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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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.

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.

Meanwhile, house prices are so high in San Francisco that even software engineers at mega companies struggle to afford accommodation, tech companies are downsizing, and homelessness is on the rise. Confronted with these problems, the city recently recommended a payment of $5 million each in “reparations” to eligible black residents. The figure was arrived at without actually doing any maths and, it is estimated, would cost everybody else $600,000 each.

As always, Silicon Valley is at the vanguard of a wider Californian trend. Here is a place where things were too good for too long; where the ruling class became unmoored from reality, hastening their state’s decline. Residents are voting with their feet: in 2020, California’s population declined for the first time in its history, a trend which continued through July 2022. Where, people are asking, are all those who came to California seeking success now going?

For many, the answer appears to be Texas. Austin in particular has received some high-profile defections. In 2020, Joe Rogan left LA for the city because, as he put it, “I want fucking freedom.” Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, the data mining firm  that helped locate Osama Bin Laden, declared that Texas beats California “in almost every method you can name, whether it’s education, pollution, homeless[ness].” Trump-supporting billionaire Larry Ellison relocated the HQ of database giant Oracle from Redwood City to Austin following a bitter struggle with regulators. And, most famously, Elon Musk shifted Tesla’s headquarters to Austin in 2021, after claiming that California regulators had started behaving like a “monopoly that cannot go bankrupt”.

Musk’s announcement marked the moment when the rise of Austin as a tech hub reached critical mass in the public consciousness, but the process had been underway for over a decade. Long before Tesla arrived, Google, Amazon and Meta (as well as older firms such as Apple, IBM and Dell) had established significant presences in the city. They had been attracted by a concentration of engineering talent and Texas’s business-friendly government. The result is that the Austin metro’s population has exploded, while rents and house prices have soared. Since I moved here, during the second Bush administration, the downtown skyline has completely transformed. A second centre, “The Domain”, has sprouted in the city’s north, where many tech firms have offices.

The cultural changes have also been profound. The laid-back city of old prided itself on the slogan, “Keep Austin Weird”. But there is a sense among locals that, in the new Austin, idiosyncrasies are ironed out. Formerly hip neighbourhoods that might once have boasted the odd wax museum or vintage thrift store are now lined with luxury boutiques and frou-frou eateries, while quirky institutions have either fled to the remote reaches of the city to survive or closed for good.

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Although Austin was a second-tier provincial city until very recently, it always punched above its weight when it came to the counterculture. Cheap rents, low house prices and Left-wing politics made it attractive to creative people and misfits: “slackers” unafflicted by the ambition and status anxiety that bedevils all those chasing careers in NYC or LA. Psychedelic music was born here, in the shape of The 13th Floor Elevator’s debut LP — released a year before Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And in my almost two decades here, I have met many interesting characters without trying, including a Scottish BMX champion who was once name-dropped on an episode of Neighbours, Morrissey’s guitar technician, and a man who turned his PhD on crustaceans in Victorian literature into a career in AI. The poster boy for the Keep Austin Weird era was Leslie Cochran, a homeless man in a thong bikini who ran for mayor three times and had his own line of fridge magnets that allowed you to dress him in an array of outfits. Leslie’s death in 2012 (he was only 60) coincides almost too precisely with the last gasp of weird Austin.

As depressing as this metamorphosis might feel to many Austinites, it is simply the next logical stage in a process that began years ago, as middle-class hipsters displaced the black and Hispanic residents of the working-class neighbourhoods they moved into. What follows now is not gentrification but rather wholesale destruction, as entire blocks are razed to the ground and replaced with luxury apartment buildings, while the truly wealthy erect ostentatious ziggurats on lots where modest kit houses once stood.

Tech bros are often cast as the villains here, but they are too easy to scapegoat. A more interesting example of how social dynamics have shifted in the new Austin can be found in the furore that erupted when the residents of a brand new luxury development attempted to shut down a weekly car club that had been taking place since the Nineties. The sight of customised low riders and the roar of engines was too much for the exquisite sensibilities of the residents of “The Weaver”, one of whom denounced the club as “a display of toxic masculinity”.

