from Adam Smith or Ronald Reagan won’t save capitalism from the Leftist tide. In a few short years, the Democratic Socialists of America have gathered strength not just in New York but Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, and other cities. The coalition they are putting together is broad, including economically stressed young professionals, poor recent immigrants, and the pre-existing welfare class. The critical force was a shift among younger voters who drove record turnouts for Mamdani and backed him by over 70%.

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Instead of meeting the challenge with libertarian rhetoric beloved by academic economists, the best option will be to adopt, and expand, social-democratic policies that have existed within the context of the market system, and are widely supported by the public across the board.

What the young Left promotes, however, is not genuine social democracy. As Michael Lind has argued in these pages, the Mamdani agenda isn’t about growing the pie and empowering workers relative to capital so they can get a larger share of it through wages — the wage-based predistribution that was at the heart of the New Deal. Rather, Mamdani is mostly pursuing the same old post-tax redistribution that neoliberal progressives have long favored: free buses, public grocery stores, and subsidized pre-K education allow businesses to keep on paying low wages while putting the costs on the taxpayer’s tab.

The public budget ends up covering the transportation and schools that, in turn, allow the service-industry worker to get to her low-wage job. But such measures don’t fundamentally grow the economy, create new opportunities, or alter the balance of bargaining power between the asset-poor and the asset-rich.

The Mamdani agenda supplements this with the identity-obsessed social deregulation that has become characteristic of blue-city governance. For example, he’s pledged to underwrite legal defense for migrants targeted by ICE — another pro-employer measure, since illegal migration creates a shadow army of cheap and vulnerable labor for the DoorDash economy. And he wants to legalize prostitution, allow homeless encampments, and create so-called safe injection sites for drug addicts: measures that, again, will not alter the balance of bargaining power between workers and capital, but will blight working-class and minority neighborhoods in the name of “emancipation.”

The late DSA founder Michael Harrington (I took his course in Marxism at Columbia while still in high school) would barely recognize his offspring. To be sure, Harrington favored industrial policy and antitrust action (like both Joe Biden and Donald Trump). But he also detested Communism and its Third Worldist offshoots. He supported the right of Israel to exist and defend itself. And he didn’t think democratic socialism should mean the breakdown of social norms, all contra today’s urban Left.

Social democrats have traditionally embraced  patriotism, family, freedom of speech, self-government, and personal property. But today’s DSA prefers Third Worldist rhetoric. It embraces the Marxian radicalism of Kwame Nkrumah, after whom Mamdani got his second name, as well as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and even Islamists supportive of Hamas.

That this version of “socialism” has the wind in its backs should be read as a symptom of a deeper social crisis. What is now widely described as “late-stage” capitalism by hopeful Leftist ideologues seems to  disturbingly mirror Marx’s bleak assessment of capitalism’s future as a repressive and impoverishing force for most people. If a decisive share of people in America (and Europe) experience the market system in this form, it will be a boon to the Mamdani agenda — and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, to hard racialists on the Right.

The depth of the problem can be discerned in the ever-greater concentration of assets, notably in housing. Today housing affordability stands at the lowest level for which there are data series (up to 60 years). A new Institute for Family Studies report found that since 1970, the share of young adults who own the home they live in has declined from 50% to as low as 25%.

At the same time, this same generation faces diminishing economic prospects, declining earnings and a job market getting tougher, even for college graduates. This could be further exacerbated  by the rise of artificial intelligence, at least in the short run. Oligarchs like Mark Andreessen and free-market advocates like Phil Gramm naturally insist that AI “will bring prosperity” to the masses. But 82% of Millennials fear AI will reduce their compensation.

Even geeks may find out that they are vulnerable to what economists refer to as “skills-based technological change.” According to McKinsey, at least 12 million Americans will be forced to find new work by 2030. Companies like Amazon are consciously employing technology to reduce their workforces, laying off 30,000 workers while enjoying record profits. There seems to be a corporate race to see who can lay off the most people, while wages for those still working have increasingly stagnated.

Here’s how you build a constituency for resentment Leftism. Already barely half of all people under 30, according to one survey, have full-time jobs, while many simply drop out of the workforce. Europe has, if anything, a larger cohort of the young and disengaged.

Meanwhile, the ultra-rich are invested in a future shaped by a kind of technological elitism, spending fortunes on making designer babies and finding ways to live forever. Some, like Google co-founder Larry Page, even conceive of intelligent robots not only taking jobs, but insist that digital life is the natural and desirable next step in “cosmic evolution.”

All this nurtures the politics of resentment and redistribution. A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found that the share of those who see a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American Dream — that if you work hard, you will get ahead — no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys. Negativity was particularly pronounced among Democrats, with 90% holding a negative view of the future, almost twice as much as among Republicans.

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So support for mass redistribution grows. Even in the United States, the majority of young people now embrace socialism as a better model. There’s growing US support for expanded government and greater income redistribution, with the majority under 40 strongly in favor of limiting wealth. Perhaps even more remarkable, one survey found that a majority favors restricting incomes, with a large portion seeking limits under $1 million annually.

This is a perfect environment for demagogues of various stripes. Mamdani and his ilk, as I’ve argued, are mainly dabbling in Third Worldist and identity-based resentment politics, not authentic social-democratic reform. But in the absence of the real thing, the corrosive Mamdani version — blue-city misrule on overdrive, featuring minority entitlement, anti-Israel antics, green degrowth hysteria — can have great popular appeal among two credible voting blocs: stressed educated whites and often hard-pressed recent immigrants.

Ultimately, we may face a situation somewhat akin to Weimar Germany, with radical politics driven by what historian Eric Weisz identified  as “the proletarianization of the middle class.”  Just as the Industrial Revolution, particularly in its early stages, created Marx’s revolutionary proletariat, we are rapidly creating a vast new constituency for radicalism. Over time, we may find that no power on earth is more fearsome than what one Marxist scholar described as “the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs.”

Social democracy — the real thing, not its Mamdani mirage — is part of the answer.

The brilliance of social democracy lay in its broad national appeal. Lyndon Johnson, a Texas New Dealer, used his power to bring electricity to his native, and historically poor, southern part of the Lone Star State. Projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam powered once-remote parts of the south and southwest. Throughout America, we still admire, and benefit materially, from the social-democratic achievements of the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration.

Although there is much dispute as to the New Deal’s economic effects in ending the Depression, America’s experiment in social democracy created a nation strong enough both to win World War II and ensure mass prosperity afterward — the so-called “30 glorious years.” In more recent times, the social-democratic policies of California’s Gov. Pat Brown, through massive investment in education and infrastructure, laid the foundation for California’s late-20th-century ascendancy, a legacy that still benefits millions of people in the Golden State.

Something of the same spirit is needed today, if not the exact same policies. No, universal basic income isn’t it. That’s another form of what Marx called “the proletarian alms bag”: it doesn’t fundamentally empower working people, it doesn’t boost their wages and autonomy in the workplace or their agency in the marketplace. UBI merely blunts the misery (the useless eaters can spend it on palliative weed and porn, is how many of its advocates in the tech world really think).

But this approach is not sustainable, even for the oligarchs, particularly in a stagnating economy.

It makes sense, even for capitalists, to look into a modern revision of the old social-democratic playbook with its focus on policies that would bring more opportunities to the now struggling middle and working class. What’s necessary, at its core, is a restoration of America as a builder country — of houses, advanced-manufacturing products, healthier foods and cheaper electricity. This would mean significant reform of our current costly, ineffective education system, and an emphasis on skills training. It’s an approach that worked well for decades in northern Europe, and would meet the country’s debilitating lack of trained technicians, artisans and mechanics. It would also encourage new development in areas, like some inner cities and the periphery, where price is less of a factor and locals are largely in favor of it. Modern social democrats might use government as a prod, but they’d also look to the genius of the market, as we did so brilliantly in becoming last century’s “Arsenal of Democracy.”

Of course, like all political philosophies, social democracy can warp over time and needs persistent reform and rethinking. But given the choice between authoritarian Third Worldist pseudo-socialism and an untenable, and unsustainable, elite economy, maybe it’s time to give social democracy another chance.

***

Nearly 60 years ago, Time magazine, then an important publication, posed a discomfiting question on its cover: “Is God Dead?” Yet today, a spiritual hunger grips America, with roughly two-thirds of religiously unaffiliated Americans still believing in God or a universal spirit, according to Pew. Overall, young people are drawing closer to a higher power, and new research reports that most Gen-Z teens are more interested in learning more about Jesus, often using the internet to find new commitments.  

There is even some sign of revival in decidedly secular Europe, with 45% more people being baptized in historically anti-clerical France compared to last year. And, notes The Spectator, there’s a “boom biblique”: a rapid rise in sales of the Bible. More broadly, religious bookstores report a 20% percent increase in purchases since 2024. In Britain, of course, there is the “quiet revival,” with the church-attending share of the population rising to nearly 6 million in 2025, up from 3.7 million in 2018, with much of the energy seen among young men.

In modern sociology, conventional wisdom holds that religious people are generally less curious, less ambitious, and less intelligent than their nonbelieving peers. But this view is out of tune with current realities. On the contrary, a deep dive into the data shows that, over the last 15 years, religiously engaged people have become more likely to be well-educated, while atheists are less so. In the United States, religious groups outperform atheists and agnostics.

Overall, religious enthusiasm is most concentrated among middle-income professionals. An analysis of the 2022-2023 Cooperative Election Study, surveying nearly 85,000 Americans, found a positive correlation between education and weekly religious attendance. The rate of attendance rises from 23% among high school graduates to 30% for those with graduate degrees. This trend is supported by the sociologist Philip Schwadel’s research, which found that each additional year of education increases an American’s likelihood of attending religious services by 15%.

At the same time, the nature of worshipers has changed, and taken on increasingly conservative character. This has much to do with the rise of Gen Z, notes religious commentator Aaron Renn. Today’s young believers have arrived at faith amid a decidedly hostile environment for religion. They have, moreover, embraced political positions on race, immigration, and transgenderism that are vastly different from those held by older liberal Catholics as well as mainline Protestants.

Indeed, progressive ideology has proved catastrophic for houses of worship that embrace it. In 2019, more Protestant churches closed than opened in the United States, as mainstream Protestant denominations lost 5 million members in the past decade. Once dominant mainline Protestant churches now count barely 9% of Americans in their flocks, down from a peak of 50%. Progressive-dominated sects like the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the United Church of Christ are experiencing what one analyst described as “a bloodbath,” with membership down at least 30% since the Nineties.

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In Canada,  the once-dominant Anglicans have lost roughly three-quarters of their worshipers and could go extinct by 2040, according to some church leaders. Even in its ancestral home, the Church of England, fashionably liberal and dismissive of many of the concerns of its congregants about such problems as Islamic militancy or grooming gangs, has been in secular decline and may be surpassed by Islam within a decade. Liberal Catholicism is similarly graying and out of touch.

The progressive hierarchs of all denominations, in short, face the challenge of an increasingly conservative customer base, both in the West and even more so in Africa, the crucible of the Catholic future. Traditionalist faiths, such as Greek Orthodoxy, seem to be doing better. A survey of Orthodox churches around the country found that parishes saw a 78% increase in converts in 2022, compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2019. The average age of attendees is 42, with 62% between 18 and 45. That’s significantly younger than other major traditions.

Among Jews, reform and even conservative synagogues are struggling while those of Orthodox Judaism, particularly the thriving Chabad movement, have gained both members and influence, enjoying the greatest growth in engagement since Oct. 7. Some reform Jews (including yours truly) have been shocked by the turn toward anti-Zionism among leading reform rabbis. Given the overwhelming support among Jews for Israel, these Leftist-oriented clergy can only alienate most congregants and can only survive as useful idiots for those who wish to destroy the Jewish state.

If there’s an epicenter for the new religious revival, it’s Africa, which is the one continent with a growing population and enormous, largely untapped economic potential. Historically, Christian missions were central to establishing formal education on the continent, forging a lasting link between faith and upward mobility. Today, Pentecostalism is a major driver of this trend, offering a version of Christianity that promotes values such as individualism and a strong work ethic, providing followers with the spiritual and social tools to pursue economic advancement and a better future.

Widely ignored by Western interests, Africa is far from a hopeless basket case. It is home to 11 of the world’s 20 fastest growing economies. In the span of a single century, Africa has undergone a religious revolution in tandem with its economic growth. While Islam has expanded its footprint in Africa, doubling its share since 1900, the preponderant growth is among Christians. The Chrisitan faith has won the adherence of nearly 57% of all Africans since 1900, compared to 29% for Islam.

Clearly Africa’s demographic exceptionalism will drive the future of religion. The population of sub-Saharan Africa grew by an extraordinary 31% between 2010 and 2020 alone, reaching 1.1 billion people. UN projections indicate that this population will increase by two-thirds by 2050, a period during which Europe and North America are forecast to remain largely static. By the end of the century, seven of the world’s 15 most populous nations are projected to be in Africa, a stark contrast to 1950, when only one African country made that list.

Ultimately, then, Christianity’s future lies in Africa. As of 2020, there were 697.4 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. This growth now accounts for most of the numerical increase in Christians globally. A century ago, two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe. Today, that figure is roughly a quarter. By 2050, projections indicate that 4 out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa. The region’s share of the global Christian population is expected to rise to 38% by 2050, up from a quarter in 2010; while Europe’s share is projected to plummet to just 16%. Africa’s Christians are also young, with a median age of 20, compared to a global Christian median of 30.

In Africa, Christianity also tends toward social conservatism and takes traditionalist stances both inside mainstream groups like the Anglicans or the Catholic Church, or in fast-growing  evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal denominations.

This tie between religious faith and growth, so visible in Africa, could also shape the West. Education, long dominated by Left-leaning secularists and radicals, will be a crucial inflection point. In the South Bronx or Houston’s heavily immigrant Sharpstown, religious educators are having success with young people from very poor backgrounds where secular education is failing. Inner-city boys who attend religious schools, notes Tulane University sociologist Ilana Horwitz, do far better and are twice as likely to graduate from college than those in public schools. Critical here, she notes, are the attributes of religious engagement, such as respect for elders and learning. Even guilt has its efficacy, helping to restrain the worst impulses that often lead adolescents into dark spaces.

Nationwide, enrollment in private Christian schools has risen in recent years. In New York, as city schools are emptying, Catholic-oriented charters have doubled their enrollments. The K-12 enrollment at the Association of Christian Schools International, described as “one of the country’s largest networks of evangelical schools,” increased 12% between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 academic years, even as more families migrate out of the public-school systems. The rise of voucher programs, including in such large states as Texas and Florida, has largely benefited religiously oriented schools.

It is becoming increasingly clear that religious faith provides critical social benefits. For instance, just 10% of religiously observant people today say they have no close friends; the share almost doubles for those who have no faith. Participation in church generally also correlates, according to a 2022 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology, with better health outcomes. Equally well-established are the links between religious participation and longer lives, greater financial generosity, and more stable families. 

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Christian talk show host Justin Brierley predicts “the fall of the New Atheism.” Richard Dawkins’s vision of a universe driven by “blind, pitiless indifference” is being challenged by a generation of conservative intellectuals like Jordan Peterson, JD Vance, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who embrace religion’s resurgence as counterweight to the current declines in marriage, family, community, and civil society.      

Even some in the tech elite are having second thoughts. Most scientists tend toward secularism, but there seems to be a trend among scientists to embrace faith. Most notably, the expanding Society of Catholic Scientists counts more than 2,100 members and has 28 regional chapters.  

Even in the technological heartland of secular America, Silicon Valley, there are religious stirrings. The world’s most important innovator, Elon Musk, has recently become more public in his embrace of Christianity, which he described  as “ a religion of curiosity” and “greater enlightenment.” Other executives and investors like Pat Gelsinger, former head of Intel, Gary Tan, CEO of Y Incubator, and Peter Theil have likewise embraced the faith.

In Silicon Valley — where, as one observer notes, religion is “borderline illegal” — the congregation of the Catholic Our Lady of Peace church has burgeoned to more than 3000 families. And, according to Fr. Brian Dinkel, who hears an estimated 50,000 confessions a year, “People who may be doing well also want something more. Our people work at Google and Apple, but there’s a real search for the truth beyond tech.”    

Ultimately, the religious may prevail due to their higher birthrates. The places where Americans have children tend to be in the South, the Plains, and parts of the Intermountain West. These are also centers of conservative Christianity. The presence of children is all the more important in an  era where the population bomb has morphed into the population deficit.  

 It seems likely that more Americans, seeing the benefits of faith and community, will continue to take on a more religious cast of mind in the future. News of the death of God, it turns out, was greatly exaggerated.

Instead of facing up to their fundamental challenges in livability and economic viability, the Big Apple and other cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Chicago are falling for full-spectrum progressives. In Tuesday’s local elections, Zohran Mamdani, a socialist running as a Democrat, handily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran independently after failing to secure the Democratic nomination. Leftist have also scored recent victories in smaller cities like Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo.     

It’s hard to see how politicians like Mamdani, following the Democratic Socialists’ platform, will  abolish capitalism or implement the “social ownership” of all industry in a still profoundly capitalist country. People, at least outside the bluest cities, may not respond well to progressive ideas about taxing “white” areas, one of Mamdani’s proposals, or regarding the very existence of the NYPD as an obstacle to “queer liberation.”

His defenders insist Mamdani has disavowed such views since he aired them in the febrile Covid-and-BLM era. But his statements from back then, which wasn’t that long ago, give every impression of sincerity; Mamdani — unlike, say, his failed opponent Andrew Cuomo — comes across as an ideological true believer if ever there were one.

The bigger problem is that this abrupt Left turn comes as cities are losing their primacy. Today, core cities account for just 15% of the US population, down from a quarter in 1950. Meanwhile, the suburbs and exurbs have seen explosive growth — accounting for 86% of the metropolitan population, up from 13% at the outset of World War II. Suburban and, especially, exurban dominance of metropolitan growth has only accelerated in recent years.  

More critical still, cities are losing their once-dominant economic role. In 2019, before the pandemic, office construction was a third of the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000. Even large multinational firms, historically anchored in cities like New York and Chicago, are rethinking their real-estate strategies. According to the Financial Times, many companies are planning to reduce their office footprints by 10% to 20%. A study from the University of Chicago found that as much as a third of the urban workforce could operate remotely.

It is precisely these conditions that have helped create a new urban demography favorable to far-Left city politicians like Mamdani. Between 1970 and 2000, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income areas in core cities dropped 23 percent, down from nearly half, while the majority lived in low- or very-low-income areas. Job losses in manufacturing and middle management, notes MIT economist David Autor, were “overwhelmingly concentrated in urban labor markets.”     

The Big Apple, for example, has lost some 76,000 middle-income jobs since 2020, while upper-income and low-income jobs have grown. This has paralleled the exodus of middle- and working-class ethnics — Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans — into the suburbs, particularly those with lower prices. Their departure is a blessing for the professional-class Left that backs Mamdani (while remaining middle- and working-class voters largely continued to back Cuomo to the bitter end).

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Burdened with astronomical college debt, these high-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities. They have largely adopted radical positions hostile to Israel and are seen as threatening to Jews, especially older ones, who once played a dominant role in the city politics.

Onetime rapper and Hollywood nepo baby Mamdani knows well how to appeal to this emergent class. His high-priced proposals for free childcare may seem family-friendly, but many of these voters are unliikely to have children (a majority of Manhattanites are single and have never been married). Socialist campaigners thrive in those places that have far fewer children — gentrified  sectors of Queens and Brooklyn, Chicago’s near northside and trendy swaths of west LA. Those who march under the banner of LGBTQ also play an outsized role in these movements. Mamdani, despite his Muslim background and pro-Palestinian bona fides, romped in heavily gay-friendly parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens

What disturbs the young professional class most appears to be  high rents; Gotham takes the highest share of income for housing of any US big city. Mamdani’s programs — rent freezes, free buses, eviction restrictions, and the like — are designed to allow urbanites without the means to remain in the city, rather than join those moving to less costly cities to fulfill their dreams.

Some Leftist pundits see this class-based approach as the path to power, and even as the better substitute for the identity-based politics that dominated progressivism beginning a decade ago. High prices mean that coastal metropolises now suffer the lowest adjusted incomes, even as incomes in the less costly middle of the country remain above the national average. The thinking goes that, by running on “affordability” for this educated precariat, Democrats can regain their electoral footing after the thrashing they received in 2024.

Other economic pressures are radicalizing the hipsters. They face a job market that is  getting tougher — barely half of workers under 30 have full time jobs — even for those with expensive advanced degrees. Their jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence, including in finance, business services, and even “creative” professions that historically have clustered in cities.   