The invocation of Left-wing pieties in the service of naked class war captured perfectly the way similar language would be used to justify policies during the pandemic that had a disproportionately harmful effect on the poor. Austin’s leadership embraced school closures and mask psychosis. After the murder of George Floyd, it also voted to defund the police — promptly experienced record murder rates. This was not the first time radically progressive policy had backfired in Austin. In 2019, the city had decriminalised public camping, allowing tent cities doubling as drug markets to spring up along freeways and in underpasses. San Francisco had already demonstrated how a policy that sounds compassionate can quickly become indistinguishable from the worst kind of laissez-faire cruelty, yet Austin seemed determined to pursue the policy to its destruction.

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But while Silicon Valley operates in uber-progressive California, Austin has an openly hostile Republican state legislature to contend with. Texas puts a limit on just how far the city can go with its more avant-garde policies, while occasional uprisings from the electorate thwart others. The ban on public camping was reinstated by popular vote. It is also misleading to assume that everybody moving to Austin is a doctrinaire progressive: when three-time Democrat failure Robert “Beto” O’Rourke was defeated for the first time, he had actually polled higher among native-born Texans than among those who have moved to the state from elsewhere. Indeed, Musk himself has argued that Austin should not slavishly copy San Francisco, while Lonsdale said that bad policies made the state “unlivable”. Indeed, so appalled is Lonsdale by the “far Left” thinking he saw in San Francisco that he co-founded the new University of Austin to challenge the “new ideologies of intolerance that order subservience and quash those who think differently.”

It would be preferable, of course, if we did not live in a world where entire cities could be so radically transformed by the desires of the super-rich. But in this, Austin is becoming not weirder, but more normal. All the great cities — Moscow, London, Paris, New York, LA, Istanbul — are full of buildings, monuments and institutions that exist only because rich and powerful people wanted them: indeed, there are entire cities, such as Saint Petersburg and Astana that exist because of this principle. If not exactly progress, it is a sign of Austin leaving childish things behind.

Meanwhile, even as the old “Keep Austin Weird” spirit teeters on the verge of extinction, the new city is weird in its own ways. Sometimes this is in the style of nouveau riche grotesque: $150 cups of coffee are weird. But I also recall my confusion the first time I drove past the shell of Musk’s immense Tesla Gigafactory just outside the city. At first, I assumed it was just another Amazon warehouse, but the scale was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was weirdly radical to see so ambitious a manufacturing plant in a Western country when we have spent decades getting the rest of the world to make our stuff for us.

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And people here still dream of creating their own worlds: I recently met a man who was considering building a commune south of the city, while Musk himself is rumoured to be contemplating the construction of a “utopia” in the Austin metro area, close to where facilities for The Boring Company and SpaceX are being assembled. On the one hand, Musk’s plans have a practical aim: he wants his employees to have access to affordable housing. But on the other, they are extremely secretive, although Kanye West was reportedly involved in discussions about what the town might look like.

But whether Musk builds his City of the Sun or not, there is a more certain sign of the old Austin’s extinction. The city has approved a 12-foot tall monument, to be erected downtown, that will read: “Keep Austin Weird.” In doing so, a cold, heavy slab has been dropped on the still warm corpse of the town that was once was, to guarantee it never escapes from its resting place.

In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. warned in God and Man at Yale of his alma mater’s inability to prepare its students for the real world. Its subtitle, The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”, hinted at the already existing tendency for administrators to hire academics who only teach ideas they deem acceptable. Scepticism was banished: to Buckley, political radicals were subverting American society by indoctrinating their students with atheism and collectivism. Yet he remained an “epistemological optimist”, hoping that sense would prevail both in the Ivy League and across the nation.

More than 70 years later, that sense has manifestly not prevailed. Take the case of Roland Fryer. A hugely gifted and until recently celebrated black professor of economics at Harvard, he was suspended for two years without pay following the most tenuous sexual harassment claims. Many suspect the real reason for his humiliating treatment was his research showing that African Americans are not disproportionately the targets of lethal violence by the police. There were, Fryer wrote, “no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account”.

Though published well before the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 decided that the police were state-funded agents of racial oppression, Fryer’s research nevertheless made him enemies in the academic world. Though he was only following the evidence, he had offended the progressives who now dominate the university’s governance and culture. On Fryer’s return to campus after two years of exclusion, the Harvard Crimson newspaper had only this to say: “Fryer should not return to Harvard classrooms.” Similar stories can be told about other illustrious institutions. Joshua Katz, a tenured Classics professor at Princeton, was not merely suspended but fired this year over a long-ago relationship with a student. Given the investigation into his behaviour was based on selective evidence, it seems likely his real crime was daring to criticise Black Lives Matter.

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If universities once made promises to teach their undergraduates how to think, they now aim to teach them what to think. Students are now taught that disparities between groups are always the result of discrimination; the US is irredeemably racist; racism is everywhere; invisible power structures of structural oppression are equally ubiquitous and need to be dismantled; meritocracy is a myth; colour-blindness is a misleading concept; a focus on individual rights distracts from the real struggle. Gone are those such as Roland Fryer who sought to inquire freely into the most important questions facing society today through well-gathered evidence and rigorous logic. Hounded out by a vocal minority of thin-skinned students and zealous administrators, they are replaced by progressive conformists.

It was with these issues in mind that, last week, I taught five classes on freedom of speech at the new University of Austin. UATX is intended to be a free-thinking, free-speaking alternative to existing universities, and our summer school was aimed at attracting current undergraduates from precisely those places. But while one could have forgivingly expected at least some of these students to be scared of questioning progressive orthodoxies, the reality couldn’t have been more different.

These students were hungry for knowledge, eager to learn and to excel — and yet many of them hailed from established institutions such as Dartmouth, Brown, Berkeley. Others came from overseas: the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of British Columbia in Canada. My class was an equally diverse group of students: three women, one transgender person, and seven men. One student was of Moroccan origin, another of Indian ethnicity. On paper, they were a diversity, equity and inclusion officer’s dream.

However, far from protesting that the US was a “structurally racist” society oppressive to supposedly marginalised communities, the students I met were eager to be of service to their country, culture, and society at large. Not one was in the slightest bit woke.

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Yet what they taught me in the five sessions we had together was the near-absence of critical thinking and free inquiry in their respective universities. Even the Frenchman said there was very little debate in the Sorbonne. The American students suggested that most of their peers were just like them: eager to learn, debate, and compete — all in a civil manner. What they worried about was a minority of students, professors and administrators who spoil the experience of college for everyone by grandstanding, virtue signalling, and enforcing the tenets of progressive orthodoxy. Those in student government and student media certainly didn’t represent the majority, they said. Their union policies and mantras spoke only to the small group inside their autocratic bubble.

It was clear from my conversations with the students at UATX that the elite educational institutions are doing the next generation a fundamental disservice. If we are to teach the leaders of tomorrow how to think — how to ask probing questions rather than repeat dictated answers — we need a fundamental re-evaluation of the modern university. It’s clear these institutions are still in high demand — just look at Harvard’s ever-increasing application numbers — but that doesn’t mean they are fulfilling their function.

Harvard’s motto is a single word: Veritas. Yale’s is Lux et Veritas. But truth is the first casualty of progressivism. And as for light, there is a great deal more heat generated by the endless identity politics of the modern campus. Still, I came away from the UATX summer school feeling relieved. Young people — some of them, at least — don’t want indoctrination. But the only way to get back to “advancing learning and perpetuating it to posterity” is to found new universities. Let’s not forget: even Harvard was a start-up once.

This, increasingly, is what ex-presidents do: they trade on their brand, milking their fanbase for cash. Obama has his media company, his tedious podcast with Bruce Springsteen, his paid appearances. The Clintons had their consultancy and speaking fees. After all, how can they continue to hobnob with their billionaire friends unless they, too, get filthy rich? Trump, I figured, was a little different: already wealthy, it was adoration he sought.

Freedom Tour tickets ran from the thousands for a seat close to the stage all the way down to $45 for those at the back. (There was a still lower level that got you a seat watching a video screen in an overflow hall.) Intrigued, I purchased a ticket for the cheap seats, wondering how the disgraced prophet would try to shore up the faith among his followers. Biden and his media stenographers would have it that these followers are an extremist, angry force active in the land, still fulminating over a thwarted coup attempt. His opposition researchers have already coined a new insult: “ultra MAGA”. And I wanted to know: what is happening to Trumpists during their period in the wilderness?