Cities, of course, can fight back against these trends by developing policies that encourage urban economic growth, something barely mentioned in the DSA and other Leftist forums. Through reasonable taxation, less regulation, and the nurturing of local high-wage industries, from light manufacturing to video production, an early generation of practically minded urbanists helped restore order and growth. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Ed Rendell in Philadelphia and Steve Goldsmith in Indianapolis showed how cities can come back.

Today’s urban politics, at least for now, make such a revival unlikely. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, in office since 2023, was elected by a very Mamdani-like coalition of poor minorities, public employees, and hipster whites. Under Johnson’s steady misrule, schools deteriorate even as he pushes through big raises for teachers and other public employees, leaving the city with an extremely high pension debt.  

Even where reformers have triumphed this decade, as in San Francisco and Seattle, radical forces appear to be once again ascendant. Long a favored destination for college-educated migrants, Seattle during the 2020 riots shut down for weeks and even spawned something of a mini-Havana near its downtown. The city suffers from stubbornly high office-vacancy rates, large numbers of empty stores, and business flight. Crime is down, but hardly back to its pre-2020 levels. The George Floyd Plaza, meant to be some sort of public shrine, remains largely desolate and threatening.

In Portland, another city still reeling from the effects of 2020, socialists are also ascendant, having displaced Republicans as the city’s essential second party, and one with all the momentum. As in Seattle, the local progressives seemed reluctant to police even violence-prone groups like antifa.

Just recently New York Times veteran Nicholas Kristoff blithely dismissed Trumpian assertions about Portland as a crime-cursed dystopia, suggesting that “hell does not serve Pinot Noir this good.”  Of course, not everyone in these cities loves the helmeted kids in black, notably those who have suffered their attacks, including the Seattle police union.

Much the same process appears to be taking place in Minneapolis, which suffered massive  disorder during the “summer of love.” There, Mayor Jacob Frey, after eight years, is deeply unpopular and could lose out to his socialist challenger, Omar Fateh. The race was too close to call as of this writing.

Radical realignment is also unfolding in San Francisco, where since 2020, the city had tacked to the center. Once united in opposition to the progressives, the moderates are now increasingly divided. Now the city’s Board of Supervisors may have a DSA majority within a year or two.

President Trump deserves some blame for the socialist tide. He may well have saved the career of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who impressed few during last year’s fires and continues to disappoint, as the city’s performance in rebuilding has been abysmal at best. The city’s economy may be largely moribund, losing companies at a rapid clip. But Bass’s fervent attacks on ICE agents have helped her galvanize progressive support.  

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Is this the denouement of great cities? Even under socialist rule, big cities like New York will continue to attract young professionals, globe-trotting elites, and cultural creators, as well as some immigrants. In New York, while the overall population has declined, ultra-wealthy residents, boosted by the stock market, continue to spend lavishly at the city’s often absurdly expensive restaurants. Similarly, tourists continue to flood in, gawking at the bright lights, street characters, and remarkable cultural assets built by earlier generations.  

Yet over time, socialist rule may make it impossible for big cities to finance their current costs, much less elaborate schemes for redistribution. Trump and the congressional GOP are unlikely to   give much help with mass transit or to fund new city services. And there remain definite limits to what the rich — notably, those who earn and not just inherit their wealth — will absorb in terms of taxes and public humiliation.

It’s hard to see how cities like New York can expand spending without keeping these people. Between 2011 and 2021, New Yorkers with more than $1 million in adjusted gross income averaged 0.7% of all tax filers, but paid 42.4% of municipal personal Income Tax. Between 2018 and 2022, the city lost some $10 billion in revenues just to south Florida. Even Andrew Cuomo vowed to head to the Sunshine State in case he lost, which, he did.

On the other hand, socialist wins could prove a boon for places like Palm Beach, Fla., which have become beacons for people leaving places like New York and Chicago. Dallas is developing  a stock exchange to rival Wall Street and is eyeing a Mamdani mayoralty as an ideal marketing device. 

Some conservatives might celebrate the radicalization of cities and salivate at the prospect of hard-Left control of the Democratic Party. But they ignore the underlying forces boosting socialism, notably the cost of living and diminished employment prospects for the young, which could also spread beyond the radical cities. Rather than a boon to conservatives, the rise of the radical city constitutes a loss for the country, and can be reversed only by a rebirth of pragmatic reason.

Just recently, however, its members have been feeling considerably less secure. Zohran Mamdani — a socialist, a Muslim and a fierce critic of Israel — is the city’s likely next mayor. His emergence is eliciting palpable concern among the club’s members. “We are being erased in our own city,” says Sam Abrams, club member and prominent political scientist. At the Harmonie, as in various less illustrious Jewish institutions, the talk is of rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and an increased feeling that the city is turning against its Jewish communities. Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi at the generally liberal Park Avenue synagogue on the Upper East Side, sees Mamdani as a lethal threat. “If there’s a celebration of Israel and 10,000 people show up, will they be safe under Mamdani?”

New York’s Jews have suffered periods of exclusion, as they have elsewhere. Indeed, that’s one reason why the Harmonie was founded in the first place: Jews were largely unwelcome at the immaculately WASPish Union Club. But never before has New York had a mayor who is so apparently anti-Zionist; who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”; who has defended the phrase “Globalize the Intifada”; and who has appeared to celebrate terrorists and their supporters. All this in a city that, for most of the 20th century, hosted the largest Jewish community in world history.

Not that New York has always been welcoming to Jews. The first to arrive came in 1654, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They were a cause of consternation for Dutch colonial administrator of the time, Peter Stuyvesant, but the refugees had enough connections in Holland to force him into allowing them to stay. The first synagogue rose in 1682. The American Revolution brought full citizenship, while through the 19th century, New York welcomed thousands of largely German-speaking Jews: it’s no accident that the Harmonie was originally called Gesellschaft Harmonie. By the American Civil War, the city was home to 150,000 Jews, yet the largest influx came around 1900, when over two million Jewish migrants, including my own grandparents, arrived from Eastern Europe.

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Having traveled the filth and stench of steerage class, these immigrants did much to shape the 20th century city. It is frankly hard to imagine a successful, prosperous New York without Jews — just as it is hard to imagine New York culture without Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow; George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein; Barbra Streisand and Stephen Sondheim; Stan Lee and Diane Arbus; Woody Allen and Mel Brooks; the Beastie Boys and Lou Reed; Fran Leibovitz and Lena Dunham. Jews are critical players in the philanthropic structures of the city, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Philharmonic to the New York Historical Society near Central Park. They have been prominent among the big donors to the city’s great universities, notably NYU and Columbia.

It was New York’s Jews who, for better or worse, founded Goldman Sachs and the Lehman Brothers, and the modern mafia too. “In New York,” suggests Yeshiva University historian Jeffrey Gurock, “you could feel like the whole world was Jewish.” Even on the streets, the Jewish heritage persists: besides selling falafel and kebabs, the ubiquitous halal vendors also hawk knishes and kosher hot dogs. The essayist Milton Klonsky was only half joking when he called the Big Apple the “Ghetto of Eden”.

But New York’s Jewish character has been waning for decades. In 1950, the city was home to 40% of America’s Jews. Now, it represents well less than 15%. When I was growing up in the late Fifties, New York had some two million Jewish inhabitants; today the population is slightly less than half that. Much of that population headed to the suburbs through the Sixties and Seventies, an era of marked urban decline in New York as elsewhere.

The million or so Jews who remain in New York are still a largely affluent community. Yet they inhabit a city with new cultural influences, from the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia — and the Middle East. The city’s Muslim population has grown to roughly 750,000, and may soon match or exceed the Jewish population. All the while, New York’s institutions have also become less culturally Jewish. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have poured money into Manhattan’s universities, and its campuses have become flashpoints of anti-Zionism. The current holder of the Herbert Lehman chair at Columbia University, established in memory of the financier, a dedicated Zionist who served New York as both senator and governor, is none other than Mahmood Mamdani: Zohran’s virulently anti-Zionist father.

Nonetheless, New York’s large Muslim population is not Mamdani’s most critical constituency. His remarkable rise has come by appealing to well-educated, but often moderately paid, professionals. Like everyone else, New York’s Jewish middle classes find the city too expensive. Many continue to leave, particularly young families. The ones who remain are hemmed in by costs that reduce their quality of life on a daily basis. There remains a large group of young people, usually long-term renters, often single and/or childless, mostly concentrated in progressive enclaves, who want to stay — but look to Mamdani to help curb rising housing, food and transport costs.

Mamdani’s promise to make New York more affordable appears to cut across any concerns voters might have about his anti-Zionism — some polls have him winning a third of the Jewish vote, though more recent surveys are less enthusiastic. Whatever the exact numbers, they imply a new version of the class divide that has long separated New York’s Jewish populations. “There’s more than one Jewish New York,” says Rabbi Cosgrove. “Things look different on the Upper East Side than in parts of Brooklyn or Washington Heights.” Many families are divided, he laments. It’s not just progressive activists who are backing Mamdani but in many cases the children of the sorts of moneyed families who might frequent the Harmonie Club.

Indeed, New York’s Jews are turning on each other. The most staunch defenders of Israel accuse Mamdani’s Jewish supporters of being, like the old Jewish Bolsheviks, “Jews in Name Only” — choosing progressive bona fides over the deepest traditions of the tribe. For many of Mamdani’s champions, it suffices to call pro-Israelis “Zionists”, which many consider slur enough.

The frightening prospect for New York Jews is that antisemitism will become more commonplace, as it increasingly appears to be in Europe, reinforcing the notion that, as the Jewish political consultant Hank Sheinkopf put it, “every galut (place of exile) ends up in tragedy.” In Europe, demography favors a growing and far larger Muslim population, as well as their allies in established progressive parties.

As Muslim power, awkwardly allied with the secular Left, grows, an increasing number of Jews feel they can no longer count on protection from what were once considered friendly states. Some American Jews have noted the vicious antisemitic murders in Manchester — are they justified as part of the “global intifada”? — and conclude they can no longer count on the British sense of fair play. In the violence that accompanied the football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam last year, Dutch police were notably lax in protecting both visiting football fans and Amsterdam’s Jewish residents. Even Amsterdam’s progressive, anti-Israel Green mayor, Femke Halsema, was forced to admit that the attacks resembled Nazi pogroms.

Rather than restrict openly antisemitic acts, then, it’s Jews who are now being restricted: witness the ban on Israeli soccer fans being enforced in Birmingham. When the keffiyeh crowd is out in force, it’s a “no-go zone” for British Jews. Many New York Jews worry this is their future too, with community leaders fearing that Mamdani’s election will accelerate Jewish flight from the city: both to surrounding suburbs and further afield. Florida remains one popular option here. But as Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami demographer explains, Jews are also heading to cities as varied as Dallas, Raleigh, Austin, Atlanta and Las Vegas. All these places now have among the fast-growing Jewish communities in the nation.

Of course, this will be a slow process. New York is not about to lose its Jewish character overnight. Nor will the city’s economy collapse, at least immediately, if Mamdani is elected. Life goes on. Surging tourism and the Wall Street boom keep Manhattan as frenetic as ever.

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But, for all this, the city has clearly changed, its inequalities all too evident in an economy where almost all job growth is in low-wage sectors like tourism. Indeed, low wages and high rents have proved a boon to Mamdani, whose gaggle of proposed rent freezes, higher minimum wages and free childcare offer succor to the over-extended. New York also continues to attract the largest pool of the world’s ultra-rich, but Gothamites typically spend over 40% of their incomes on rent — the highest proportion of any large US city.

Yet if that explains the popularity of Mamdani’s economic positions, his radical political views may help explain why a growing number of American Jews are taking their religion more seriously. These trends favor more conservative branches of the faith, with nearly two thirds of New York Jewish children now raised Orthodox. Chabad, the most prominent Jewish traditionalist movement, and based out of a handsome neo-gothic house in Brooklyn, is ubiquitous on campuses and storefronts. Rabbi Mottie Seligson, Chabad’s public relations officer, points out that while temples are closing in much of the city, his movement continues to build new synagogues right across the five boroughs. For those younger Jews who eschew Mamdani’s anti-Zionism, Seligson adds that Friday night Shabbat attracts over 1,000 participants.

Altogether, Seligson argues that attachment to Judaism must replace the “religion of the Ivy League”. Young Jews, if they embrace their identity, will increasingly send their kids to Jewish schools and organize such things as local volunteer patrols: which may yet become necessary given many police officers are threatening to quit should Mamdani win.

As for the traditionally liberal Jewish establishment, frequenting spots like the Harmonie Club? It will take more than one term of anti-Zionist radicalism to overcome centuries of achievement. The great Jewish real estate families — the Zeckendorf, Rudin and Tishman — have their vast fortunes invested in the city. For many Jewish New Yorkers, there is nothing like Gotham, not just for making money but living a fully-rounded life.

In the near term, meanwhile, New York’s Jews may also turn to their own considerable resources, riding out the storm until reality impinges on Mamdani’s socialist dreams. “When you feel under attack, and you feel the city will no longer protect you, you need a sanctuary,” says Sam Abrams. He’s presumably thinking of places like the Harmonie — outposts of Jewish life over almost two centuries of upheaval, and which will surely endure long after Mamdani leaves the scene.

The upshot? A bonanza for investors, with firms like Blackstone betting literally billions of dollars on buying up American homes, before renting them out to desperate tenants. And if 28% of US single family homes were sold to investors in Q1 2022, an 8% jump on the previous year, the trend is increasingly popular on the far side of the Atlantic too. Not content with dolling out mortgages, Lloyds Bank apparently has plans to become Britain’s biggest landlord.

Yet as large corporations gobble up a diminishing supply of houses, they pose an enormous threat to would-be homeowners, particularly those Millennials too young to have cashed in the boom of earlier decades. Combined with frequent complaints that these mega-landlords don’t maintain their new purchases — and signs that they’re keen to scoop up even more real estate — much of the Western world edges closer to genuine disaster territory, even if the antagonists are more feudal vampires than undead shamblers.

Housing now dominates political discourse right across the developed world. Among Americans, it now ranks second only to inflation as a leading economic worry. In my native California, almost 70% of residents are concerned about housing costs; in Britain, housing has risen to become one of the top issues for voters — well ahead of defense, security, poverty and crime. That’s hardly surprising: especially under the country’s inflexible NIMBY regime, projections suggest that nearly five million UK households will live in unaffordable accommodation by 2030.

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And if the Anglosphere is especially bad in this respect, it’s hardly unique. Studies have found similar problems stalk the European and East Asian markets too, as prices rise far faster than household incomes or inflation. And if the OECD warns that living standards are bound to “stagnate or decline” in consequence, this is far more than a series of individual catastrophes for the families involved. Rather, the West’s housing crisis, so exacerbated by outfits like Blackstone, has terrifying implications for the maintenance of middle-class democracy.

Small landowners have been the bulwark of democracy for millennia. This was true in the early origins of Athens and Rome, and in the rise of the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, perhaps the first genuinely middle-class society in history. If, however, the rise of property ownership undermined the aristocracy and hastened the end of feudalism, the most dramatic changes came after the Second World War.

Servicemen returning home wanted something better than the dank Victorian apartments they’d inhabited before. Their dreams were embraced, and indeed realized, by a series of progressive governments, often on the Left but sometimes Christian Democratic. There are plenty of examples here: Harry Truman’s GI Bill and Clement Attlee’s welfare state are probably the two most famous, but Australia and Canada pursued similar policies too.

And if President Roosevelt was surely right when he proclaimed that a “nation of homeowners” is unconquerable, the postwar embrace of quality, affordable houses for all provided “the secret sauce” that made liberal capitalism palatable to working people. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, that was self-evident for those thousands of working-class families that fled the slums of Brooklyn or Wapping, embracing instead a front lawn and back garden in Long Island or its Essex equivalent. “Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?” wondered the filmmaker John Boorman, recalling his childhood in a South London suburb.

Now, though, many Western countries are transforming into “rentership” societies — where citizens have plenty of income to enjoy video games or tend to houseplants, but can never accumulate their own brick-and-mortar assets. The broader effect may ultimately resemble a modern form of feudalism, where institutional ownership concentrates control over housing.

If these problems transcend demographics, young people are particularly threatened here. When I ask my students if they feel confident about buying a home here in Southern California, they rarely answer affirmatively. In a recent Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds, housing ranked as the third most important issue overall, just behind inflation and health care. No wonder: nationally, homeownership for people under 35 has fallen steadily since the Great Recession, and is now half that of over 45s. And, to be clear, this is not due to changing priorities, as two-thirds of millennials still yearn to escape to the suburbs.

All this has a predictable number of knock-on effects: starting with wealth accumulation. With property now so expensive, a situation hardly helped by Blackstone and the rest, American home owners have a median net worth over 40 times that of renters. It’s not hard, here, to see the political implications of this economic divide, with renters tending to favor Leftist policies such as rent control and housing subsidies. To put it differently, a class of permanent renters seems tailor-made for fomenting class warfare against an ever-shrinking number of owners.

Indeed, this is precisely the factor that’s pushed an obscure socialist named Zohran Mamdani to the verge of becoming the mayor of America’s largest and most important city. Mamdani’s “cost of living” campaign — based on rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets — seems to some Leftist pundits as a potential path back to power. And why not? As one recent poll found, a majority of people under 40 embrace socialist principles, even as 70% of adults no longer believe the American Dream is even attainable.

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This politics of bitterness is arguably exacerbated elsewhere too. The only way many can now buy homes is by relying on the classic feudal formula — “the funnel of privilege”. In the US, after all, Millennials are three times as likely as boomers to count on inheritance for their retirement. In high-price markets like Los Angeles, close to 40% of loans rely on family money for qualification, up from 25% in 2011. For the losers of this economic lottery, resentment is bound to follow.

Of course, it’d be wrong to blame all this on Wall Street or the City. Many forces contribute to higher home prices. That includes immigration — especially the kind of open-door policy faced by Britain in recent years — as well as land-use policies that restrict development. Yet adding big capital to the mix deepens the assault on middle-income aspirations, especially when investors are especially eager to snatch up single-family homes. That, it goes without saying, does much to harden even moderate hearts to free-market ideas, especially when balancing housing with other priorities means that even something as basic as childbearing is now thrown by the wayside.

Nor does the situation look likely to improve in the medium term. As the industry journal Private Equity Real Estate estimates, investors could control as much as 40% of US housing stock by 2030, with similar trends visible in Australia and elsewhere. So pervasive is the trend, in fact, that some lawmakers, including in California, Washington and Georgia, have sought to limit purchases by large real estate outfits. Yet as the radical social theorist Barrington Moore wisely noted half a century ago, “no bourgeois, no democracy”. And if such tweaks are enough to save either remains decidedly unclear, as the stumbling masses look to take revenge.

Tariffs are hardly a MAGA invention, of course. On the contrary, the United States has levied protective tariffs almost from its origins as a nation. Tariffs and import substitution formed one of the central pillars of Alexander Hamilton’s political economy. 

Today, Europe screams about Trumpian tariffs, but the Continent has been reluctant to lower its own historically high protective barriers, most of them based on non-tariff regulatory policies. Canada, too, has been very protectionist and for a long time. Now, after decades in which Washington put global integration over its own workers and industry, America is playing the same game. 

The benefits of Trump’s tariffs will take time to become apparent. Already, they have spurred  companies like Eli Lilly to recommit to domestic production, forced Honda to scrap plans for shifting production of new models to Mexico in favor of Indiana, and prompted chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung to build new plants in Arizona and Texas, respectively.  Likewise, Nvidia, a company that long offshored its production to Taiwan, has committed to multibillion-dollar development projects. 

Still, job recovery is gradual. US manufacturing revival has been a bipartisan goal, pursued in fits and starts, since the Great Recession. As the Reshoring Initiative notes, the country has managed to claw back approximately 1.7 million jobs in an effort to bring manufacturing to or nearer the US homeland. This could just be the beginning. By some estimates, as China rises up the value chain and production costs there increase, up to a third of all Chinese capacity will move away from the Middle Kingdom in the near future. 

This shift gets an unintended boost from the increasingly hostile atmosphere in China, which confronts even big, established firms like the appliance giant Whirlpool, General Electric,   Caterpillar, Goodyear, General Motors, and Polaris. Most recently, Chinese exports to America dropped to the lowest level since the pandemic, driving the trade deficit to $280 billion this year, down from $500 billion under President Joe Biden.

Yet the road from here is by no means easy. One key concern is that firms will merely shift production from China to other third countries. This would be a plus in terms of weakening Beijing as a rival, but only domestic production in key industries can guarantee US economic preeminence and, with it, US geopolitical primacy.

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Like any trend that enriches some, reshoring faces strong opposition from those who benefit from the offshoring trend. You can start with the greens, whose anti-growth ideology and embrace of “net zero” are simply incompatible with industry-led economic growth. Their view boils down to letting the Chinese and their satraps do the dirty work, while America and the West purchase the products from the world’s No. 1 polluter. 

Traditional liberals also find tariffs distasteful, as reflected in most of the business press: The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, and the like. Most of their favorite pundits detest tariffs and focus on the ill effects on companies and consumers, while largely embracing the current trading regime, as long as financial markets thrive. Libertarians, especially, rail against the very idea of having national policies to encourage manufacturers.

Many mainstream Democrats naturally disdain industry, reflecting the prejudices of their party’s elite professional base. Factories, a Northwestern University economics professor claims, “aren’t the future,” and we can count on our service and tech economies to generate wealth. Christina Romer, who served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Barack Obama, claimed concerns that building stuff was more important than getting haircuts reflected merely “sentiment and history,” not modern reality.

Then there’s the Democratic Party’s increasingly powerful socialist left — which along with many Silicon Valley oligarchs — prefer welfarism over growth and who have abandoned higher-wage jobs in energy, logistics, and manufacturing as a means to grow family incomes. Many embrace a  universal basic income as a means to palliate a populace made redundant by globalization — in effect, offering handouts, porn, and weed to the jobless children of a once-proud working class.

Of course, China benefited the most from the status quo ante. Since its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, the People’s Republic has grown so much that it boasts as many factory exports as the United States, Japan, and Germany combined. 

In contrast, between 2004 and 2017, US reliance on Chinese inputs doubled, a barrage that, notes an Economic Policy Institute study, cost as many as 3.7 million jobs since 2000. Europe’s industrial sector also declined, losing a million manufacturing jobs just between 2019 and 2023. Germany is projected to lose as many 400,000 auto jobs by 2030 through competition with Chinese EVs. Britain, once the world’s industrial leader, has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs since 2010 and is now only the world’s 12th largest manufacturing power.   

Mass deindustrialization’s effects are not hard to see. Just travel to northern England, the outer suburbs of Paris, the American Midwest, or Germany’s “Rust belt on the Rhine.” All these areas suffer reduced  economic mobility, high degrees of welfare dependence, and mass out-migration. For millions, the loss of such jobs has meant that, as an MIT report put it, the traditional “job escalator” has shut down.

The digital revolution, and the creation of mega-companies in places like Silicon Valley has done little to make up the difference in terms of productivity or social mobility. Nor can services by themselves solve deep-seated social or trade woes. Overall US service exports, including those that go to tech firms, represents less than a third of the country’s overseas sales.  

Needless to say, Chinese manufacturing supremacy under the former neoliberal regime also threatened to bring about Chinese defense and geopolitical supremacy. 

But here, too, a reversal is underway, with new signs of life in the US defense industry. This comes not from the corporate dinosaurs, but a whole wave of new companies. “Innovation starts in the small shops,” notes the Dallas-based venture capitalist Bryan Chambers. Upstart “defense-tech” firms are feeding off a huge surge in investment, including the Army’s current $36 billion procurement overhaul.

Some of these companies, like Denver’s Palantir and Orange County-based Anduril have seized on a change in military affairs resulting from experiences with drone and missile attacks in Palestine, Yemen, Russia, and Ukraine. Equally important, we now see a shift among entrepreneurs toward “hard tech,” essentially AI-assisted hardware, as the best bets for the future.

Likely, the bulk of America’s reindustrialization won’t take place in blue areas like California, due to their high taxes, prohibitive regulations, and high housing prices. The fastest industrial GDP growth is taking place in Texas, Michigan, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arizona, Ohio, Minnesota, and North Dakota. These are also the states that, according to Supply Chain Digest, offer the best conditions for manufacturers.

If the industrial boom gains velocity, it could mark a massive reversal of fortune not only for the newly industrializing South, but especially for the Midwest, a region that, between 2000 and 2005, accounted for nearly 40 percent of all US industrial job losses. 

Contributing to the production comeback is the renaissance of the US fossil-fuel industry, now producing at a record level. The Permian Basin in west Texas, which by itself is the world’s fifth largest producer of oil, and new production sites in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania provide a critical raw material, cheap energy, for reindustrialization. For example, Shell in 2022 installed a $6 billion methane cracker in Monaca, Pa., to convert the region’s abundant natural gas into plastics.

Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker, authors of The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation, see the old industrial belt as the primary beneficiary of a growing interface between manufacturing and technology. Self-driving cars, wearable devices, smart grids, and smart farming all benefit from harvesting a legacy of industrial expertise. For example, Akron, Ohio, successfully reinvented itself from an auto and tire center to a hotbed for polymer research. Other parts of the heartland seem poised to do the same.

Tariffs alone will not bring industry back. After all, Europe and Canada have extensive tariff regimes but continue to lose industrial market share. A concerted drive to reshore requires basic preconditions: the use of new technologies and a better-trained workforce.

New technology and the spread of affordable digital manufacturing tools like 3-D printers enable domestic firms to design, produce, and sell locally, reducing reliance on long supply chains.  These technologies allow American firms to produce better and often cheaper products. In many of these dimensions, the United States is leading or regaining the edge.

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Finding competent workers will likely prove a more uphill battle. President Joe Biden talked about having factory workers and oil riggers “learn to code” but now artificial intelligence, backed by a huge infusion of Wall Street cash, threatens to wipe out many software jobs. But there is a most pressing need for skilled, dependable workers such as drivers, machine-tool operators, and welders who can do basic industrial tasks. The American Welding Society estimates the shortage of skilled welders exceeds 400,000 nationwide.

Pushing all students into four-year programs is one source of the crisis. Schools made a terrible mistake by no longer offering shop classes. Few were encouraged to learn industrial arts. Now many of the most competent industrial workers are over age 45.

Fortunately, an incipient sea change is slowly lowering the age of skilled workers. Shop classes are making something of a comeback, and some states are investing more in skills education, something that engages less than half as many US workers than in Germany. Much of this is occurring in red states in the Midwest and South. One US senator, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has even suggested taxing ultra-rich universities, once favored for their production of elite professionals, and using the proceeds to fund an expanded apprenticeship program.

Attitudes are changing. One recent survey found that roughly 83% of Gen Z feel that learning a skilled trade can be a better pathway to economic security than college. That includes 90% of those already holding college degrees. Indeed, as college enrollment dropped between 2020 and 2023, trade schools grew by 10 percent.    

To a large extent, these shortages will likely be filled by working-class whites, but also increasingly immigrants and minorities. Today, barely 58% of all working-class Americans are non-Hispanic whites; according to a 2016 Economic Policy Institute study, people of color will constitute the majority of the working class by 2032.     

Even in the rural Midwest, long plagued by shrinking workforces, refugees from places like Bhutan and East Africa have become a critical source of workers. In Fargo, ND, employers routinely call resettlement director Dan Hannaher to inquire about new families moving to the region. Seventy percent of one local manufacturer’s staff is composed of first-or second-generation workers from immigrant families, hailing from more than 30 countries. In Texas, according to a number of recent studies, as many as half of all manufacturing workers are foreign-born.  

The challenge facing these companies will be to turn these newcomers, and the increasingly detached native-born working class, into effective workers, able to employ the new technologies. Today, the West needs these companies, and workers, to be well-compensated, restoring upward mobility as well as productive growth. These people will prove far more critical to the future of the West than social-media influencers or Wall Street wizards. In the 21st century, reindustrialization offers the best hope for economic renewal and revival of a real social democracy.

Progressives like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson complain that America looks the way it would “if the Confederacy” had won. Yet the South’s triumph today is one the old rebels would barely recognize. The region, to be sure, still has more than its share of Blimpish nativists and religious fanatics. Even so, more people, including African-Americans, led by those with college degrees, now flock there in search of opportunity.

This marks a huge historical turnaround. Well into the Twenties and Thirties, the South was lagging and losing migrants to the North and the West. Slavery, and then segregation, notes historian Gavin Wright, kept down labor costs and, with them, the incentive for innovation and labor-saving technology. The South was almost its “own country,” as Wright says, a poor appendage to a much richer, more dynamic nation.

But now, the South is capturing cutting-edge industries, drawing in capital as well as a swelling tide of migrants from within the country and abroad. Overall, the southeast quadrant of the country is now the most dominant economic region, and since 2018 has produced almost all the country’s population growth and half its new jobs, according to the Texas Stock Exchange.

By contrast, it’s the Northern and Pacific cities that are pursuing John C. Calhoun-style nullification to resist Washington. And the Trump administration has taken note of this. Recently, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that “we want the US to be more like Florida and less like New York.” With Gotham about to embrace socialism and a globalized intifada, things look good for Trump Central in Palm Beach, the new favored boomtown for millionaires and billionaires.

Of course, inertia still works for the North and California after decades of dominance. Even today, per-capita incomes remain higher in the Northeast and California, but this likely reflects fewer families and higher costs, which often wipe out income gains, particularly for minorities and the working class. The income disparity has been receding since the Forties, as the South grows in power and influence and shifts to sophisticated businesses like aerospace, software, and finance — once unthinkable for the agrarian region.

One key factor to the Southern ascendancy has been investment in education, which has long been a critical weak spot, with average expenditures half the national average well into the Forties. With an economy built around labor-intensive farming and light manufacturing, generations of ambitious Southerners sought opportunities elsewhere. Many headed to colleges in the Northeast and West Coast. But today, that flow has reversed, with ever more college students choosing to attend schools in the South.

Perhaps even more important, the once widely admired Northeastern and particularly California grade schools, although still better funded, have declined relative to those in Florida or Texas. Schools in many states have become increasingly forums of indoctrination for “social justice,” with even long-time leader Massachusetts eliminating honors programs.

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In contrast, the South, and even truly backward states like Mississippi, are focused on improving their long-woeful grade schools. A strong focus on basic reading and math skills has led to dramatic improvements in both. At the same time, many of these states — South Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee — have developed a system of trade schools for those who don’t wish to go to college. Eight of the 10 best states for this kind of education are located in the South.

This focus makes sense, since the South has enjoyed the fastest growth in US manufacturing in the past five years, much of it stimulated by foreign direct investment. Last year, South Carolina led the nation in the share of jobs created by overseas firms, with Kentucky and Alabama seeing strong growth, as well.

These investments are helping drive the South’s growing dominance in tech-forward industries like aerospace. The Lone Star State, in particular, is considered by PwC to be the best state for aerospace manufacturing and the Texans are now tied with Californians for the most Tier One research universities. SpaceX and Blue Origin each have large test facilities in Van Horn and Brownsville, respectively, including one to be used for an upcoming NASA launch. In addition, Texas has two spaceports, one in Midland and the other in Houston.

As Bryan Chambers, who runs the Capital Factory in Austin, points out, these firms, many in defense, are headed south, as they require factory space, skilled workers, reasonable housing costs, and, as one executive told me, “good places to blow things up.” It helps that Austin is home to the Army Futures Command. Texas also has the talent, ranking second behind California in the number of aerospace engineers. Astonishingly, Alabama ranks fourth — an achievement that would have horrified Confederate agrarian ideologues who loathed mechanized industry, if they were around to see it.

Like SpaceX, many of the most innovative California aerospace firms, like Jet Zero, based in Long Beach, tend to move to the South as they grow. The innovative low-emission jet manufacturer recently announced a $4.7 billion investment in Greensboro, NC, that will employ more than 14,000 people over the next decade. The company also indicated that it would move its headquarters to the same city, once the plant is finished.

A similar trajectory is taking place in semiconductors and artificial intelligence. Between 2022 and 2023, Texas led in new tech jobs, Florida came second, and Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina also made significant gains; California was basically flat. According to the Computer Technology Association, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina are projected to enjoy the biggest growth in tech over the next decade.

With the rise of AI and quantum computing, tech companies facing soaring need for affordable electricity will likely look to the South, which has generally lower electricity prices. That will allow the likes of NVIDIA to fabricate chips, supercomputers, and data centers for AI in the South. By contrast, states like New York and California suffer the highest energy prices in the United States.

Southern boosters are also aiming a shot at the last great bastions of the California-Northeast economy, such as entertainment. Georgia, Nashville, and Austin have all become major players as Hollywood retreats and loses both its historic allure as well as jobs. Surging media hub Atlanta may not have LA’s great weather, but it is far more affordable and closer to the national mainstream culturally.

An even more deadly blow could come in finance, the other bulwark of the blue-state economies. The recently established Dallas-based Texas Stock Exchange, scheduled to open next year, has raised more than $161 million from such firms as BlackRock, Citadel Securities, Charles Schwab, Dell Family Office Management, Fortress, Jump Trading, Squarepoint, Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, Tower Research, and other market leaders.

Nicole Chambers, the Texas Stock Exchange’s global managing director, only smiles when I bring up the fact that New York seems poised to elect a socialist as mayor. She sees the new exchange as providing a more business-friendly environment for both small investors and companies. “We want to be a Wall Street for all,” the San Diego native suggests. This is part of the whole “y’all street” meme, which sees Texas capitalism as a more open, even populist alternative to more hierarchical Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

Another strength: Texas now has more finance professionals than New York. As Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda, once told me, “more important than gold or diamonds are people.” For much of its history, the South failed to attract people who could build a stronger, more advanced economy. Today’s reversal is proof that there are few inevitabilities in the political economy.

Housing is another consideration. Although both progressives and even some conservatives now claim the South is suffering from the same shortage of affordable housing as the Northeast, this is limited to a few select areas, notably Austin and Miami. Due to more rapid construction, and lower development costs, Southern cities tend to overproduce housing, already leading to price declines. Overall, notes Wendell Cox in a recent report on housing affordability, prices in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Jacksonville are all half or less the price, based on incomes, of those in LA, San Francisco, and San Jose.

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In most of the century after the Civil War, Southerners, black and white, headed to other regions, with a diaspora that peaked at 12 million in 1980. That pattern, too, is shifting. Since 2000, Florida alone enjoyed net domestic migration gains of 3.5 million, Texas 2.5 million, and the Carolinas roughly 2.5 million; meanwhile, New York, Illinois, and California have hemorrhaged roughly 10 million together. Nine of the 10 fastest growing metros since 2020 have been located in Dixie.

This migration has also generated a huge infusion of capital into the South. Between 2019 and 2022, states like California, New York, and Illinois lost more than $150 billion in taxpayer income. In contrast, the Sunshine State alone gained more than $100 billion, while Texas, Tennessee, and South Carolina made major gains.

But if the capital comes largely from Boomers, the real shift has been among younger generations. In the last decade, the four leading destinations for millennials were all in the South: Nashville, Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas-Ft. Worth.

Perhaps nothing more dramatically reflects the ascendancy of Dixie than its embrace of migrants from developing countries. Historically, the South received few immigrants. In 1910, only 2% of Southerners were foreign-born, compared to almost 15% nationwide. That era’s predominantly legal migrants helped build great cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. But in the last Census, notes demographer Wendell Cox, all three of the cities that led in the growth of foreign-born residents were located in the South: Miami, Houston, and Dallas.

The appeal of the South to these newcomers lies in the same thing that drives domestic migration: opportunity. Immigrants need such things as low entry costs and an expanding economy. Many find that Southerners increasingly mix their traditional courtesy with a renewed sense of openness. “We are a resettlement city,” suggests Steve Clark, a former CEO of the Fayetteville, Ark., Chamber of Commerce. “The chamber has a Hispanic heritage festival each year; it’s held downtown on the square. We teach five languages in our school here.” The metro vision, he suggests, is one that dispels the racial past and seeks a different future.

The South’s demographic destiny will be further accelerated by its appeal to families. The highest birth rate among the nation’s major metros is found in Hinesville, Ga. Other high-fertility areas include Jacksonville, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Memphis, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City. Meanwhile, the lowest rates are found in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with New York also back in the pack. As families move to the South, many of the region’s metros, even in famously doddering Florida, are getting slightly younger. This, even as Northeastern and West Coast regions age more rapidly.

Of course, nothing is set in stone. The region could still fall back in the pack by rejecting its transformation and embracing neo-Confederate nostalgia. Nominating morally dubious candidates like Texas’s rabid-red Attorney General Ken Paxton and pushing mindless Trumpism certainly invite a resurgence of blue politics. But for now, the demographic and economic trends promise a bright future for the South.

If he is looking back up from hell, or wherever he ended up, Jefferson Davis is unlikely to appreciate the racially tolerant, migrant-welcoming South of today. Yes, the South has risen again, but this has happened largely by copying the old playbook of the detested North.

Eugenics, a policy that seeks to “improve” humanity, dismisses the importance of bestowing a sense of worth and dignity to all individuals in the quest of breeding only “the finest”. Today, our expanding knowledge of genes and demographics has created eugenic possibilities far beyond those of the last century. Once rejected largely due to Nazi atrocities, eugenics is being embraced by both the Left and Right. Yet its beating heart lies not in politics, but in tech-driven approaches that reflect, as New York Marxist academic David Harvey called it, “a fetishism of technology” that transcends conventional politics.

In a way that past eugenicists could only dream, technology now opens the possibilities of engineering something far more radical than sterilizing the weak and giving bonuses to those with the right genetic inheritance. Instead, the looming prospect of an entire biological transformation emerges. For half a century, scientists have been dreaming of engineering humans to better specs before conception, as they look to edit genes to produce “superior” offspring.

New technology — from “gene editing” to in-vitro birthing and cloning — provides new ways to create “the better human.” One big difference from 20th-century eugenics is that today’s effort is a largely private matter, at least until now, shaped not by the state, but the technocratic elite. What’s emerging is a modern version of John Calvin’s Protestant “Elect,” based not on faithfulness but measurements of IQ and ability. This new dominant class, as Daniel Bell predicted some 50 years ago, can employ “new intellectual technology” as a means of “ordering the mass society.”

Promoted by technologists, these efforts tend to be intrinsically “dehumanizing,” as the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned. Eugenic technology, Sacks argued, operates “in detachment, driven by analysis, the breaking down wholes into constituent parts.” In this emerging world, we see the expansion of technology imposed on masses that have become less intelligent not despite but because of ever greater exposure to social media and increasingly, to artificial intelligence.

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Don’t worry, at least that’s what those who benefit the most from this shift suggest. Their answers boil down to this: let us lead you into the perfectly honed future. Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japan’s influential Softbank venture fund, recently suggested that artificial intelligence would lay the foundation for the creation of the “superhuman.” Not satisfied with making life better, Son now “really wanted to become an architect, to design the future of humanity,” as the Financial Times reported.

Politically, the current neo-eugenics movement spans the gamut. Ray Kurzweil, longtime head of engineering at the painfully progressive Google, is perhaps the best-known advocate of creating a “posthuman” future, with human behavior and attitudes shaped by the interface with machine technology. Sam Altman, generally a supporter of Democrats, wants AI bots to serve as “super assistant” for every dimension of life, supplanting the roles once played by parents, friends, teachers, ministers and neighbors. Mark Zuckerberg, a long-time donor to Democrats, thinks human contact can be supplanted by properly customized bots in his Metaverse.

Similar thoughts about automating humanity also come from Trump-leaning oligarchs like Elon Musk, who uses genetic screening before impregnating women who meet his criteria in order to create his “kid’s legion” of superior babies. Peter Thiel, an influential figure on the so-called Tech Right, warns darkly of “a deadly race between politics and technology,” with technology deemed superior to democracy. Thiel embraces the notion that cognitively gifted represent the future of society, and is a key investor in Orchid, a gene-editing IVF firm. He’s also, like Kurzweil, an enthusiastic backer of transhumanism.

The techno-elite’s vision constitutes a call for a scientifically ordered society detached from marriage, family, religion, and the broad sense of community. In its most extreme form, the eugenicists embrace “transhumanism” like Thiel — searching for extended mortality through technology. Today, we witness Silicon Valley’s obsession with efforts to extend life through the use of drugs, technology, and rigorous exercise, a kind of techno-Spartacism lacking that culture’s strong sense of communal obligation and honor. But this is just the beginning. “The rise to power of net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal,” writes Jaron Lanier.

Potentially the most radical and far-reaching of the emerging creeds, transhumanism offers a distinctly secular approach to achieving the long-cherished religious goal of immortality. The new tech religion treats mortality not as something to be transcended through moral actions, but as a “bug” to be corrected by technology. The aim is to, in the words of tech engineer Anthony Levandowski, “develop and promote the realization of a godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”

Ultimately, like their early 20th-century predecessors, the new eugenicists have little time for traditional religions, with their focus on the essential equality of people and acts of charity and concern for the less fortunate. They want to abandon the teachings that have underpinned much democratic and egalitarian thinking in the West. They’re trying to make a religion of their own.