*

The Austin Exhibition Center is a massive space that’s right downtown: it is easy to reach, so I expected to see some protestors, especially given the role of Trump-appointed justices in the recently leaked Roe v Wade ruling. But there were none, just a dude selling car air fresheners shaped like prominent Democrats (because “Liberals Smell”).

Trump fans, on the other hand, had turned up en masse, and early. It took over an hour to clear security, which provided me with ample time to check for signs of the “multiracial whiteness” that The Washington Post warned us about. And indeed, I saw that Trump had attracted Asians, Hispanics and a small number of black people in addition to white people, although within each of these very broad categories there was great diversity.

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Among the white people, for example, there were representatives of the big-beard-and-shaved-head cohort, older rural Republicans, preppy college kids and black T-shirt Infowars types. The gender split seemed close to 50/50. The vibe was good humoured despite the long line: people were expecting a good show. A Trump impersonator walked up and down, posing for pictures. The woman in front of me asked if she could touch his hair. “Go for it,” he said, adding: “It’s real, completely real.”

*

Dinesh D’Souza was wrapping up as I entered the hall. The Left had captured all the institutions, he said; nothing could be done. Conservatives needed to withdraw and create new ones, a culture within the culture. This got some applause, but the message struck me as defeatist and un-Trumpian.

D’Souza was followed by the author of a business book, who wanted to live in a world where you could still tell jokes without fretting about offending people. He then told a mild gag, about getting punched after “helpfully” fixing a lady’s skirt, which would have been suitable for broadcast pre-watershed any time in the past 50 years. The crowd laughed: this guy was definitely more entertaining than Dinesh D’Souza.

Next up came Kevin Sorbo. Democrats get Jay-Z and Beyonce, MAGA people get the star of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. An outspoken Christian conservative with a penchant for trolling liberals (“If men can’t comment on abortion because they don’t have a uterus, why does the Left comment on gun control?”), Sorbo was dropped by his Hollywood agents and ejected from every social media platform bar Twitter. But he has fought back by forming his own production company and now makes successful films for the Christian market. I half-remembered a line from The Brothers Karamazov, describing Alyosha, the protagonist: “he had gone beyond the fear of appearing ridiculous.”

To me this has always sounded like the greatest of freedoms, although those who achieve it are not always likeable. Trump had done it; he could afford to. Sorbo had done it and paid a price, but he had survived. The audience, with fewer resources, were being encouraged to do the same, to own the MAGA-ness that earned them the contempt of the elites. “I’m not here to wake up the sheep,” said Sorbo. “I’m here to wake up the lions — and you guys are lions.”

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This would emerge as a major theme of the day. There were barely any references to policy, to Roe v Wade, to Ukraine, or even to the Republican Party. Very little organising was going on. The American Freedom Tour was not a rally; it was a revival meeting bringing believers together so they could strengthen each other in the faith and return renewed to the world to tell the truth.

Sorbo, at least, did not attempt to lead the audience in prayer, though the MC who came on between the “acts” did. The Bible instructed us to pray for our leaders, he said, and that included Joe Biden, even if he was not the audience’s favourite person. He pulled it off: heads were bowed, and everybody went silent to join him in a prayer for the president.

*

By lunchtime it was clear that Trump had drawn a huge crowd: the number “8000” kept coming up. Yet the success in Austin appeared to have caught the organisers off guard: there was hardly any merch for sale, just a whiny-voiced snake oil salesman pitching membership of the “inner circle” for $30,000 a pop, an online system for investors that was supposed to be foolproof, and copies of Trump’s latest book, Our Journey Together, which you could get signed by his son.

Trump had missed an opportunity, as his followers loved T-shirts and hats. The variety was spectacular: a grinning Trump sprinkling stars that formed the word “America”; Trump as Theseus holding up the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa; and “God, Guns and Trump”, to name but a few. “Ultra MAGA” was already a T-shirt. Trump’s fans are serious about their beliefs, but they are also in on the joke.

The tone, however, hardened in the afternoon. Introduced to us as “Donald Trump’s pastor”, Mark Burns, an ultra-energetic black preacher and Christian media entrepreneur, was the first speaker to really push evangelical conservative stances on abortion and gay marriage, but he also came out swinging against transgender athletes, Black Lives Matter and CRT.

And then he invoked the name of Rosa Parks. All American children are raised on the story of how she rejected an unjust law and refused to take her seat at the back of the bus. Burns offered a radical reinterpretation of the story: the second-class citizens of today are not black people but white Christian conservatives, and the time might come when they might have to follow Rosa Parks’ example and reject unjust laws.

*

“It seems from what the speakers are saying that Trump is thinking of running again,” said a middle-aged man, sitting behind me. “I thought he was going to hand over the baton. How old is he?”

His friend did a quick Google search. “It says here he’s 75. He’ll be 77 and a half at the next election.” There was a pause. “He’s still sharp, though.”

“I heard one of the speakers say he is the greatest president of our lifetimes,” said the first man. “Well maybe some of the young folk here don’t remember, but I was around for Reagan…”

The consensus was that Reagan was better than Trump. The conversation then switched to a discussion of Elon Musk’s tweets, the border situation and Disney’s declining stock price. These men were well-informed professionals who had arrived later in the day and were worried they had missed rock star Ted Nugent. Although he was never mentioned by name, Chris Rufo’s influence loomed large in their conversation — and at the Freedom Tour in general. Trumpian causes such as the border wall might get the occasional shout out, but Rufo’s, with his leaks and campaigns against woke institutions, were the driving force. But Rufo is aligned with Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, not Trump. Even at the ex-president’s own event, the centre of gravity seemed to have shifted: the agenda is no longer set by Trump.

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The men behind me had not missed Ted Nugent. The rock star landed, playing the Star-Spangled banner on electric guitar, telling the audience that although he loved us “madly”, he would love us even more if we “went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the Communists”. This soundbite would briefly light up Twitter the next day, juxtaposed with the news of the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo. He did not receive boos, but Don Jr’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, de-escalated the rhetoric when she arrived on stage: she settled for sneering at Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and reciting his many failures (high price of gas, debacle in Afghanistan, no baby formula) against Trump’s many victories (low price of gas, victory over Isis, record low unemployment) while repeating the mantra: Trump was right.

In the morning Sorbo had made fun of Obama’s golfing skills; now the attacks on Biden, Big Tech and other bête noirs of the MAGA movement became relentless. I expected things to deteriorate further when Donald Trump Jr took to the stage. This scion of privilege, like his father before him, presents himself as a defender of the working class — with the energy and delivery of a stand-up comedian. Clearly revelling in his heretic status, he was willing to go much further than any of the previous speakers in terms of his selection of targets.

There had been little mention of Ukraine until this point, but Trump Jr attacked the senate for rushing through $40 billion worth of spending on a regime he described as second only to Russia in its corruption. Then he attacked Big Pharma, Big War, defence contractors and the Biden administration for doing nothing to stop the flow of fentanyl over the border from Mexico. The self-proclaimed “prince of MAGA” was leading the audience into territory that until very recently would have been the preserve of the Left. They followed him willingly, cheering at his comments.

And then, finally, eight and a half hours after the show had begun, the man himself took to the stage. Following the energetic and radical performance of the son, the father was content to perform a greatest hits routine — the wall, “fake news”, his successful renegotiations of NAFTA and the bill for Air Force 1, his victory over Isis. Yes, the election was stolen, but he didn’t bang on about it, and he didn’t mention January 6th at all. He was coy about his intentions for 2024, only saying that the audience would be very pleased.

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And the audience was pleased, on the whole. Trump put on a show, and those who saw it were entertained, even if some people got up and left before he was finished (he was an hour late) and so missed the comedy dance moves at the end. Trump was the main draw, required to bring the show together, but he was no longer the main source of energy or ideas. He was, however, “still sharp” — a canny performer who knew how to keep his audience excited enough that they would tune in for the next episode.