In contrast, transhumanists reject Judeo-Christian egalitarianism. Yuval Noah Harari sees instead a future where “a small and privileged elite of upgraded humans” gain control of society and use genetic engineering to cement the superior status of their offspring. The new eugenicists are not going to “wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic,” he notes. Instead, bioengineers will rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance, and even grow entirely new limbs. He concludes: “They will thereby create new godlings, who might be different from us Sapiens as we are different from Homo Erectus.”

Some of the new eugenicists have a disturbing influence on the current Administration. Curtis Yarvin, a far-Right gadfly with ties to Vice President JD Vance, embraces the so-called Dark Enlightenment and favors ending democracy and imposing a tech-led monarchy. Like eugenicists of the last century, he has advocated for measures to keep down those deemed inferior. He seems also to have a soft spot for slavery, suggesting black people might have been better off without abolition.

Such thinking undermines the MAGA agenda, which draws its strength from the multiracial working and lower middle class. Some Right-wing nativists, like Steve Sailer, even think Republicans should ignore non-whites, even as they become an ever larger part of the electorate. These views get validation from Razib Khan, a science popularizer with links to Right-wing eugenicons like Sailer and Ron Unz. He wants race science to inform a reshaping of society, for example suggesting men “import” more East Asian women to marry the often not appealing — at least to Western women — nerdish types.

Yet it would be misleading to see the new eugenics drive as exclusively a phenomenon of the Right. In the last century, many on the progressive Left openly embraced eugenics, including leading lights like Margaret Sanger and Jane Addams. For them, the need was to curb the breeding of inferiors, largely Eastern and Southern Europeans, while encouraging childbirth among the superior, enlightened people, mostly Anglo-Saxons like themselves.

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This notion of “salvation by science” also appealed to some on the European Left. The famed Swedish sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, backed the sterilizations that were part of government policy till the mid-Seventies. This reflected the notion that socialism required a population that culls the genetically flawed. In 1941, Alva Myrdal wrote in Nation and Family that “In our day of highly accelerated social reforms the need for sterilization on social grounds gained momentum. Generous social reforms may facilitate home-making and more childbearing than before among the groups of less desirable as well as more desirable parents”.

A similar stance was advocated by The Webbs, the British inventors of Fabian socialism, who considered a policy of encouraging “the healthy” to have more offspring while blocking, as Sidney Webb put it, the “breeding of degenerate hordes of a demoralized ‘residuum’ unfit for social life.”

The conception of those “unfit” for social life resonates with some among the anti-MAGA crowd because it reflects the Democrats’ dependence on educated professionals. Elon Musk may be an object of hate for Leftists, but a defense of elite institutions is now mandatory on the Left, which demand protection from the populist masses as the repository of superior thinking. From all this, notes historian Michael Lind, comes the notion, popular on the Left, that the red states are “filled with inbred, knuckle-dragging, white nationalist Neanderthals plotting to overthrow democracy.”

Whether on the Right or Left, the core belief of all eugenicists lies in the assumption that we should shape and cull the human herd to fit a particular vision. This idea is gaining influence, particularly from the wealthiest and most powerful forces of our age. Threatened are our longstanding notions of morality, family, and self-governance critical to democracy and our flourishing as humans.

Rather than simply growing the social media sinkhole, hard tech focuses on building real-world equipment. “We’re inventing the new factory town, and recovering the sense of what works in America,” says Cameron Schiller, whose Rangeview Corporation startup uses 3D technology to make castings for the metal parts used in aerospace. And if Schiller feels his team is fighting the right fight, he’s far from alone. El Segundo, after all, is home to around three dozen such firms, the biggest concentration in the region, together making everything from drones to engines, drilling systems to satellites.

As Schiller implies, all this could finally restore America to the kind of blue-collar prosperity it enjoyed after 1945. It could also protect the country against threats from overseas and even take the country to the stars — if, that is, El Segundo can fend off competition from both other states and the looming threat of China’s own high-tech space sector.

The emergence of El Segundo, known to locals as “Gundo”, comes after decades of struggle. With the end of the Cold War, America’s traditional aerospace industry stumbled. Big contractors like Lockheed and Boeing got fat and lazy, particularly given the lack of competition after the Soviet Union’s demise.

Over recent years, and especially with the end of the Pax Americana, the country’s aerospace sector is making a comeback, jumping by 7.1% in 2023. Yet this revival isn’t really focused on poorly managed primes — Lockheed Martin’s Artemis moon rocket has been plagued by delays and failures — but rather on the smaller firms snatching up their engineers. Scattered like lost pennies from LAX to coastal San Diego, a stretch of about 100 miles, these firms are concentrated in old industrial areas like El Segundo, where the daytime population reaches 50,000, or else Long Beach’s Douglas Park, with a million square feet of industrial space.

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Around 40 of these new firms are spinoffs from SpaceX, which is now worth an estimated $350 billion and whose founding headquarters once sat just 11 miles east of Gundo. One good example here is Relativity Space, a Long Beach-based outfit that develops reusable rockets and raised $650 million in 2021. Another spinoff is Impulse Space, a satellite developer that lately secured $300 million of its own.

As the SpaceX connection suggests, this is something new. For if American tech was once dominated by coders and marketers, these jobs are increasingly disappearing off to Bangalore, with software firms from Salesforce to Google facing eye-watering job cuts. Not that it’s all bad. For if algorithms are on the way out, America’s virtual economy is being replaced by what Delian Asparouhov calls “harder tech”.

Cofounder of Varda Aerospace, Asparouhov set up the firm with yet another Elon Musk protégé. More to the point, and like many of its neighbors in El Segundo, his company is interested in solving distinctly practical problems: in this case, testing pharmaceuticals in zero gravity. “There is an aerospace renaissance,” the Bulgarian MIT graduate explains. “This can’t be done with AI — you need people to build spaceships. It’s a paradigm shift.”

It’s hard to disagree with that last phrase, and not just scientifically. For if firms like Varda represent a more practical form of science, the “hard tech” revolution, with its circuit boards and machinists, equally implies a different kind of corporate culture. They may, after all, flap like palm trees to the political winds: but, in general, the lords of Silicon Valley are socially progressive, and believers in an elite culture that has little in common with everyday Americans.

With the military implications of satellites and space, however, spots like El Segundo are rather more comfortable in their Right-wing patriotism. “There’s a sense of being comfortable in America,” says Tom Feldman, founder of Durin, a startup that wants to use new technology to bolster mining. “There’s a nationalist theme here. We feel we are building for America. That’s why there’s so much concern about who has the biggest flag.” That sentiment is echoed by the area’s broader cultural vibe. Lunch for Feldman is less about locally sourced salads or Asian fusion and far more about comfort food at Wendy’s Place, a wood-paneled diner where young engineers eat eggs, pancakes and meatloaf amid calloused-handed older aerospace workers.

To establishment media outlets, El Segundo’s “bros” appear a threat to everything they hold dear. To quote Vanity Fair, they love fast cars, tobacco, and “their Lord and savior Jesus Christ.” These nerds, the liberals report, are inspired by blue-collar aesthetics, wearing tattered jeans, leather work boots, and dark t-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets.

And, to be fair, this cynical tone isn’t totally unreasonable: waving the Stars and Stripes can be lucrative indeed, with almost half of 2024’s top 100 defense startups newcomers to the scene. These firms have together secured $52 billion in private capital, far more than they received from defense or space agencies. The majority were located in California. Tiny El Segundo, for its part, was home to four, equal to San Jose and its 970,000 people.

Yet if a dash of patriotism isn’t bad for the balance sheet, the two are hardly incompatible. Indeed, the Gundo squashbucklers arguably echo the conquistadors that roamed California in the Age of Exploration. As one of Hernán Cortéz’s captains explained back in the 16th century, the Spaniards crossed the seas to both “serve God and His Majesty” and “to grow rich, as all men desire to do.”

Historical analogies aside, it’s obvious that the upstarts are making a real splash with the White House. Shaym Sanker, CTO of defense giant Palantir, sees Donald Trump as a chance to break the “manager” mode of Boeing and Nasa, a view that is fair enough when challenger firms like Anduril are now worth over $30 billion. “This is where the exciting things are happening,” agrees Ian Cinnamon. The 33-year-old cofounder of Apexspace, which builds buses for satellites and rockets from its El Segundo factory, describes the production process as something that ends not in digits: but in something more tangible.

Cinnamon is clearly proud of these developments, especially compared to his rivals further up the coast. “Silicon Valley,” he says, “is not so exciting.” Perhaps — but the El Segundo boom is clearly about much more than tech bro rivalries. For if firms here are making it big in defense, they’re also adapting to, and indeed shaping, the future of warfare thousands of miles from California. Faced by the rise of drone and missile attacks from Gaza to Yemen to Ukraine, the Pentagon is rethinking the equipment it needs, all part of a $36 billion procurement overhaul. Arguably somewhat less essential are the eye-wateringly expensive tanks and jet fighters produced by legacy firms — replaced by cheap and replaceable alternatives.

In truth, though, the biggest pool of money splashing around Gundo isn’t from the Defense Department, but rather the burgeoning space industry. In a sense, of course, El Segundo is just following global trends. Boosted by a huge surge of investment, space industry global revenues have jumped tenfold since the early 2000s, from $175 billion in 2005 to almost $385 billion in 2017, a growth rate of just under 7% per year. All told, the space economy is now estimated at $570 billion, and could reach $1.2 trillion by 2040.

Here, at least, Southern California can rely on its history. For if the Boeings of the world are in trouble, the state retains almost twice as many aerospace engineers as second-place Texas. These skills, including those of skilled machinists and other blue-collar specialists, provide the sinews of the new space economy. One great example here is Arkisys, a small startup located 25 miles from El Segundo. Squatting in a low-rise building, across the road from an old-school pasta joint and a Mormon church, it is developing ports to service satellites in space. These sites are serviced by robots, controlled from Earth, which can help with everything from repairs to fueling.

“This is the right space because it’s the bastion of historical space intellect,” says Dave Barnhardt, Arkisys’ professorial founder, who among other things has worked at high levels at DARPA, the originator of the internet. At 63, Barnhardt is a grizzled veteran compared to most other space people, wearing the button-down shirt and slacks that once were the preferred uniform of engineers.

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Fair enough: its reservoirs of talent have allowed California to expand its dominance of aerospace. The Golden State enjoys a 19% share of the global space industry, dovetailed by 40% of the government’s largest space-related programs.

Yet here, as elsewhere, California’s dominance is threatened by rivals. The two obvious internal candidates are Texas and Florida. Unlike California, both boast their own Space Commissions, combined with lower costs and friendly taxes. No less important, both Texas and Florida have all-important rocket launch sites, not least iconic spots like Cape Canaveral. Together with California’s continued bickering with space leaders — his heirs may have plumped for El Segundo, but Musk himself left the state after tiring of its wokeness — and the exact contours of American aerospace remain uncertain.

What’s not in doubt, though, is that this technology looks set to dominate our century. For if those robots and satellites are all impressive enough in theory, they could yet be used as a geopolitical battering ram.

Combined with the kind of drone technology developed by the likes of Palantir, and it’s little wonder America’s leading rival is taking the hard tech revolution so seriously. Under the tight control of the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing’s deep tech companies reflect a desire to dominate human affairs both on the ground and amid the stars. Though it didn’t put an astronaut in space until 2021, the People’s Republic enjoyed a record number of launches last year, not least when the Tianwen-1 (“Heavenly Questions”) mission drove a rover on the surface of Mars. China is also the first country to return samples from the far side of the Moon. The country’s future goals are no less ambitious, including a mission to Jupiter and its moon, Callisto in 2029 and 2038 plans for establishing a research base on Mars.

The impact of the new hard tech has implications back on Earth too. Both Russia and China are developing space-based military systems, while satellite communications, such as Starlink but also proprietary systems serving soldiers on the ground, have become critical to military conflicts from the Middle East and Ukraine to a possible fight over Taiwan. Wars will be won on earth, in short, but the critical battles may be in space.

If this were a battle of bureaucracies, China’s chances would be excellent: as Rand Simberg, one industry veteran rightly says, today’s NASA wouldn’t be able to pull off Apollo 8. But if the American federal government is creaking, it’s equally clear that El Segundo represents something of a way back. Filled with small, innovative companies, the industrial parks of Southern California are a denim-jeaned riposte to Chinese central planning. What could be more American than that?

Indeed, over the past decade, the green movement has successfully trolled for big money from groups with strong links to the Chinese Communist Party, as well as some dollops from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has cynically backed efforts to curb the West’s production of natural gas, the easier to deepen its own energy dominance; and Qatar, known for financing Hamas and other Islamist groups.

Nowhere is the penetration more complete than in the universities, where Chinese and Qatari money are behind the largest proportion of the $29 billion of foreign money sunk into American universities between 2021 and 2024. This, and similar funds flooding Canadian, Australian, and British Universities, buy good will and political influence. Chinese students at institutions like Stanford are also closely monitored by the Beijing regime’s agents in order to stamp out or at least identify dissidents — and when possible, to purloin research for the motherland.

Climate change has emerged as one critical element of this collaboration. The Washington Free Beacon has reported on millions of dollars from a climate nonprofit called Energy Foundation China, run primarily out of Beijing by former Communist Party cadres, flooding campuses. The beneficiaries include the University of Maryland and Harvard (where a professor was arrested for lying to the FBI about his China ties, and then appointed at a Chinese university). The consulting firm Strategy Risks argued Harvard also hosted training sessions for XPCC, a Chinese paramilitary organization, subject to sanctions for being involved in the suppression of the Uyghurs.

The belle of the China ball, not surprisingly, is California. Engagement with the People’s Republic has been long required for elites in the Golden State, whose imports from China are roughly nine times its exports. For China, it is a wonderful place to do business. The country runs a roughly $107 billion trade surplus with California, and the disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense. California fares better with services, notably software and other tech licenses as well as universities, but this only amounts to $5 billion. As climate policy hurts average Californians through deindustrialization, high energy prices, and climate regulation, it enriches China.

The outreach began under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown, who now chairs the legislatively created California-China Climate Institute at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley has been particularly egregious in its embrace of China. So much so that the Government Select Committee on the CCP wrote an open letter to the school, venting “grave concern” about its “joint institute with state-controlled Tsinghua University and the Shenzhen government” and warning that Berkeley is facilitating Chinese espionage of American research.

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Newsom is clearly a vassal in training, traveling to China and greeting Xi like a visiting sovereign when the dictator came here. Ahead of the visit, China and California issued a “first-of-its-kind” joint declaration pledging cooperation on subnational climate action, such as “aggressively cutting greenhouse gas emissions, transitioning away from fossil fuels, and developing clean energy.”

Not surprisingly, Beijing dreams of the pliable Newsom as President Trump’s successor. In July 2024, not long after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, several media outlets — including the Asia Times, South China Morning Post, and Business Insider — reported that Newsom was seen by the regime as “a fresh but also positive and more sober-minded politician in the US” who “could be a cool head among this anti-China US consensus”.

The greens are also “all in” for this kowtowing behavior. The Hill, quoting Alex Wang — a UCLA professor and former Natural Resources Defense Council attorney who helped establish the NRDC’s China office — praised the governor for being “engagement-oriented, at a time when engagement is seen as a dirty word by some people” and sending “a green light for more collaboration” with China “to move as quickly as possible on climate action and climate research.”

But it’s not just California politicians and NGOs on the Chinese green gravy train. The Energy Foundation has also lavished large grants on groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute, whose policy agenda includes the electrification of homes and EV mandates that benefit the Middle Kingdom. This reflects China’s industrial strategy that is in part built around capturing new markets, of which “green” products like EVs and solar panels are critical components.

The CEO and president of Energy Foundation China is Ji Zou, who previously served as a deputy director-general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, under the government’s National Development and Reform Commission. In 2013 and 2014, he served as a Chinese representative to the UN Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing.

Of course, Chinese influence extends well beyond California. Right-wing groups have also been known to align with China, and its wealth has turned Republicans, like former House Speaker John Boehner and former Sen. David Vinter, into Beijing lobbyists and acolytes.

But for the most part, China’s best allies are found, perhaps unwittingly, on the progressive Left, particularly in billionaires like Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, as well as powerful foundations like Rockefeller, MacArthur, Hewlett, and a large coterie of donor-funded NGOs.
All are devoted to “fighting” climate change, whatever the cost to the unwashed.

As China gears up its increasingly anti-American response to President Trump’s trade antics, including racist AI-generated videos, it also can count on the behind-the-scenes backing of obliging Wall Streeters like Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dalio, and Larry Fink. Business is business, I suppose.

Similarly, Silicon Valley firms seem less committed to fulfilling American aspirations than enabling Xi Jinping’s “China dream” of greater state control, more wealth, and worldwide technological supremacy. Alexander Karp, co-founder of the defense-tech firm Palantir Technologies, has argued in his recent book that most social-media and internet CEOs view the US as a “a dying empire, whose slow descent cannot be allowed to stand in the way of their own rise.” Instead, they have become accomplices helping achieve Beijing’s stated aim of becoming the leading global superpower by 2025.

The rise of pro-China politics can be seen in other countries, too. The recently elected, pro-China Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney advocates for policies that would block oil drilling and place burdens on Canadian mining, agriculture, and industry for environmental reasons, even while stating no objections to China’s coal-plant building spree to power its own solar-panel industry. A greener Canada, as currently defined, will have to genuflect to China to procure the requisite rare earth minerals and the technology for processing the “renewable” energy that Canadian Liberals crave.

This alliance between China and the greens can likewise be seen in Britain and Australia, where China has won over allies among center-Left parties. In Labour-run Britain, China is building a mega-embassy in London that will likely help the surveil and harass those who fled Communist Party rule for the assumed safety of Britain. In Germany, China has been very active in trying to evade climate-related duties on their exports. In December 2024, two of the largest German media companies conducted an investigation of “dozens of climate projects in China” that Germany approved for domestic “carbon credits” and found that the Chinese credits were “likely fake and part of a large carbon credit scam.”

Besides appealing to the profit motive of the plutocratic elites, China takes advantage of our liberal institutions — and our comparatively open economies — only to undermine them. The Chinese have become skilled at siphoning off the technological edge of the West. Chinese money also goes to diaspora groups that attack as “racist” anyone who protests CCP policies. For example, the Committee of 100, a China-aligned US group, singled out former Rep. Michelle Steel, a Korean native based in California, for being “racist.” Her real crime? Criticizing her Democratic opponent’s support for a China-backed program promoting Chinese language and culture in elementary schools.

China’s apologists justify their sympathy in large part on concern about our common earthly future. After all, the UN aid chief recently praised Beijing’s green “leadership.” Like almost anything that comes from Turtle Bay, this seems patently absurd. The country won’t stop building coal plants, at least not in the foreseeable future. Its 1,161 coal-power plants account for 55 percent of global carbon emissions from coal.

China overall emits far more GHG pollutant than any country and is responsible for more than 30 percent of global carbon emissions as of 2024, twice the American share. Not content to spew at home, it is also building coal plants around the world as coal consumption hits a historic high.

The greens make little effort to demand that China stop its pollution, which no doubt the People’s Republic would refuse. Instead, the greens prefer to turn their ardor against Western industries and consumers. Greens, for example, barely raised a peep after China recently decided to slash its GHG-reduction pledge.

For China, this represents clever realpolitik. Demands for massive purchases of Chinese solar technology, rare earths, and EVs creates a huge boon to the Middle Kingdom. Current green policies necessitate a flood of Chinese EVs, as well as panels from its solar-panel industry, while green obsessions undermine Western industries.

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China is already working to make sure that key solar manufacturing technology is not exported to potential competitors. The country boasts a huge lead in solar battery production, and increasingly dominates the production of the rare earth elements, which also figure prominently in wind turbines, solar panels, and EVs. As American electric-car firms struggle with production and supply-chain issues, China’s Warren Buffett backed BYD has emerged as the world’s top EV manufacturer, with big export ambitions, while Tesla focuses much of its future growth at its Chinese factories.

We already know who pays the price for kowtowing to China. It has meant a massive erosion of jobs and productive capacity. The United States has lost an estimated 3.4 million jobs since China was invited to the World Trade Organization at the turn of the century. The US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned to $419 billion last year, up from under $10 billion in 1990. China’s ratio of imports to exports was 4 to 1 in 2018. Academics from the climate-industrial complex continue to claim renewable energy is cheaper and the move towards them is “unstoppable,” but virtually all the places with the highest energy costs are generally those with the strictest renewable policies — Germany, Britain, California.