I wondered if he has a twist in mind for us. Many a businessmen will pass the family corporation onto his son, and Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, erstwhile dictator of Turkmenistan, recently passed on the presidency to his son Serdar. The order of the show kept it in the family: the top three headliners were Trump, his son, and his son’s girlfriend, whose main claim to fame otherwise is years spent as a second tier talking head on Fox News. Suddenly the thought of Don Jr signing his dad’s books no longer seemed absurd but rather one of the rituals through which a patriarch might anoint a successor.

As the Democrats complete their transformation into a party representing the interests and values of the professional-managerial class — and so prove themselves unable to learn from 2016 — it’s worth noting that Trump Jr’s appropriation of hitherto leftist critiques of power drew some of the loudest cheers from the audience. Despite his immense wealth, he has, like his father, the same ability to articulate the concerns of people infinitely poorer than himself. His isn’t “classical” Trumpism; it is a new, more radical mutation.

MAGA isn’t finished, but nor is it fixed, and though the American Freedom Tour wasn’t pointing towards a particular end point, it did prove that something else is being born. But there were still no protestors outside the stadium when I left.

This view was widespread at the time, and has lingered well into the 21st century. Forget Houston. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are the cities most frequently associated with the urban American dream.

Fast forward to today, however, and a new urban renaissance is taking shape — and this time, it’s in the heart of Texas. Never before in American history have two metros in one state — Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth — been in the nation’s five largest. So much for its cockroaches; at its current rate of growth, Houston could replace Chicago as the nation’s third largest municipality by 2030.

What’s driving this Texan resurgence? Traditionally, American cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis all tried to copy the model set by New York and, to a lesser extent, Chicago, with high-rise offices crowded into central business districts. But Texas urbanism is different. They may wear cowboy boots, drive pickup trucks, and attend rodeos, but Texans have created a new model of American urbanity rooted in the demands of the consumer market — an idea deeply offensive to many planners and retro-urbanists.

Some observers lament the fact that the vast majority of Texas’s metropolitan growth — nearly 100% — has taken place in the suburbs and exurbs. But this has its benefits, not least the fact that its cities haven’t been turned into rabbit warrens that only provide high living standards to the rich. Over the past decade, Texas has built three times as much housing as California. This has allowed its cities, despite massive demographic and economic growth, to keep housing prices significantly lower than in coastal Californian cities such as San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Los Angeles.

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But while affordability has been the secret sauce for Texan cities, its urbanism also thrives by embracing the realities of the marketplace. Over the past decade, Austin and Dallas have created jobs two to three times faster than New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. And this growth is not all at the low end of the job market, as some like the New York Times’s Paul Krugman suggest. Over the past five years, for instance, Austin has displaced San Francisco as the fastest growing tech market. Indeed, Austin is now arguably the strongest rival to Silicon Valley, home to the headquarters of Tesla, and Oracle, as well as Apple’s engineering division and Meta’s latest expansion, 33 floors downtown.

But the most significant expansion has been in professional and business services, the core of the new urban economy. Over the past five years, Austin and Dallas-Ft. Worth have created more than twice as many new business service jobs as San Jose; all four big Texas cities have grown this sector many times the rate of New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. The Dallas metroplex is now home to 24 Fortune 500 company headquarters, trailing only New York and Chicago by a small number; 40 years ago, the region had fewer than five.

Perhaps the most important consequence has been in demographics, particularly critical in this era of persistent labour shortages. The media insists on portraying millennials as desperate to settle in places such as Brooklyn, but in reality they have been fleeing these neighbourhoods — heading instead to Texan cities, where they can more readily afford homes or spacious rental apartments. During the tech boom of the late Nineties, more people moved from Texas to the Bay Area than vice versa; today, however, the pattern is reversed, with Austin, Houston, and Dallas — and their lower costs of living — all among the leading gainers.

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Texan metros, notably Houston and Austin, also are among the nation’s leading destinations for minorities and immigrants, the drivers of America’s demographic future. As Patrick Jankowski, chief economist for the Greater Houston Economic Partnership, has noted, the area added more than one million people over the past decade, the majority of them Hispanic, and barely one-tenth Anglo.