This pro-China regime may have enriched some in the City of London, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, but is clearly no boon to the rest of the Western population. Living standards in the post-industrial West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ peacetime life expectancy has gone down for the first time. China’s successful wooing of some on the Left seems odd not only because the country is spewing greenhouse gas and repressing its people, including Muslims, but also producing a society where income inequality exceeds that of the United States.

Ultimately, the only way for the West to get to “net zero” by 2050 — a goal China just put off for at least another decade — can be accomplished is by squelching all future growth.

As Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes, it would entail catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West, This program, he suggests, can only succeed only by imposing “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship.” China’s leaders, for their part, are quite clear: they will not sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost. They understand clearly that declining living standards threaten their hold on absolute power.

The West needs to escape this trap. Fortunately, even some on the Left recognize the danger of dependency on China, with The New Republic recently suggesting that Washington needs to relearn “the language of mining and metallurgy.” The ultra-green Guardian has recently embraced the argument that US manufacturing needs to come back, allowing for “an exit path from neoliberal globalization” and the creation of higher-paid blue-collar jobs.

The West must choose not to surrender its productive economy to the polluting superpower in Asia. The notion of giving up progress and living standards for the middle and working classes — largely to sustain the same classes in China, Russia, and Iran — sounds like a bad bet. Voters will see it that way — and punish ruling classes that acquiesce, sooner or later.

These prophecies — or dreams — of America’s downfall conflate the United States, a people and place, with the US government. The difference between the two things isn’t well understood, especially in Europe. Whoever controls the White House and Congress has an effect, to be sure, but the true power of America lies not with its elected leaders, but in the ambitions of its people, its remarkable physical endowment, and the constraints of its constitutional order (Trump is learning about that last — to his chagrin).

Great empires don’t fall easily. Often, they rebound from the worst setbacks. Rome suffered under the misrule of Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, but resurged under more enlightened leaders well until the fifth century AD. In the East, the Roman imperium lasted for almost a millennium longer than that. Britain, too, didn’t fade after losing American Revolutionary War; the country simply moved on, incorporating much of the world into its imperial system for the next 150 years.

Likewise, the United States emerged as the victor in the Cold War a couple of decades after the disaster of Vietnam, the social upheavals of the Sixties, and mass deindustrialization.

Today, Europeans, having permanently lost their empires, may be tempted to console themselves with thoughts of inevitable American decline. Hence, the new talk about Europe being the best place for the “pursuit of happiness”. Yet in the real world, Europeans are far from happy. As Gallup International found in 2022, the world’s top-five most pessimistic populations are all in Europe, including Italy and France; others like Britain are similarly distressed.

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This may reflect the fact that Europe has consistently lagged behind the United States in adjusting to changing economic trends. Over the past 15 years, the eurozone economy grew about 6%, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the United States, according to International Monetary Fund data.

To view this another way, consider that the most powerful economy on the Continent, Germany, is barely bigger than that of my adopted home state, California. America’s industrial giants have faded, victims of their own incompetence and shortsightedness in Washington. But they were replaced in large part by aggressive new firms, something Europe hasn’t produced in a long time.

Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe as a determinative third force on the global stage. But this is no longer the case. The most obvious weakness is in technology: of the top 50 tech firms, only three are based on the Continent. The rest of the list is dominated largely by the United States, including in artificial intelligence, with China coming in a firm and ascendant second. This gap may widen as massive new chip and computer plants open up in Texas and Arizona, steps encouraged under both Joe Biden and Trump.

The overall entrepreneurial gap extends far deeper than tech. To wit, the United States within the last 50 years created “from scratch” companies with market caps over $10 billion at five times the rate of the European Union, according to MIT researcher Andrew McAfee. American entrepreneurs have flourished in the past decade, and self-employment has grown, while in Europe entrepreneurship has declined. Europe still possesses great intellectual resources, but the policies adopted by the Continent’s elites seem designed to guarantee further decline.

For one thing, the EU and Britain appear unwilling to curb millions of unvetted migrants, mostly from developing countries, many of whom find it difficult to integrate into European society. Some of these newcomers have undermined the safety and social cohesion of cities like Marseilles, Paris, London, Berlin, and Malmo; many are unlikely to contribute more in taxes than they draw in public benefits. Meanwhile, European governments remain wedded to “net-zero” lunacy, burdening European firms and consumers with high prices, while robbing them of reliability, as demonstrated by the recent blackout in Spain and Portugal.

What about competition at the other end of the Pacific, from China?

Much digital ink has been spilled on how Trump’s offensive comments and hyper-nationalism play into the hands of Beijing. And to be sure, China (along with India) matters far more in world economics, politics, and military power than an increasingly debilitated Europe. But recent turbulence notwithstanding, the American imperium is more than up to the task of rivalry with the Middle Kingdom.

China is a dangerous but deeply troubled dragon, anxious not to occupy lands but to control them as vassals. Given the nature of the Beijing regime, it’s hard to get accurate information on the overall economy. Still, despite its impressive accomplishments, the country faces major challenges. These include a massive property crash, demographic decline, and growing disengagement, particularly among the young, from the Communist system, much as occurred in the late stages of the Soviet Union.

After pushing for a “one-child” policy for decades, China has reversed course. But the Chinese people haven’t started pumping out babies. The country, which eschews immigrants and foreigners, is now faced with looming demographic decline. By 2050, notes demographer Wendell Cox, China is expected to have 60 million fewer people under age 15, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The country also suffers rising unemployment and outmigration by its young, educated people.

Trump’s much-dissed tariff policy threatens a China that views exports as its savior. Even without Trumpian levies, the Communist Party’s assault on property rights and the rule of law drives foreign companies to reconsider their tech investments. Private-equity barons are finding it difficult to get their funds out. Once-common projections that Chinese aggregate output could surpass America’s as soon as 2028 are being readjusted to 2036; they may never come true.

Could Beijing tip the scales by allying itself with a Europe alienated by Trump? It’s possible, but it seems highly unlikely. After all, the Continent can offer little in terms of natural resources — China’s primary interest. As for intellectual property, Beijing has other, more underhanded means for getting at those, as American firms have learned over the past couple of decades. To be sure, Tuscany and Provence may lure tourists and second-home buyers from Shanghai. Great European universities will play along, too, as long as they get students paying a full ride.

But combining a declining Europe with Chinese power will not help mitigate the fundamental weaknesses of either party. A Europe that is fast sacrificing its industrial base on the green altar can’t supply a secondary manufacturing hub to the Chinese, who anyway prefer their own cheaper and more pliant workers. (However, China — the world’s surveillance super-state — could help European elites clamp down on dissent even more tightly than they have in recent years.)

Beholding these realities, many in the European media still view Trump as the primary threat to democracy. Like many Americans, I am disgusted by Trump’s lack of respect for constitutional niceties, much less his lack of personal decency. But his hardheadedness may be the only way to keep America and the West from collapse. Amid the challenge from China, a foreign policy based on “principles” would be subordinated to a stronger and less virtue-seeking will. Liberalism can only be preserved by an America that is less progressive Kumbaya, and more closely shaped by frank power politics.

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The better path, then, is a Europe that still looks to America, warts and all. Despite the protests (or wish-casting) of the European elites and academics, the United States continues to receive a remarkable, increasing surge in new investment. The United States, now the world’s biggest exporter of liquid natural gas, could help solve Europe’s energy crisis, while reducing the trade imbalances that so enrage Trump.

Of course, some Europeans might prefer a courteous kowtow to the Russians or the mullahs to enriching brash Texans or pleasing the Donald. Yet the disdain of continental elites works against Europe’s long-term future. America’s vitality is clearly not spent. You won’t find it in DC, but in ethnic neighborhoods, like Little Saigon, not far from my California home, where Vietnamese boat people have in five decades created a prosperous community. Or in the fast-growing New South. Or in the old fields of the Permian Basin, which by itself represents the world’s fifth-largest producer of oil and gas.

America’s system, with its checks and balances, may not be perfect, but it remains the only potential counterweight to China and her allied nest of authoritarian regimes. America’s continent-spanning empire is more than MAGA or its enemies in the liberal establishment. Its power derives from the American people’s energy, their entrepreneurship, and unwavering willingness to try something new.

It’s a fair point. For if tourism powers the bloc’s otherwise torpid economy, more galleries and restaurants is not what Europe needs. Squeezed by a conservative business culture, and an elephantine welfare state, genuine entrepreneurs increasingly seek exile in the Anglosphere, while the workers that remain wallow in low-paying service jobs. Especially as the shock of Trumpism forces the continent to defend its fading interests, it’s a recipe for economic catastrophe, with the EU expected to encompass just one tenth of global GDP by 2100.

Yet if the Old World needs to reclaim the magic of the Medici, the continent’s redemption will come far from Florence. Rather, Europe’s periphery is leading the way, with places like Portugal and Greece offering sunny business prospects dashed with pleasant weather. Combined with similar dynamism in the former communist states of eastern Europe, it’s increasingly possible to talk of a European Sun Belt. For just like the former Confederacy, once disdained and now booming, the continent’s future will be made on its edges — if, that is, the EU’s reactionary status quo can finally be vanquished.

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Europe’s economy is broken. Over the past 15 years, the Eurozone has grown about 6% in dollar terms. The US has jumped 82%. The biggest gap is in tech: of the top 50 tech firms, only three are located in Europe, with the list unsurprisingly dominated by Silicon Valley. Not that Europe’s entrepreneurial deficit is not only in ones and zeros. MIT researcher Andrew McAfee has shown how, over the last 50 years, the US has created “from scratch” companies with market cap of over $10 billion five times faster than the EU. No wonder some observers now quip that Europe is “a museum as a continent and a museum as a stock market”.

Faced with this malaise, and geopolitical upheavals from Kyiv to the White House, it’s little wonder that Europe’s leaders, in Paris and Berlin, are rushing to reindustrialize. That’s clear enough militarily, with the Bundestag promising €500 billion for new tanks and missiles. Yet if the German defense minister claims his countrymen have an “erotic relationship” with weapons — and we agree that bolstered self-sufficiency is necessary given Trump’s rising isolationism — it’s unlikely that Europe can thrive in the 21st century through force-of-arms alone.

Certainly, you shouldn’t count on Brussels, prime mover of the continent’s decline, to reverse the slide to irrelevance. Mario Draghi’s much-ballyhooed response to the current crisis followed the old patterns of green obsessions, social “inclusion” and ever greater conformity with Brussels edicts. Europe’s grandees believe that money fleeing Trumpian chaos will head to a permanent economic shift towards the Old World. But that ignores the fact that Europe is far more dependent on exports than the US, and lacks new industries that can compete with either America or the rising powers of the developing world.

Instead, the best hopes for European revival lie not in the old heartlands of the Ruhr or Picardy, but in enterprising economies of the south and east. “France and Germany are not good for startups, while places like Spain and Portugal are catching up and far more open to new firms,” suggests Giacomo Gentili, founder of the Pack digital mentoring firm, itself based in Barcelona. Other tech experts agree. For Andrea Zorzetto, co-founder of People Rank, a Milanese social media outfit, the European periphery offers ample opportunities for ambitious startups.

To a large extent, these transformations can be understood in fiscal terms. As traumatic as the great financial crisis doubtless was for countries like Greece and Spain, EU strictures did oblige them to finally reform their internal markets. “They were forced to change and reform while others did not,” says Veronica de Romanis, an economist who advises the Italian ministry of finance. “After 15 years they are the ones that [are] growing.”

An example to the contrary is de Romanis’s native Italy, which retains high costs and eye-watering tax rates. School teachers in Naples or Milan can expect to pay upwards of 60% of their income to the state, while sales taxes squeeze them even more. Despite its handsome piazzas and educated population, no wonder Italy today boasts far less venture capital funding per head than either Portugal and Spain. Eastern Europe, too, continues to bask in its post-Soviet sun. Big new IT investments are taking place in Polish towns like Wroclaw, where Intel is building a $6.4 billion semiconductor facility. Google, for its part, plans to invest up to $2 billion in a Romanian data center.

As these examples imply, much of this investment is happening in tech. Three of the EU countries with the highest proportion of IT workers are all found on the continent’s edge: Ireland, Malta and Lithuania. People with advanced degrees in places like Poland are far less likely to be unemployed than their counterparts in the UK and France. According to Nima Sanandaji, a Swedish economist, traditional tax-and-spend havens just can’t compete, especially when their obsession with EU climate policies tend to mean energy costs are much higher.

Taken together, it’s little wonder that peripheral Europe is now growing faster than its more established rival, with a so-called “regional inversion” set to upend cliches of Nordic verve. It helps, of course, that much of southern Europe is blessed with the so-called “Mediterranean premium”. From the weather to the food, much of southern Europe is a delight, another neat echo of California in its 20th century pomp. Though not quite as stunning as my adopted home state, states like Georgia and Florida are similarly attractive. The summers might be sticky, but lower energy prices also allow for the generous use of air conditioning.

It’s unsurprising, too, that the European Sun Belt has become popular with digital nomads, while Barcelona and Lisbon now host digital hubs for Danone and Carlsberg respectively. “The quality of life here attracts people,” says Gentili, whose staff includes Spaniards, Italians, Japanese and Argentinians. The wages help too: a software designer in Portugal is a third cheaper than in France, while similarly skilled workers in eastern Europe are as much as half the price. All told, offshoring to low-cost tech hubs in Europe can lower project expenses by up to 70%.

Yet if these strengths have seen even Greece’s tech sector grow by 15% in a single year, this model is not without challenges. In cities like Lisbon, an influx of digital nomads has driven up prices for local residents. The southward flow also threatens the very authenticity that attracts people to these spots to begin with. Troops of US graduates may make good techies, but they risk undermining the Old World charm of southern Europe in much the same way as mass development in California has sapped away its laid-back character.

There are broader questions, too, about the viability of Europe’s periphery, something that goes well beyond tech and other bluechip firms. At the grassroots level, the number of European self-starters has actually dropped in recent years, even as their counterparts in America are thriving. “In Europe people are afraid to fail and take risks like in the US,” Zorzetto argues. “Europe has become a continent of old money. We have to get back to our entrepreneurial, artisanal DNA.”

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Considering the continued legacy of welfarism from Porto to Piacenza, it’s a reasonable point, even if the communist legacy doubtless bestows the continent’s east with more collective grit. “We are hungrier, and western Europe has a high level of comfort,” says Gabor Szanto, a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter. “We had nothing, so we worked harder and risked more.” To explain what he means, Szanto describes the remarkable rise of the region’s film industry, with Hungarian studios alone now employing some 20,000 workers.

For both established Europe and the upstarts, events in America are, at least, shaking things up. “I think we should see Trumpism as a historical opportunity for Europe,” says Ermelinda Campani, director of the Breyer Center for Overseas Studies, a Stanford-affiliated institution in Florence. But Campani sees a future where Europe capitalizes not on its huge welfare state, but on its technological nous as well as its artisanal skills in design, fashion and food.

To be sure, such a transformation wouldn’t be unprecedented. Throughout its history, Europe has seen economic power shift from Italy in the Renaissance, to the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, to industrial Britain, Germany and France in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, again, is time for something new, with Kraków and Alicante happy to oblige.

Of course, Europe’s powerful progressives will resist any such shift. The Guardian predictably calls for Europeans to preserve the continent’s welfare and climate regime. Certainly, this approach is central to the European Commission, which remains wedded to net zero and continent-wide green initiatives. Essentially, then, they are reaffirming the formula that has brought Europe to the brink of economic irrelevance. Yet doubling down on this approach, combined with low fertility rates, will inevitably ensure that spots like Florence remain what they are now — lovely museums, but museums nonetheless.

This shift away from liberal orthodoxy has shocked Newsom’s long-time progressive allies, who see it as an act of treachery. Yet if they had been paying attention to Newsom’s career — above all, his willingness to morph into whatever identity best serves his quest for power — this wouldn’t be so surprising.

Conservatives, too, will discover that Newsom isn’t a tool of the progressive Left, or a typical California progressive with “communistic” policies, as one conservative outlet described them. On the contrary, Newsom, unlike his predecessor, Jerry Brown, has been a committed, shameless sniffer of political winds throughout his career.

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That’s not to say that Newsom doesn’t have a lodestar. He does: namely, the monied elite of the Bay Area, particularly the Getty family. It explains his ease in discarding Left-of-center dogmas on law and order, and likewise why he has emerged as an unofficial political spokesman for the “abundance” agenda, which is how neoliberal Democrats are rebranding themselves these days. (In a display of virtuoso flexibility, however, Newsom in his conversation with Bannon called out Trump for his closeness with the tech oligarchs — talk about the pot calling the kettle black.)

His oligarchic allegiance has funded, and shaped, Newsom’s career. He projected himself as a relative moderate as mayor of San Francisco. Later in 2011, as lieutenant governor, he challenged the rigid Brown, suggesting pro-business reforms. That year, amid a weakening Golden State economy, he traveled to arch-rival Texas to discover the secrets of the Lone Star State’s boom — much to the consternation of progressives.

Then, as the winds shifted to the Left, Newsom decided to re-center his appeal to progressives in California and nationwide. He became a fervent advocate of such things as early transgender treatments and banning schools from informing parents about their own kids’ sexual identity issues. His heiress wife, Jennifer Siebel, made a documentary film embracing the transgender cause.

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As governor, he could dispense the blessings of full-spectrum progressivism thanks to a massive accumulation of capital-gains revenue during the tech boom. The economy, about which he repeatedly bragged, may have hurt the middle and working classes, but it allowed Newsom and his legislative allies to build a vote-catching “blue welfare state”, as The Nation magazine enthused.

During the tech boom, Newsom ladled out subsidies to poorer Californians; indeed, the Golden State spends more of its budget on welfare than virtually any state, twice as much as Texas, while it generally neglects basic infrastructure like roads and water supply. This sort of liberal welfarism recalls what Marx recognised in the Communist Manifesto as “the proletarian alms bag”.

Today, California’s economy is struggling, and progressive ideology increasingly clashes with reality and voter preferences. Newsom is clever enough to see the writing on the wall — in contrast to Kamala Harris, his possible gubernatorial successor and potential 2028 rival.

Bottom line: rather than frame Newsom as an ideologue, it is better to see him as a representative of the Bay Area tech oligarchy. To the titans of Silicon Valley, issues matter less than power and influence, as evinced in their recent genuflecting to Trump. If tactics need to be changed, if it’s necessary (for now) to learn the lessons of the 2024 MAGA triumph, so be it.

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This shift began to emerge even before the 2024 election. As it became clear that wind and solar couldn’t easily replace fossil fuels or nuclear power, particularly in light of the state’s draconian electric-vehicle mandate, Newsom signaled a growing flexibility. He reversed the proposed decommissioning of the state’s last nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo, as a means to prevent embarrassing blackouts.

This, along with natural-gas plants that account for close to half the state’s electricity, prevented politically damaging blackouts. He has even considered amending the state’s landmark environmental law. The green lobby’s ever harsher energy policies were recently dissed by a Newsom spokesperson as akin to “fantasy and fairy dust”.

Similar fault lines have pitted him against progressives when it comes to race. Newsom was an ostentatious promulgator of Leftist racial cant and racial policies, like reparations and quotas. Yet when reparations legislation suggested cash payments upwards of $640 billion dollars for the descendants of slaves, Newsom recoiled, upsetting the state’s hyperactive race hustlers. He now also expresses concerns about the injustice of transgender men competing in female sports programs, perhaps aware of the damage done to Harris by this issue.

Newsom has even backed away from his welfarist inclinations, recasting himself as a fiscally conscious moderate. He fended off proposals from Sacramento progressives, including their calls for a 32-hour workweek; raising the state’s income tax (already the nation’s highest); and adding new payroll taxes to cover universal health care.

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After the 2024 election, Newsom’s centrist shift has accelerated. This may still not be necessary in a state that went nearly 60% for Kamala Harris. But state politics are beside the point for the termed-out governor. For him, the prize is no longer in Sacramento — but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Newsom senses, correctly, that the best chance lies with embracing moderates reacting against the inevitable Trumpian excess. But the Democrats can only win the national vote if they shift away from progressive stances on climate, diversity, and gender — all widely unpopular east of the Sierra.

Ultimately Newsom’s biggest problem, particularly in a general election campaign, will be his miserable record. In a national campaign, he will be made to defend the state’s lousy education system: California’s students perform at among the lowest rates in the country, with nearly three of five Golden State high-schoolers unprepared for either college or a career; in most categories, the state scores below lower-spending places like Texas and Florida.

Nor can he boast of the state’s still massive economy. Once deemed to be the world’s fourth largest, the California economy is now among the weakest in the country and seems destined to fall to sixth place in the near future. His frequent pro-worker pronouncements don’t hold water in a state where unimaginable wealth coexists with the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another fifth live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.

Then there’s crime. In a recent referendum, Californians overwhelmingly ditched liberalized sentencing laws enacted by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Newsom. Sensing danger, he has moderated on some law-and-order issues. Newsom last year vetoed a bill that would have legalized “shooting alleys” — so-called safe drug-injection sites — in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Many of his progressive allies, who favor such programs, denounced his veto. But a GOP presidential nominee could slam him for his Johnny-come-lately rethink on social order and cohesion.

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Newsom also is vulnerable for the utter failure of the state’s climate-focused housing policies. By curtailing new suburban construction, state policies have hiked housing costs to the highest levels in the country, sparking a powerful out-migration trend. And that’s not to mention the state’s dismal performance in response to the horrific LA fires this year, a result of progressives ditching basic infrastructure in favor of boutique climate and “justice” causes.

Overall, whatever his media savvy, Newsom will have to run as former chief executive of a state repeatedly rated by Wallet Hub as among the least efficient in delivering services relative to tax burden. Newsom might be tempted to curtail regulations so he can appeal to business-oriented Democrats and independents. As a white male, Newsom seems ill-suited to compete for the diversity vote, particularly if Harris or some other “person of color” decides to run.

Whether this lurch to the center works or not, it is now the most viable path to the nomination. Of course, things may change in response to Trumpian overreach. The 45th and 47th president might just make progressivism great again. If that comes to pass, the Governor’s moderate rhetoric will no doubt change. In being willing to bend to any prevailing trend, at least, Newsom is almost perfectly consistent.

This, after all, is a place that promises a new Austin, one, its marketers say, that offers “serenity in the sky”. There’ll be restaurants, and retail, and a hotel complete with swimming pool and spa. Far from a repeat of The War of the Worlds, then, the Waterline speaks to another H.G. Wells fantasy, one the writer envisaged as “a great gallery” where people could meet and live in harmony. Nor is it alone. There are 13 similar high-rises coming right across Austin, as its population rises and GDP soars.

This emerging urban Austin, a place of towers and cocktail bars, is fundamentally different from the established centers of the East and Midwest. In beehives like Wall Street or The Loop, office workers historically came in to work, then retreated back to the suburbs each night. Downtown Austin, though, puts residents at its hearts, focusing less on offices and more on lifestyles. Yet if that means amenities galore, this tidy vision risks redefining American cities for the worse — even as the old problems of urban dysfunction always loom.

For decades, the Texan capital was synonymous with a single word: weird. Unlike the conservative countryside, or else oil towns like Dallas, the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Austin was a place of lively bars and soul-filled clubs. There was Rainey Street, too, a charming Latino neighborhood filled with pretty tree-lined cottages. When I first came here, almost half a century ago, I was reminded of nothing less than Haight-Ashbury — the San Francisco neighborhood so beloved among artists and hippies.

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Now, though, this older, shabbier Austin is slipping away. Quite aside from landmark developments like the Waterline, that’s clear enough in the numbers. Since 2000, downtown’s population has tripled to 15,000. In large part, in fact, Kevin Burns argues the ultra-modern vibe can be understood by sheer demand, with the rising forest of towers appealing to young professionals tired of life in the suburbs. “The driver is quality of life,” says the bearded 47-year-old real-estate developer, sipping a coffee as the sound of construction echoes around us.

It’s not hard to see what he means. Life by the Colorado, still feverishly in the making, is pleasantly walkable. There are yew-scattered parklands, and bike lanes and creeks. It’s all surely a step up from the convention centers and stadiums that once got urban developers excited. There’s also plenty to do: dozens of bars and restaurants open in Austin every month, dovetailed by yoga studios and comedy clubs. Yet if the new Austin promises paradise for wealthy hipsters, the hippies of yore seem far less welcome. Downtown, after all, is expensive, hardly surprising when so many of the new arrivals are tech workers, “empty nesters” with far fewer children to feed than their peers elsewhere. An apartment in the sky here will set you back $170,000 more than other parts of Central Texas, doubtless explaining why so many new downtowners are white.

All this speaks to a younger, hipper crowd, especially compared to the vast suburbs of somewhere like Houston. Nor is demography the only way downtown is different. As Hannah Rangel says, this is fundamentally a place to live, not work, with the vice president of Austin Downtown Allies explaining that offices are smaller than elsewhere. Once again, that’s probably a function of the city’s tech boom: with startups needing little more than coders and their Macbooks, they need far less floorspace than their corporate competitors.

Factor in the remote work revolution and it’s little wonder places like the Waterline are so popular, with residential and mixed-use construction easily outstripping office builds right across town. Nor, of course, is this unique to Austin: even America’s classic urban cores are going the same way. New York has its own planting of residential towers, while the Rust Belt undergoes a similar transition.

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Reviving the grand architecture of the dead industrial past, downtown Milwaukee is one good example here. Another is Detroit, with its gaggle of neoclassical skyscrapers. Then there’s the Renaissance Center, all Seventies steel, abandoning offices for flats and entertainment. And where houses are coming, business is going. According to one recent report, residential conversion projects were set to double through 2024, even as demand for new office space tumbles.

Given the apparent enthusiasm for remote work among finance and professional services — the sectors that long kept downtowns afloat — it’s tempting to assume that the new Austin will soon become the new America. In truth, though, Wells’s “brilliant and entertaining agglomeration” isn’t a sure thing. One way of thinking about this is by digging into the numbers. Yes, the population growth along the Colorado is impressive, but roughly 98% of newcomers to Austin still settle in suburbs and exurbs. And why not? With WFH allowing employees to make money anywhere, many still prefer a yard and a picket fence over an apartment in the sky.

For those companies insisting on in-person attendance, meanwhile, America’s hinterland remains appealing. Once more, the statistics are telling, with jobs and homes across the sunbelt increasingly shifting to shiny new suburbs, with plenty of space for office parks, and where the overbuilt apartments are cheap. As far as Austin is concerned, certainly, outlying areas north of the city are wildly popular. The Domain, which lies just outside the city, is thriving, offering a car-oriented vision of suburban life. Though there’s some dense development, the surrounding area is covered by single family homes. Compared to downtown, it’s easy to park, and has fewer street-level hassles. It’s a similar story across the country, whether in Irvine, California, or New Albany near Columbus.

And while the denizens downtown are richer than average, the urban analyst Bill Fulton warns that their “niche life” remains at odds with the average high earner — most of whom still reside outside the urban core. One good example is Brian Niccol, the new CEO of Starbucks, who runs the coffee giant not from downtown Seattle, but rather from the warm weather and easy lifestyle of coastal Southern California.

In a sense, this is unsurprising. The American job market began spreading its tentacles into the suburbs as early as the Fifties. Prodded along by the automobile, and perhaps too by the enduring power of the traditional American Dream, a recent MIT study found that 80% of America’s metropolitan population now live in car-friendly suburbs, while just 8% live downtown. Nor are all suburbs created equal: though the sprawl is as popular as ever, the brownstone streets of Brooklyn or Georgetown, designed with mass transit in mind, are home to just 13% of people.

Simply put, then, the old urban model is dissolving, though what comes next remains unclear. As that last statistic implies, one issue is transport. Especially since the pandemic, networks across the US are struggling, with many short of money and plagued by crime and squalor. In 2023, some still operate between a third and two thirds below their pre-Covid levels, while in Austin barely 5% of people downtown make use of buses or the city’s light rail system.

It’s just as well, then, that Burns pins his hopes not on trains but Uber, or else the increasingly ubiquitous Waymos, which cart people about in driverless vehicles. “The Ubers are here now,” Burns says, “but the Waymo’s are going to change cities, and make places more attractive and connected.” Austin, with its tech-oriented elites, seems an ideal place to become, in the words of former mayor Steve Adler, “the Kitty Hawk of driverless cars.”

Yet if getting around in Austin may soon become a private-sector affair, Big Tech can’t hope to do everything. Indeed, Burns’s biggest worry is the proliferation of criminals and vagrants stalking inner-city streets. Stroll between downtown and the Capitol and you’ll see drug addicts and alcoholics sprawled by the gutter, albeit in far fewer numbers than other big cities. And, to be fair, some of these residual challenges do seem to be subsiding, especially with a new mayor who takes street-level disorder more seriously. Even so, Burns remains skeptical of Jose Garza, Austin’s radical DA, complaining that he “does not enforce the law” amid rising chaos on the streets. Given the grim decline of towns like Oakland and Chicago, these fears feel justified.

A more intractable problem with the new Austin — typified by the Waterline tagline that “work is rooted in wellness” — is that it has a limited market. Much of the original appeal of downtown’s earlier iteration was its funkiness, its scruffiness, when its dives and honky tonks were spots where anything, it felt, could happen. Good luck recreating that at Whole Goods. The offbeat charm of Rainey Street has vanished too, with just two of its bungalows remaining and its Latino residents priced out.

We probably shouldn’t mourn these shifts too much. Cities, after all, are always changing. Yet walk the streets of downtown Austin and this historic neighborhood, once so full of life, feels as sterile as Singapore. In that, it shares the fate of Spitalfields, or Hudson Yards, once the “great galleries” of Wellsian imagination, but now little more than vast amenity districts for a small and well-heeled elite. Better than dystopia — but hardly transformative for the mass of urban residents.

In truth, though, I think the speech matters. For in its populist appeal to Main Street over Wall Street, it reflects the revival of something we haven’t seen in years: class politics. Rather than appealing to racial subgroups, or sex or gender identity, Biden instead spoke, however fleetingly, to those many millions of Americans who care more about their paychecks than the color of their skin.

Nor, of course, is the 46th president alone. Increasingly, both main parties realize that to win at the ballot box, they must appeal to the middle- and working classes, as proven by Trump’s roughly 10-point lead among those two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. Yet, if that speaks vividly to radical shifts across US socioeconomic makeup, it remains unclear if politicians on either side of the aisle are truly willing to back blue-collar workers — especially when the oligarchs continue to have such a grip over them all.

For all Biden’s warnings about oligarchy, the elite did very well during his tenure. Consider the numbers, with the wealthiest Americans increasing their collective net worth by a remarkable one trillion dollars over his time in office. The monopolists, for their part, have been generous in their turn. In 2020, to give one example, Biden received 25 times as much funding from tech companies than Trump, and over three times as much from Wall Street. Among electronics manufacturing firms, many of whom build their products outside the country, the margin was a remarkable $68 million to $4 million.

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All the while, American business continued to consolidate, just as it has for a generation. The Review of Finance notes that three quarters of industry has become more concentrated since the late Nineties. This has been most notable across finance, where big banks have doubled their market share since 2000. The same is true elsewhere: a coterie of tech firms now account for a record 35% of market cap. No wonder only 22% of Americans were optimistic about the economy by the end of Biden’s term, even as confidence in his economic leadership had fallen to just 40%.

Taken together, then, Biden’s fall stemmed from an enormous miscalculation. Elected as a moderate, he ignored polls that suggested most Americans were more concerned with their economic prospects than issues like climate change and foreign affairs, let alone social justice manias around trans rights. Nonetheless, the Democrats followed the lead of their oligarchic funders, many of whose biggest contributions have been focused on exactly these side issues.

When the election came, no wonder so many blue collar Americans tried their luck with Trump: including a remarkable number of minority voters. Once again, the statistics here are clear, with 40% of Asians voting for him, well above the 30% in 2020, even as some African Americans headed to the GOP as well. Blue-collar Latinos went heavily for Trump too. The point is that this realignment largely happened on economic grounds, with minorities ignoring Trump’s past litany of racist comments because he offered them a more expansive economy, particularly in blue collar professions. All the while, they saw little promise in the tsunami of promises offered by Harris and her bozo vice-presidential partner Tim Walz. Knowing a winner when they see one, America’s billionaires duly came out for the Republicans too. That included Elon Musk, of course, but also prominent investment bankers like Bill Ackman.

Taken together, what does this revolution show? That class and economics now play a greater role in American politics than skin color or national origin. If you want to secure minority voters, the new President clearly understands, you appeal to them not as identity groups but as individual people, and families, looking out for their own self-interest. Nor is this really revelatory. America’s working-class remains more aspirational than those in other Western countries. That’s equally true of non-white voters, many of whom appreciate that the politics of race is an impediment to the American Dream. Most of the middle-income people who lately lost their homes to fire, in the minority LA suburb of Altadena, hardly benefited from a city government more obsessed with race and gender than protecting property. No less telling, Democratic policies on water and climate have created what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls a “green Jim Crow” — where working-class minorities face increasing headwinds in terms of jobs and housing.

This matters: and not just morally. Minorities, after all, encompass over 40% of working class Americans, and will constitute the majority by 2032. To win back the White House, then, Democrats will need to ditch all their woke baggage and focus on addressing the everyday concerns of working-class people, especially the non-white variety. In practice, that’ll involve focusing on bread-and-butter issues. When it comes to education, for instance, this could include expanding charter schools, or else developing skill academies for well-paid blue-collar jobs. When it comes to crime, meanwhile, just enforcing the law would help. That’s clearly a novel idea for some progressives, but would have a real impact on the security of inner cities.

Rhetorically speaking, the Democrats also have that new pro-Trump oligarchy to fall back on, with progressives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez increasingly railing against a corrupt cabal of kleptocrats goose-stepping America towards fascism. Never mind that Democrats didn’t seem concerned when the tech elite marched in lockstep with Biden four years ago. (Probably the more egregious hypocrite here is Chuck Schumer, who tried to reposition himself as an anti-oligarch radical despite serving as an unofficial consigliere for varied Wall Street ghouls).

At any rate, how likely is it that the Democrats can change course? Backing such things as legalized drug injection sites near schools, as just happened in deep-blue Denver, suggests that not all progressives are ready to take the plunge just yet. As they face the reality of working-class desertions, in fact, the progressive wing of the party will likely move even further to the Left. People like AOC already don’t distinguish between “good” billionaires and “bad” ones. They just think billionaires shouldn’t exist at all, even as they push for even more redistribution, a program that ultimately looks suspiciously like American Peronism. It hardly helps, of course, that the loudest proponents of radical economic change are often the very same Democrats pushing for unpopular shifts on transgenderism or reparations.

An arguably even bigger problem for liberals is that, their new populist guise notwithstanding, they’re still reliant on many of the oligarchs that Biden now denounces. That’s clear enough in the figures. The Elons of the world have kissed Donald Trump’s greasy ring, but when it comes to “dark money” from the ultra rich, Democrats have tended to be greater recipients. Just as important, the Democrats have become so dependent on affluent professionals, including across the vast government apparatus, making any appeal for redistribution tricky. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, has explicitly said Democrats should avoid “true economic populism” because it “is bad for our high-income base.”

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The Trumpistas face a different class challenge: though one where those troublesome oligarchs still feature heavily. Having won over much of the middle- and working-classes, gaining even in outer borough New York, they now have to find a way to build a common agenda with the billionaires. The recent brouhaha over H1-B visas — essentially allowing for the import of temporary tech workers — revealed the gap between an oligarchic elite addicted to procuring cheap foreign labor and those countless Americans who might want such jobs for themselves or their offspring.

One thing is certain: most oligarchs are not social democrats. Rather than a competitive economy, they represent what Aldous Huxley called “a scientific caste system” where the highly credentialed and technologically dominant have almost total reign. Artificial intelligence, the crack cocaine of the digital age, will accelerate this process, eliminating both high- and low-paid jobs, as power gravitates to those who control the algorithms. This new aristocracy, whatever its current political affiliation, already regards itself as intrinsically more deserving of their wealth and power than the old managerial elites, let alone grubby corporate speculators. Coming from the ADD tech world, they tend, if anything, to be more followers of Ayn Rand than any populist theoretician.

Trump’s dilemma, in short, will be how to please these nabobs while preserving his working-class base. Expect continued battles between populists — including JD Vance and Josh Hawley — and more libertarian, profit-driven Trump whisperers. In particular, expect conflict over Social Security, which Trump has pledged to preserve, and tariffs, despised by most libertarians and their billionaire funders. Then again, in a land where class is king, such bickering is surely to be expected.

Fires have been a reality in California for at least 20 million years. In my own, far shorter lifetime, I have seen numerous blazes, and covered several on television. They aren’t predictable, but you know when they are likely to occur. They aren’t preventable, but you can be prepared for them. Fires, floods, and earthquakes — disasters are us, and that has been the case as LA grew over the past century.

This time around, city and state leaders bear a heavy blame for a shocking lack of preparation, given weather conditions that were well predicted and have caused disasters in the past. As Traci Park, a member of the City Council, recently suggested, the fires revealed “chronic underinvestment in our critical infrastructure”. Perhaps the most remarkable failure was the lack of pressure to get water out of hydrants.

This disaster reflects the failure of the one-party progressivism currently dominating governmental structures. In this worldview, basic infrastructure is less important than addressing climate change and “social justice”; measures such as building dams or hardening the electric grid are demoted to a secondary role, with catastrophic effects.

While the fire may not reverse this mentality, it has demolished the reputations of two major adherents: LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Even as federal authorities warned of fires, Bass elected to take a junket to Ghana at the behest of President Biden. She came back to a city ablaze, with thousands of Angelinos having lost their homes and businesses.

During her tenure, Bass, whose political icon was Fidel Castro, had cut the fire department budget, signed off on lavish, and largely unsuccessful, programmes to address homelessness, and crowed about how the city would defend illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, everything in the city — from parks to schools — is worn and in a state of ill repair.

Nor has this regime done much for its poorer residents, which it claims to care most about. LA suffers among the highest poverty rates in the state and the worst in the country. South-central LA, the epicentre of two of the worst riots in American history, is now poorer in relation to the rest of the city than before those upheavals. It remains the second worst homeless capital of America and builds far fewer new housing per capita than almost every other large US metro area. The city still wants to raise taxes amid a deepening budget hole .

In turn, Newsom presides over a California with roads now among the worst in the country and a high-speed bullet train plagued with endless delays and massive cost overruns. Precious little has been done to boost water systems critical in a perennially drought-threatened state. And state environmental policies, as the Little Hoover Commission found, have contributed significantly to the severity of conflagrations, largely by blocking controlled burns and allowing the pile-up of dry, combustible brush.

It turns out that governance matters. The Golden State’s ascendency was a product of a state that the great liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1971 described as run by “a proud, competent civil service”. This legacy reached its zenith not under California Gov. Ronald Reagan, as some conservatives might wish, but under the responsible liberal regime of Pat Brown, building excellent roads, addressing state water needs, and fostering what Galbraith hailed as among “the best school systems in the country”.

In contrast, California’s government now has been ranked by Wallet Hub as the least efficient in delivering services relative to tax burden. The primary education system stands now among the worst in the country, particularly for poor and minority students. Simply put, progressive Democrats don’t seek to build capacities that made life better for people, unlike their predecessors.

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Such degradation is thrown into sharp focus by disasters. In the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake, Mayor Richard Riordan was everywhere, and repeatedly questioned bureaucratic roadblocks that would slow recovery. With the help of Gov. Pete Wilson, he managed to have a critical section of freeway connecting the Westside and downtown rebuilt in a remarkable 66 days. Under Riordan, much of the city, including sections that burned in the 1992 riots, was rebuilt, in large part with private investment.

Such effective political leadership is all but gone from both Sacramento and the LA City Hall. Yet LA’s decline isn’t foreordained — a fact highlighted by the rise of the largely Latino industrial cities outside LA’s jurisdiction. As you enter well-run cities like Southgate, suddenly the streets are well-paved and there are few vacancies, with virtually no graffiti or homelessness. An exhaustive study by Chapman University researcher Bheki Mahlobo found that these cities generally outperform adjacent regions of Los Angeles, and even the city itself, in retail sales, labour participation, crime rates and poverty. Downtown LA’s office vacancy rate is almost three times that of the independent cities just to its south.

Yet the prospects for change, both in the state and the city, aren’t favourable, the recent fire notwithstanding. Not that Californians or Angelinos are happy with the status quo. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature and almost two-thirds tell pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. As misrule persists and opportunity diminishes, the young head for the exits. Since 2000, LA has lost 750,000 people under the age of 25.

Yet in both California and LA, the progressive stranglehold seems strong enough to survive a nuclear war. After all, the state still voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris in November, deposed several GOP members of Congress, and maintained lopsided control of both state houses; Democrats boast four times as many voters as Republicans in LA.

Which brings us to the 2028 Olympics. The choice of LA to host the games seems hubristic, to say the least. The Olympics put enormous strain on any city: from law enforcement to traffic management to logistics. Yet this isn’t the LA economy and government that hosted the 1984 games, but the sadly diminished city of today. And even if a disaster of some kind doesn’t break out while millions of visitors are in town, it’s hard to see how the city revives itself in time.

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In the past, the city and its economy were able to bounce back, even after earthquakes, fires, and riots. Without significant political change, the chances of that happening now are low. The current regime is more radical than ever, with four members of the far-Left Democratic Socialists on the 15-member council. Most of the rest are more mainstream progressives; none is a Republican.

The ascendant Left will inevitably blame the fires on climate change, ignoring the more obvious and proximate role of government mismanagement. As for the poorer Angelinos displaced by the fires, we can expect the growing progressive influence to replace the lost housing with publicly financed products. The goal is to turn a city built around single-owned houses into something more akin to life in the Soviet Union.

If there is a silver lining, it’s that the fire’s encroachment upon the city’s upper classes will prompt a rethink. This time, the damage to ultra-affluent areas like the Palisades and the Hollywood Hills brought governmental incompetence literally to the doors of the progressive elites, who thought themselves safe in their enclaves — just as they protected their kids by keeping them out of the miserable LA schools.

Clearly, a new more pragmatic mindset, not necessarily a conservative one, is desperately needed. The great entrepreneurial city must rediscover how to combine business-friendliness with good infrastructure. The opportunity is there to rebuild large areas of the city and rethink ways to prevent similar disasters. But unless state and city leadership change direction, the process will be slow, painful, and ultimately self-defeating.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated California Gov. Pat Brown’s first name.

Texas today is irrepressible. If the numbers are right, it could soon pass California and become America’s most populous state. Texas is also the nation’s second youngest state, even as it enjoys higher net migration than any of its peers. Tellingly, many new arrivals are exiles from the Golden State. This buoyancy isn’t hard to understand. Shaking off its reactionary heritage, Texans now wallow in progress, building more and making more than anyone else, with some boozing and dancing as they go. At its best, in fact, this blend of high-tech growth and gentle multiculturalism could yet rebuild America — if, that is, its worst conservative instincts can be repressed.

In a sense, Texan success within the United States is ironic. After declaring independence from Mexico, in 1836, it enjoyed a reputation as a place to “flee” the tyranny of Washington. By the time it joined the union, nine years later, the 28th state was dominated by planters and ranchers, groups that eagerly embraced both slavery and the Confederacy. After losing the Civil War, Texans were left bitter and impoverished, their natural bounty in hock to far-off Northern bankers. To quote Wilbert “Pappy” O’Daniel, governor and then senator in the Forties, Texas had become “New York’s most valuable foreign possession”.

For all its bloody-minded independence — Steinbeck was surely right when he called Texas “a nation in every sense of the word” — it would ultimately be the federal government that dragged the state’s marshes and prairies into the 20th century. The New Deal brought electricity to remote rural areas, and massively expanded the all-important Houston Ship Channel. The boom in a quintessentially Texan product surely helped too. “Oil is money,” the historian Robert Bryce has written. “Money is power.”

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Dovetailed with a degree of racial pragmatism, with Houston desegregating far more easily than Atlanta, Texas also began to move beyond its dependence on oil and gas. Prodded along by LBJ and other native sons, for instance, Houston emerged as the centre of a gigantic new space centre. And if that banished memories of the city’s parochial past — as recently as 1946, the writer John Gunther grumbled about hotels filled with cockroaches — other towns rose too. Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin, together known as the Texas Triangle, are now home to two-thirds of the state’s population and 70% of its GDP.

Not, of course, that this is simply a historical tale. For if 20th-century Texas flourished on a mix of social peace, low taxes and light-touch regulation, their successors are sipping much the same brew. The numbers here are clear. Texas’s overall tax burden, according to one recent study, ranked 37th out of 50: hardly the best, but much better than California (5th) or New York (1st).

That’s shadowed by less irksome regulations, something that unsurprisingly meant more construction. Drive around any of the big Texas metros, particularly the suburbs, you’ll see new buildings everywhere. Permissive zoning laws mean that what, until recently, were rural pathways are now packed with cars and fast-food joints. Most of Texas is profoundly suburban, but there’s also a vibrant life in the inner cities. That’s especially true of Austin, where an 82-storey residential tower, soon to be the state’s tallest building, joins a score of high-rises near the fabled Sixth Street entertainment district. The whisky joints and honky-tonks, plying punters with reasonably priced booze and loud music, are echoed by new residential developments: over the past decade, Texas has built three times as many homes as California.

This has allowed Texas to keep housing prices low, attracting young millennials tired of frittering away their paychecks in West Hollywood, Crown Heights or the Tenderloin. And if this influx saw Dallas gain $6 billion in gross income from other states last year — even as New York lost $60 billion — it’s not just white hipsters leaving paradise for Texas. The state is especially popular among African Americans and Latinos, hardly surprising when these groups do so much better in Texas than in Chicago or Boston.

That speaks to another strength of the Texan experiment. For if low taxes and cheap homes lure talent, they also attract jobs for them to fill. Once again, the statistics here are plain. Over the past five years, Texas job growth has been three times faster than California and 10 times faster than New York. Far from being a Wall Street satrapy, Texas now boasts some of the largest firms in the land, from Exxon to AT&T, Tesla to Dell. Even Joe Rogan has settled here, buying a vast Austin villa for $14 million. As these names imply, meanwhile, Texas is quickly gaining a reputation for cultural and technological innovation. Houston hosts the world’s largest medical complex, while the legacy of Nasa means the state also bristles with defence startups.

Quite apart from African Americans tired of Yankee snow and poverty, this bonanza is equally attracting foreigners. Consider somewhere like Fort Bend County, the sprawling suburbs west of Houston. From an infamous hotbed of the Klan, the community is now an easy mix of blacks, Asians and Latinos. Locals even brag about hosting America’s third-largest Hindu temple, made of bricks shipped in from India.

Not that the laidback culture here can be understood by numbers alone. Unlike other parts of America, Texas seems to avoid our moment’s worst racial neuroses. In part, that’s simply a question of prosperity: with Texan Latinos far likelier to own a home than their peers in Los Angeles or San Francisco, they tend not to see themselves as victimised “people of colour”. The state’s elites soon realised that Mexican Americans represented a vital and winnable constituency. While Californian Republicans alienated Latinos by pushing Proposition 18, banning undocumented migrants from public services, the former Bush insider Karl Rove tells me the Texas GOP takes a far softer stance. The strategy’s paying off: Latino areas, notably the Rio Grande Valley, went red for the first time ever in November.

At the same time, there are signs that the Texas miracle may only continue: the local economy is likely to benefit from the second Trump presidency. How could it not, when “drill, baby, drill” is a key plank of his platform? For their part, other Trumpworld figures make similar noises. Chris White, the incoming energy secretary, hails from the west Texas oilfields, making him the ideal candidate to exploit reserves that could yet encompass half the country’s output. Certainly, White’s background makes him an outlier: many top energy executives are more interested in appeasing environmentalists than extracting black gold.

Combined with other growth figures — if Texas is set to become America’s most populist state, Houston could become its second-largest city by 2100 — and it’s tempting to see Texas as a model for the country to follow: one that encourages entrepreneurship while retaining traditional social values. It’s a recipe that some Texan Democrats believe the party needs to follow, especially if they want to reach Latino voters. “Family, church, deep roots and entrepreneurship and the desire to weave into American life,” summarises Henry Cisneros, the former mayor of San Antonio and once a Democratic presidential candidate. “The Democrats sometimes go too far and push [people] to the Right.”

Not that a prosperous future is necessarily assured. Arguably the biggest threat to the state’s ascendancy comes from neanderthal elements inside the GOP. They’ve already shown their fangs, attempting to push Christian doctrine into the curricula of public schools. A draconian abortion ban has also been promoted by Ken Paxton, the state’s ultra-conservative attorney general, who’s equally trying to prosecute out-of-state doctors for prescribing abortion pills. This bill is widely unpopular, and seen among veterans of both parties as a threat to GOP power.

“If the identity Left is killing California, far-Right identity politics could be the ruin of Texas,” explains Steve Pedigo, a native Texan and assistant dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Pedigo is particularly worried by attempts by the Texan Right to impose conservative policies on localities, similar to what progressives are trying to impose on more conservative parts of California. That’s bad enough in San Francisco — and an absolute anathema to freedom-loving Texans.

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Yet as stupid as these policies are, they’ve yet to change the political complexion of the state. Texans, Cisneros argues, are essentially practical, and prefer a regime that boosts their economic prospects over one that panders to them as victims. Texan Democrats hardly help themselves here. Over recent years, they’ve run culturally progressive figures like Beto O’Rourke: catnip to Eastern papers but dubious to Texans themselves. This year, the state duly continued its tilt to the Right, forcing the local Democratic party chairman to resign in disgrace.

Not that we should write off liberals just yet. As Texas grows, both in population and diversity, the state will need to rediscover its inner LBJ, focusing on genuine shared prosperity amid the high-rises and McMansions. Prayer meets and flag-flying aren’t substitutes for poor schools and inadequate roads, especially as the economy only grows and grows.

The hope here is that Texans remain sane, putting their faith in centrist politicians who promote social justice without succumbing to culture war manias. Happily, there are promising signs across the Texas Triangle, with Democrats and Republicans alike sticking to their moderate guns. One good example is Mattie Parker, the dynamic and nonpartisan mayor of Fort Worth. “I govern a diverse, young city,” Parker tells me. “People want the schools better, and the business leaders also don’t like extremes. They want the lights on, and the streets paved.”

Certainly, Texans themselves seem to think just such a future is possible. Almost 70% believe their state is among the best in the land, and nearly 30% see it as superior to all others, figures far higher than in New York or California. When I was last in Texas, I saw this optimistic spirit myself. Earlier this year, on a chilly Austin night, a well-known local musician called Patrice Pike took to the stage at a wood-panelled spot called the Saxon Club. After a raucous gig, Pike looked down at her crowd, a heady blend of blue-collar types and hipsters and superannuated hippies. And then, she made a dramatic show of Lone Star unity. “I know you have different views,” she said, “but we all love Texas.” Whatever our nation’s ceaseless squabbles, it’s hard to disagree.

I’m talking, of course, about the 1980 election. Though I could mean 2024. For in their Republican triumph and desolate Democratic failure, the contests are remarkably similar. That’s clear wherever you look, from the focus on hostages, variously in Iran or Gaza, to how Trump and Reagan tapped into the concerns of young people and the middle class while Harris, like Carter, relied on exhausted (and exhausting) invective while offering nothing more substantive themselves.

Not, of course, that smart historical dovetail is merely a matter for historians. On the contrary, it offers hints about how the defeated Left-wing of American politics may yet revive. For just as the Democrats absorbed the lessons of 1980, readjusting their message, returning to the White House, and ultimately dominating the political scene until Trump’s first victory in 2016 — so too must their modern successors relearn the practical policies that made their forebears so potent.

That earlier Democratic revival, culminating in the liberal dominance of the Nineties, wasn’t really about any single policy. Rather, to quote former party activist Ted Van Dyke, it was about “being more in tune with the voters’ thinking”. Unlike the miserable Harris campaign, or indeed those waged by Carter, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale, what became the New Democrats focused not on vague appeals to “values” or “joy”, but on winning. With brilliant communicators like Bill Clinton, as well as the early Al Gore or Gary Hart providing youthful energy, they spoke both common sense and empathy, managing to reach New York liberals and hard-nosed Southern bubbas.

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What a contrast with today’s Democratic Party, led by a senile old man, and stalked by progressive mediocrities such as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Living in their own universe, they have little idea of what Main Street thinks, drawing instead on the progressive culture increasingly dominant in classrooms, offices, the media, and indeed the government bureaucracy itself. Their outreach to the masses consisted largely of tapping hyper-partisan celebrities. It’s a message that fell on fallow ground everywhere from suburbs and exurbs to smaller cities — basically anywhere in America that looks set to grow over the coming decades.

Far more even than Obama, in short, people like Clinton understood Americans in ways reminiscent of Truman and Reagan. That, in turn, was reflected in the post-Eighties policy agenda. Turning away from Carter’s missives about national malaise or arguments for green austerity, they instead embraced economic growth, personal responsibility and colourblind racial policies. Rather than back the policies of green lobbies or civil rights activists, they embraced a kind of Fabian liberalism. As a fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute, I witnessed this approach first-hand, as we attacked Democratic Party bromides on issues such as racial quotas, criminal sentencing, trade and education, often to the consternation of traditional party constituencies.

What of Democratic policy in more recent times? Biden’s huge expansion of government did boost some special interests, notably green and race grifters, as well as wealthy stock and property owners. But Bidenomics failed to lift up the bulk of the working and middle class, even as inflation hit hardest among the least affluent. One-in-four Americans fears losing their job over the next year, even as roughly half now think the vaunted “American Dream” of home ownership has become unattainable, particularly in coastal cities.

This divergence, of both policy and personnel, has had stark consequences. By shifting to the centre, Clinton undermined Reaganism while once more becoming competitive in parts of the South and Midwest. These days, though, the Democrats are electoral poison across much of the country. That’s clear enough when you consider the success of their opponents. Trump more than doubled his margin among working-class voters, enjoying a lead over Harris of more than 10%. He also gained among other traditional Democratic voters, including Jews, Asians and even some African Americans. Perhaps 45% of Latinos, arguably the most critical voting bloc in the land, stumped for Trump too. That’s a record for a Republican: in 2012 the GOP candidate managed under 30%.

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And if that should make grim reading for liberals, surely the most galling thing is that many Democrats don’t even seem willing to face facts. With their base in the professional classes, the federal bureaucracy and the media, the party now operates with almost Stalinist conformity, using influencers to lambast their opponents with a ferocity even the Man of Steel would have appreciated. Party supporters seem out-of-touch too: a recent poll of urban professionals found their views on everything from meat consumption to freedom of speech differs drastically from those of most Americans.

This Manichean mania has led progressives not to rethink but assail. As Van Jones, a long-time Democratic operative has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

Not that the situation is hopeless. Look backwards to the Eighties and contemporary Democrats will find a clear roadmap for the future. First, they should move away from identity politics. To regain primacy, they’ll need to row back on progressive ideas such as transgenderism, reparations and racial quotas, all backed by no more than 30% of Americans. Second, they must focus on economic growth and opportunity. Unlike Biden, Clinton understood that expanding government for the sake of it is pointless. Rather, he favoured tax policies that would spark growth, and poured billions into law enforcement to address the popular concerns over crime.

Whatever one thinks of them, meanwhile, redistribution of income, universal healthcare and higher taxes on the corporate elite are all popular ideas. Especially given Trump will doubtless oppose these measures, they seem like good ways of peeling off his base.

None of this will be easy to achieve in practice. Nowadays, reformers face an ever more strident progressive base — one whose whole raison d’être is destructive identity politics. MSNBC’s Joy Reid, whose inanity epitomises an entire ideology, is already blaming white women for failing Harris. Activist Democratic women, for their part, blame the vice president’s defeat on misogyny among the multi-racial unwashed.

In the first instance, then, the Democrats must find their Clinton, someone who can bridge the gap between more radical progressives and the big money people who fund the party. Fortunately, there are signs that new leaders are emerging, politicians brave enough to break with the progressives on issues such as immigration and fracking. That includes John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro, both Pennsylvania senators, as well as the New York congressman Ritchie Torres. Together with Andy Beshear in Kentucky, they’re far better harbingers of a revived party than rich boy virtue signallers like Gavin Newson (California) or J.B. Pritzker (Illinois), both of whom have done a masterful job of undermining their own economies.

There’s other good news for the Democrats, with much of the country clearly primed for a return to the centre. Los Angeles, Oakland, St Louis, San Francisco, Buffalo, Seattle — in all these cities, far-Left candidates have been squashed by more moderate alternatives. So too were Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two members of the “Squad” decisively beaten by more traditional Democrats. A dozen Soros-funded district attorneys, ominously radical in their approach to criminal justice, were similarly turfed out.

No less important, the Democrats must realise that their Republican rivals are far from invulnerable — this is the first time in 20 years that they have won the popular vote. No less than the Left, the Right is plagued by its own lunatic fringe, particularly on issues like book bans, guns, and abortion, which in different ways tend to alienate independent voters. The record of the cacophonic GOP House majority is hardly enviable.

Trump, being Trump, is bound to make things easier for reasonable Democrats. His grave personal faults will make a repeat of Reagan’s “morning in America” unlikely. More to the point, Trump will struggle, as did Biden, with increasing global instability and the country’s bewildering concentration of wealth. Trump, then, may offer bigger profits and lower taxes, but as the heir to fortune and worshipper of mammon, he remains an unlikely leader of a “people’s party” that reflects what most people actually need and aspire to. As their electoral successes vividly prove, the New Democrats understood just that.

Yet if the South was crushed back in 1865, it now holds America’s destiny in its hands. Certainly, that’s clear enough politically: Donald Trump is expected to win every former Confederate state, with erstwhile battlegrounds such as Georgia and North Carolina now tilting to the Republicans. Even Virginia, increasingly dominated by liberal Washington suburbs, could go red too. It’s a similar story at the local level. Except for Richmond, the GOP controls every state house beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. In South Carolina’s General Assembly, the Republicans hold more than twice as many seats as the Democrats.

And if the South is now crucial to the country’s immediate electoral future, broader demographic trends are on its side too. Based on the last census, Texas gained two seats, while Florida and North Carolina each gained one. Accompanied by losses in places such as New York and California, the South is rapidly becoming the most powerful region in the land. Add to that its burgeoning economic strength, and it could soon be more influential than it has been for generations — a shift likely to transform politics, and political culture, right across the nation.

Through the 18th century, the South was central to the American economy. Charleston, an epicentre of the slave trade, was the most prosperous town south of Philadelphia, while South Carolina was among the richest colonial provinces. That wealth allowed the region’s white population to be the wealthiest of the pre-revolutionary era; and self-proclaimed cotton kings to become Old World aristocrats in the swamps and plantations of the New. Stroll the streets of Charleston and you can still see this legacy today. There are elegant mansions, decorated with art, and with silverware imported from Britain. Yet somewhere nearby, their slaves huddled in windowless rooms, forced to suffer the heat and humidity of the South in chains.

It’s ironic that the war the rebels started at Fort Sumter would ultimately destroy the South. That shot heard around the world, courtesy of the Charleston militia in April 1861, would prove no match for the emerging industrial might of the free states in the North. Under blockade from the vastly superior US Navy, buoyant cities like Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans all shrivelled, as the cotton routes to England slammed shut. In 1865, Charleston fell, alongside Fort Sumter. Columbia, the state capital, was razed.

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How the City of Angels went to hell

By Joel Kotkin

Not that things would improve once the guns fell silent. The Civil War left the South in deplorable shape, becoming in the memorable words of one author the “problem child” of America. Deprived of their slaves, the cotton kings were ruined. Meanwhile many normal Southerners, particularly after Reconstruction, worshipped the memory of the Confederacy while embracing its racist ideology. Across the South, Confederate memorials dotted the landscape; as recently as a few decades ago, Stars and Bars flags were common. All the while, Southerners worshipped Robert E. Lee and the “lost cause” while the beneficiaries of Ulysses S. Grant’s victory dominated the country’s economy, cultural and political life from New England to Oregon.

Here’s another irony: it would be the federal government, and the New Deal it promulgated, that ultimately started the South’s recovery. Roosevelt’s funding of roads, bridges and ports finally prodded the region into the 20th century. Often backed by Southern Democrat politicians, the scale of this assistance was monumental: in South Carolina alone, New Dealers created the state park system, hung telephone lines, and worked with farmers on soil conservation. The industrial boom of the Second World War also brought bases and vast manufacturing facilities. In Louisiana, to give one example, upwards of 30,000 New Orleanians worked at the Higgins boatyard, producing the thousands of landing craft needed to start the liberation of Europe on D-Day.

Through the Fifties and Sixties, meanwhile, industry began relocating to the South, where unions were weak and costs lower. An influx of go-getting outsiders helped too, remote as they were from the Old South and its neuroses. One good example is John Paul Rousakis, Savannah’s Greek-American mayor for five terms from 1970. Rousakis played a critical role in reviving Savannah’s waterfront, helping preserve what may well be the most beautiful urban landscape in America. Houston, for its part, enjoyed the services of Bob Lanier, a product of blue collar Baytown. Embracing progressive, pro-business policies, Lanier took full advantage of the city’s burgeoning oil industry.

Another newcomer would transform Charleston. An Irish Catholic, Joseph P. Riley was mayor of the city for four decades. Cultivating the support of newly enfranchised African-Americans, as well as local business elites, he turned a declining, crime-infested city into a model of urban renaissance. Riley improved law and order by appointing Reuben Greenberg as police chief in 1982. Another riposte to the South’s racial cliches — he was a half Jewish, half black Houstonian — Greenberg both reclaimed the streets and beclowned Charleston’s remaining substrate of white nationalists. After personally leading the protection of a Ku Klux Klan march, the men in white pillow cases were sure never to return.

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The Californication of Texas

By Daniel Kalder

Change happened at the state level too. From Texas to Florida, many belatedly began mimicking their Northern rivals: bringing minorities into leadership positions; financing the growth of major universities; building first-class industrial parks. “The development model has turned on its head,” noted Christopher Lloyd, president of the Site Selection Guild, adding that they’re borrowing the same Californian model that proved so successful in the second half of the last century.

No less important, this legacy has continued into our own time. From manufacturing to professional services, sectors long centred in California and New York have ventured south. According to a recent analysis by Zen Business, indeed, Texas and Florida are now the country’s high-growth hotspots, while they also attract the most tech workers. That’s unsurprising: from HP Enterprise to Oracle to SpaceX, many of America’s biggest firms have relocated to Texas.

Even finance, practically synonymous with Manhattan, is drifting south. Attracted by hot weather and sandy beaches, many bankers have made their home in Miami, even as Dallas lately dethroned Chicago as the second financial centre in the country. Entrepreneurs have even started raising funds to build a new stock exchange in Texas. Their goal? Replacing Wall Street with Y’all Street.

Beyond the South’s own pro-business policies, the relative decline of places like Chicago is telling in other ways. Between soaring taxes and draconian climate change rules, Democratic strongholds in the North seem desperate to bankrupt themselves. No wonder one recent study found that the best states for industry are generally found in the southeast, even as America’s fastest growing ports are places like Corpus Christi (Texas) and Mobile (Alabama).

Not that Dixie’s economic revival can only be traced through industrial output. For just as Rousakis and Riley reshaped and modernised their cities, millions of other Americans found their land of opportunity in the once-distressed South. In 1861, when Fort Sumter was attacked, the South was home to barely nine million of the country’s 31 million residents, and even that included 3.5 million slaves. Today, though, the former Confederacy boasts 40% of the US population, up from less than a third in 1950. This trend has accelerated since the pandemic. By 2023, population growth across just five Southern states, exceeded that of the other 44 combined.

Once again, the North slumps as the South soars. New Jersey, Illinois and New York have since all lost people since 2000, even as Texas gained three million. This isn’t just a function of internal migration either: three Southern cities — Miami, Dallas and Houston — have seen their foreign-born populations rise more than anywhere else. No less striking, these trends seem set to continue over the years ahead. In a recent survey identifying the five best regions for young job seekers, four were in the South, even as Southerners are more likely to have children than their Northern peers.

Apart from anything else, these demographic shifts are exploding old stereotypes. What started with Reuben Greenberg is just as true today: by some accounts Houston is the most diverse city in the country, while African-Americans are returning to the region their grandparents fled during the Great Migration. Overall, minorities generally enjoy higher incomes and home ownership levels here than elsewhere. And whatever Brooklyn liberals might imagine, the South is now among the least segregated parts of the country. To be sure, class divides exist. But in Charleston, successful African-Americans can be found eating at some of the swankiest restaurants, often with white friends. Like low country cuisine, encompassing African, English and Caribbean influences, this is a city that feels more racially harmonious than Northern towns from Milwaukee to Buffalo.

More to the point, these comings and goings are conjuring a political storm. More people means more representation in Congress, and more electoral votes. And if current trends continue — and the South continues to rise and places like Illinois keep falling — Dixie will have 30 more seats in the House of Representatives than it did in the Seventies. Once that happens, it will again emerge as the country’s strongest political region, a role it hasn’t enjoyed since that long-lost world of frock coats and slave markets.

Not that we need to wait for redistricting to spot the South’s political heft. After all, a second Trump administration would surely draw strength from the region’s ascendancy. Trump himself is now a typical Floridian — from Queens — and J.D. Vance hails from the essentially Southern culture of Appalachia. More to the point, likely boosts in defence and space spending under a Republican president would supercharge the region yet further, as would pro-manufacturing policies using tariffs and tough trade deals to replace foreign products with domestic alternatives. There’ll also be pressure to develop policies that help the less successful Southern states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, not least given they’re such Republican strongholds.

Given her probable plans to bailout profligate Northern states, a Harris presidency would probably be less good for Dixie. Then again, the region’s demographic fortunes offer opportunities to Democrats too: as both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton so vividly proved. In this New South, a dynamic, multicultural region with ample hope for the future, liberals could gain much by opposing strict bans on abortion, especially if they dump unpopular virtue-signalling around things like migration. To put it differently, then, the South’s revival may yet dovetail with a much-needed return to the political centre. Given the region’s turbulent past, that would be the most welcome irony of all.

Democrats, particularly in deep blue California and even bluer cities like Los Angeles, can clearly win elections. But what they can’t do is govern effectively. Virtually every Democratic city in the land is now in decline. Crime, especially of the violent variety, is rising. That’s shadowed by continued out-migration to less dense, more conservative areas, a trend that’s seeing the country’s biggest cities lose out economically.

But if signs of progressive failure are clear from New York to San Francisco, it’s Los Angeles where I feel it most keenly. I’ve lived here since 1975. Back then, the idea that this diamond in the sands could tarnish was unimaginable. But it has. Once a middle-class haven with a broad industrial base, LA now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. Dovetailed by failing schools and parks, and an exodus of residents and businesses, long-term prospects of this great American city look bleak — a future that could yet be translated right across the country. 

Beyond making life miserable for residents and visitors alike, the chaos on the southside has clear demographic consequences. When I arrived, almost 50 years ago, LA was the undisputed king of urban growth in America. From a population of barely 100,000 in 1900, the city grew to nearly four million. Now, though, the trend has reversed. Today, the city and county of Los Angeles, together home to 10 million people, has fewer residents than in 2010. Even worse, the state department of finance now projects that the county’s population will drop by over one million by 2060.

This is not an exodus, as some assert, of the poor, nor of blubbering Trumpistas. Rather, many  emigres now come from the city’s once-vibrant, multi-racial middle class. According to an analysis of IRS data, many are middle-income families in their childbearing years. LA is also losing the minorities and foreign-born residents who for decades sustained the city’s economic and demographic vitality. These days, African-Americans and Latinos instead flock to places like Houston or Miami in search of opportunity. “We are becoming more dystopian,” says John Heath, a lawyer and south LA native. “We can’t house people affordably and only build luxury, and there’s no place for a middle class.”

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Why London is beating America's cities

By Joel Kotkin

There’s a vicious circle here. As ambitious Angelinos leave, so too do the jobs that might have induced them to stay. That’s clear enough in entertainment, the city’s signature industry and a key funder of progressive politicians such as Harris. Consider Disney’s fabled Pixar studio, with production moving to other states or overseas. The once-promising space industry is in danger of being kneecapped too: just look at the departure of SpaceX. 

For the past five years, LA has lagged behind the national average for creating advanced industry jobs and, no less damning, Michael Kelly of the Drucker Institute at the Claremont-Mckenna Colleges, suggests that virtually every basic industry in LA, from manufacturing to finance and business services, has lost jobs or at best stagnated since 2019. Only the government-funded education and health sector showed significant growth. If the city had grown as quickly as the national average, Kelly calculates, it would have created 300,000 more jobs.

All this has happened in a city that once boasted a powerful business class. But now that so many firms have left, the city’s remaining “leaders” — increasingly inheritors of wealth and well-placed middlemen — seem remarkably relaxed about what’s happening. Many, Kelly suggests, prefer instead to focus on what’ll gain them cultural kudos. “They don’t care about fixing MacArthur Park or helping the southside,” is how he puts it. “All they care about is the Olympics.”

If, moreover, this was the story of one failing metropolis, that’d be bad enough. But LA’s decline reflects a similar trajectory experienced across the country. According to recent analysis, Texas and Florida are now the country’s high-growth hotspots. Just as striking, income growth in these mostly red states is about 40% higher than New York and New Jersey, as well as other liberal laggards like Oregon or Illinois. 

But how did it happen? How was it that Los Angeles, alongside other titans of the last century, weaken so dramatically. Certainly, a plausible answer presents itself when you examine the electoral map. Like other urban centres, after all, politics have headed relentlessly Left for a quarter century in LA. The last Republican elected citywide, Richard Riordan, left office in 2001. Nor does a reversal seem likely anytime soon: Democrats in LA currently outnumber Republicans by over four to one.

The city’s shift to a one-party system has exacerbated corruption, with several council members and commissioners accused of bribery. Yet amid scandal, Los Angeles voters last year elected Karen Bass as their mayor by a considerable margin. A career Leftist, she travelled to Fidel Castro’s Cuba as a member of the so-called Venceremos brigade. In 2016, to mark the dictator’s death, she issued a praise-filled obituary to the man she called the “Comandante”. 

Like her idol in Havana, she issues pronunciamentos and talks grandly about confronting homelessness and boosting the housing supply, the latter pledge now part of Harris’ campaign. Yet with the middle classes fleeing, and local Republicans nowhere, City Hall has little incentive to fix LA’s underlying problems. Despite all the claims about tackling vagrancy — LA is the second-worst homeless capital of America — the City of Angels builds far fewer new homes per capita than almost every other large US metro. Unable to address the root causes of homelessness, Bass has instead fallen back on raising taxes and boosting government spending.

Given the city’s deepening budgetary hole, that’s perhaps inevitable, particularly when the tax base has fallen so precipitously. It hardly helps, moreover, that the mayor’s mild-mannered progressivism is making a bad situation even worse. Ultimately it’s about incentives in a one-party town. The plebs and the remaining middle class simply don’t matter compared to the key backers of progressive governance: the non-profit “blob” and public sector employees. This in part explains Bass’ reluctance to clean up the homeless camps, which are now legal, and her support for higher taxes, the source of wealth for those government workers who fund Democratic campaigns and specialise in “ballot harvesting” from voters in nursing homes. 

Factor in that burgeoning reputation for graft, and it’s no wonder some critics suggest that Bass has enriched non-profits and friendly developers — while doing very little to improve life for everyday people. To give one example, LA parks are often in disrepair, particularly compared with nearby suburbs. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for its part, consistently underperforms compared to state and national averages, notably failing its mostly Latino student body. Since 2019, over 80,000 have dropped out of the district, which also suffers from chronic absenteeism and high levels of violence. Almost half of LA’s workforce is unsurprisingly low-skilled. 

 “The city can’t do much, they can’t fix the streets, the schools or the parks,” says Jack Humphreville, a retired investment banker who writes for City Watch, an online media outfit that actually covers what is happening in the city. “They just take care of their allies.”  

Beyond this litany of failure, meanwhile, the truly frustrating thing is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Southern California, after all, is blessed with superb weather, a legacy of technological innovation and a robust, minority-rich entrepreneurial class. Nor is every California town like Los Angeles. In many smaller cities, controlled by moderate Democrats and even some Republicans, the California dream is alive and kicking. Drive just ten miles from downtown Los Angeles, towards predominantly Latino cities like Southgate, and you’ll quickly find that the streets are paved, businesses are thriving, and homelessness is virtually nonexistent. Compare that with downtown LA, where the office vacancy rate is almost three times that of the independent cities nearby.

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The harshest American divide

By Joel Kotkin

No less important, the fiasco in Los Angeles could yet impact the entire country. Though she speaks about poverty and racial discrimination, after all, Kamala Harris is ultimately the product of the same system as Bass: one that puts progressive rhetoric and ethnic voting blocs ahead of improving society as a whole. Abandoning the approach of old-school progressives such as Fiorello LaGuardia — one predicated on investment and practical successes from bridge-building to education — Harris seems happier putting day-to-day governance aside in favour of abstract crusades around climate change. 

All the while, LA’s population continues to fall, with younger Angelenos apparently even more dissatisfied than their parents. Residents of other blue cities feel similarly: barely 30% of New Yorkers think conditions in the Big Apple are excellent or good, down from 50% just six years ago. For their part, around half of New Jerseyites would rather live elsewhere. And as bad as all this is for the urban fabric, it could soon have a dire electoral impact for liberals everywhere. For while the exodus from places like LA doubtless benefit even incompetent Democratic mayors, the influx of voters into conservative areas equally bolsters the Republicans in Congress. Since 1990, for example, Texas has gained eight seats, Florida five and Arizona three. In contrast, New York has lost five and Pennsylvania four. California, which now suffers higher out-migration than many rustbelt states, recently lost a Congressional seat for the first time ever.

To put it differently, then, the Democrats have political as well as ethical reasons to up their game — but the resistance from progressives will be formidable. For while non-progressive Democrats have scored some victories in local elections, even in deep blue strongholds such as San Francisco and Seattle, and appear positioned to unseat Soros-backed District Attorney George Gascon, the pressures to change course fade as companies and the middle classes flee. In urban regions dominated by mobilised government workers, and a dependent population, Peron-style welfarism is all you need. Even with California’s sunny climate, that doesn’t sound like an appealing future.

And yet, the Eternal City didn’t fall. Under General Quintus Maximus Fabius, the Romans abandoned their formerly aggressive strategy, instead shifting to hit-and-run attacks. Though Fabius was roundly criticised for this cautious approach, and was promptly dismissed by his compatriots as a “cunctator” or delayer, Hannibal’s supply lines were soon cut, and the Carthaginians ultimately forced to leave Italy.

It is a dramatic story, but hardly ancient history. Adopted by Beatrice and Sidney Webb in the late 19th century, the old general’s pragmatism was revived as “Fabianism” — a form of socialism, but one framed by economic gradualism and respect for tradition.

And if, to quote one historian, the Webbs’ ideas were “perfectly suited to British prejudices” in their own sepia-tinged world, what Fabius understood remains starkly relevant now. As Keir Starmer has shown — and Kamala Harris proved in her debate with Donald Trump — remaining level-headed wins debates and often elections. More than that, practical Fabianism can be a salve for some of modernity’s most tender wounds, especially when compared to the dreamy utopianism so common elsewhere in politics.

We are living in an age of dogma. That is clear right across the political spectrum, from the Left’s extreme approach to climate change and gender, to populist demonisation of immigrants and other outsiders.

The specifics, of course, are different. But like their ancient namesake, the original Fabians found themselves in a fraught political climate. Faced with a complacent establishment that despised socialism — and the growing popularity of radical politics, epitomised by a spate of anarchist attacks from New York to London — they were forced to thread a path between the two.

How did they manage this practice? In a word: moderation. Though embracing a range of progressive economic causes, advocating for a national health service as far back as 1911, the Fabians were equally careful not to forsake capitalism entirely. For the Webbs, small businesses were to retain their assets, even as the movement’s leaders were broadly conventional in their personal morality. No less important, the Fabians also made their peace with Britain’s ancient monarchy, even as they preferred a professional civil service to the revolutionary vanguard.

As late as the Nineties, these ideas were successfully practised by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and even today most developed countries boast mixed economies and lively welfare states. All the same, recent years have seen caution and thoughtfulness replaced by emotion and zealotry, with disastrous results across a range of policy areas.

Consider climate change. While doubtless a major challenge, leading physicist Steve Koonin nonetheless suggests that current environmental policies are underpinned by implausibly catastrophic projections, including mass starvation and a huge rise in weather-related fatalities. To quote John Clauser, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics: “Climate science has metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudo-science.”

Prodded along by allies in the media — Associated Press and National Public Radio are two of the organisations to accept money from climate lobby groups — this extreme approach may yet prove harmful for regular people. Like Fabius’s opponents in the Senate, the climate lobby ignores inconvenient facts, instead preferring bold action, and a grim future encompassing smaller homes, less mobility, and worse diets.

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Climate science is making you miserable

By Tom Chivers

Apart from anything else, the science underpinning the pessimists is decidedly shaky. For one thing, net zero is a fantasy that can likely never happen even in the medium term, particularly given the rising energy needs of developing countries. That’s before you consider an even more essential problem: physics. Renewables suffer from low power density, which means they require much more material to work. As even the CEO at Siemens Energy recently conceded, economic realities are starting to assert themselves, despite massive and continuing subsidies for wind and solar.

Beyond the scientific folly of climate-change extremism, this zero-sum approach is bound to be unpopular. A recent Gallup poll shows that just 3% of Americans consider climate change the most urgent problem facing the country. Besides, adaptations of various sorts, from better flood defences to clever agricultural practices, have helped reduce climate-related fatalities dramatically over the past century, despite a massive increase in global population and higher temperatures. Why, in short, don’t we try things that actually work?

To be clear, this is not to suggest we should dismiss climate change as fake — the planet really does seem to be getting warmer, albeit more slowly than climate lobbyists suggest. But rather than clinging mindlessly to performative, ineffective and fundamentally unsellable policies, a more Fabian approach would embrace hybrids as opposed to less desirable EVs, or else invest in economically viable alternatives to fossil fuels, notably hydro and nuclear power. Placing your faith in wind or solar seems like a fool’s errand — and a good way to lose money.

If climate change is one area that could do with a strong dose of Fabianism, our attitude to race is another. Once again, it is clear that the current radical approach, popular on both sides of the Atlantic, is doing more harm than good. Current “anti-racism” ideology requires schools, companies and governments to use racial metrics in hiring and spending. Yet this approach has proved a massive failure. After making steady progress in the Fifties and Sixties, the relative economic status of African-Americans has largely stalled compared within other groups, including Latinos. That is even as inner-city problems remain as intractable as ever. The primacy of racial identity politics is also socially counterproductive, as we can see in the ethnic rioting in the US in 2020, in Britain in 2024, and in France almost constantly.

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It is understood, of course, that some on the Right are guilty of similar neuroses, especially when it comes to demographic replacement. But the multiracial reality of contemporary Western societies cannot be wished away. And besides, ideologues of both Right and Left miss a basic point: so-called “people of colour” are not monolithic, and often share little beyond not being white. That is apparent from the numbers, with the latest data from the US Census Bureau showing a wide disparity between different ethnic minorities. Korean-Americans, Indonesian-Americans, Taiwanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans all report higher incomes than whites. Among immigrants from Africa, females apparently do better than their white counterparts already. That’s even as Asians now constitute perhaps a third of leading tech CEOs in the US.

To put it differently, might it not be best to adopt a Fabian approach to race — both in terms of level-headed pragmatism, and in class and upward mobility? Fabianism, for its part, would avoid a racialist approach to public policy, instead adopting a strategy of general societal uplift, one less likely to stir resentment among white majority populations. There’s evidence, moreover, that this can work in practice: Denmark’s policy of integrating immigrants into the labour market has arguably seen the Nordic country suffer less ethnic strife than neighbouring Sweden.

Success there is echoed by the advantages of Fabianism for immigration policy. Once again, the radicalism of Left and Right has caused problems. A massive wave of immigration, embraced by business and intellectual elites across Europe, has in turn energised Right-wing populists across the continent, even as native workers (especially those on low incomes) face rising competition for jobs, homes and social services. Spurred by record numbers of people crossing the border with Mexico, American attitudes to immigration have hardened too — roughly 60% of Americans, and a majority of Latinos, support mass deportations.

These realities lead some on the Right to favour cutting off immigration entirely. Yet it will be extremely hard for Western societies to thrive without it. That’s obvious demographically: across the OECD, the so-called “dependence ratio” (those aged 65 and over as a proportion of people aged 20-64) will hit 46% by 2050.

At any rate, a Fabian approach to these challenges would acknowledge these facts while rejecting open borders. Robust controls are crucial here, with countries from Australia to Canada prioritising high-skilled migration until liberal activists and big business encouraged them to change tack. To put it differently, a Fabian approach to immigration is not only possible. It has actually been proven to work in the recent past — and the sooner nations rediscover it, the better.

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In the current environment, prospects for a Fabian revival may seem dim. Practicality is not a virtue much taught in universities these days, with the academy instead seeking to turn students into activists more than citizens. Social media tends to accelerate the ghettoisation of information too, meaning people get little exposure to ideas outside their presumed comfort zone. Then there are the challenges specific to Fabianism as an ideology: in an age of rampant inequality, to say nothing of general disgust for politics, can a softly-softly approach really succeed?

Perhaps not. Yet as Fabius so vividly proved, in difficult times societies need pragmatists not ideologues. One cannot expect either the current liberal oligarchy — nor Right-wing demagogues like Trump — to embrace such a rational response. But like Rome or the British socialists, success can only come by recognising political, economic, and social realities.

Today, in short, Fabianism provides an elegant route away from our current travails. Like the ancient Romans, we are past the point where dogma and vainglory can be afforded. In an increasingly divided, debilitated West, a shift towards greater realism therefore seems the healthiest alternative.