It’s not hard to see why. Cities such as Houston are no longer defined by the decades-old, often troubled relationship between African American, Latino, and white populations. Instead, Houston is now widely considered the most diverse major metropolitan area in the country. In 1960, Harris County, which includes Houston and many of its suburbs, was 70% white and 20% African American. Today, the county’s total population is 31% white, 42% Hispanic, 19% black and 8% Asian. As one researcher in Austin recently put it: “Driving down any major road in Southwest Houston… it is impossible to miss the signs for African grocers, churches with names of Nigerian pastors and restaurants, interspersed with shop signs in Spanish, Indian grocers, and Pakistani tailors, along with signs advertising lawyers and accountants from these countries.”

All this is hardly surprising when you consider that Latinos and African-Americans are far more likely to be home owners in Texas cities than in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, or San Francisco. Meanwhile, in a 2016 measurement of best cities for Latino entrepreneurs, Texas accounted for more than one third of the top 50 cities out of 150. In another measurement, San Antonio and Houston boasted far larger shares of Latino-owned businesses than Los Angeles, which also has a strong Latino presence.

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Crucially, this Texan boom doesn’t look to be slowing down. While many of America’s cities have been devastated by the pandemic, Texas’s model has proved resilient. New working-from-home policies may have devastated central business districts in New York and San Francisco. But only 5% of Houston employment and 2% of Dallas’s is in the CBD , compared to 20% in New York, and 16% in San Francisco. And as city centres stagnated and saw their residents leave — a phenomenon that also hit the densest parts of Texas cities — rapid growth in the suburbs and exurbs more than made up for the losses. In fact, Dallas was the largest gainer last year due to rapid growth on the periphery.

Of course, some aspects of small-town Texas life — with its evangelical leanings and sometimes neo-confederate sympathies — hint at the less attractive remnants of the Lone Star State’s past. But the success of its cities proves that the region is now defined by something else. Texans no longer need to look to New York, San Francisco, Chicago, or Los Angeles as a model for their cities — quite the opposite. When it comes to the new American urban dream, Texas is the future.

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

As Marianne Pina, who came to Dallas as a young adult before founding a five-million-dollar business specialising in minority recruitment and job placement, told me: “The American Dream stereotype still exists here. If you work hard, you can make it. It’s still up to you as an individual.”

But lurking in the background, the South’s rebirth remains threatened by its historical demons: racism, white nationalism and overzealous religious fervour. This is partly because, as the political scientist V.O. Key noted, the South remains the only region of America that has been conquered and subjugated. It is, he wrote in 1949, a prisoner of its racial legacy in its politics and social structure; only when that problem has been addressed can the region ascend to its potential.[1. O. Key, Southern Politics, (New York: Vintage,1949), pp.3-18; p.674-5] Indeed, the economic consequences of slavery persisted well into the 1960s.[2. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp.10-15, p.18,p. 25, p.80, p.240]

Even today, despite its ascendance, the South still lags somewhat behind the nation both in income and education levels. It is still castigated by progressive academics (increasingly a redundant concept) for being wedded to “racial conservatism”. It was only in 2013 that liberal chief justice Steve Breyer compared the region’s racial climate to “a plant disease”.

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Anyone who has spent time outside academia knows this is increasingly no longer the case. Ever since the 1960s, business leaders in the South have worked overtime to embrace racial diversity, if not for moral reasons, but economic ones.[3. Wright, p.265-268] Perhaps that explains why people from outside the region are pouring in: the Southern states account for six of the top ten gainers in interstate migration, led by Texas and Florida. In contrast, the biggest losers are the progressive strongholds of New York, Illinois, and California.

Significantly, while the African-American population has declined in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago, it is expanding in cities such as Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), Atlanta, Houston, and Nashville. Immigrants, mostly from developing countries and Asia, are also moving in. According to research by demographer Wendell Cox, the fastest growth in a city’s foreign-born population over the past decade was in Nashville, where it exceeded 40%, while those in DFW, Houston and Austin increased by more than 25%. Once seen as a dominant immigrant melting pot, Los Angeles, by contrast, saw their foreign-born populations shrink.

“In the past, you would go to New York, but people have found life was very challenging there,” developer La Lou Davies, who moved to Houston from Nigeria, explains. “It’s hard to find a place to live. By the 1990s, people started going to places like Houston, which have lower entry costs for housing and better business environments. Getting that first apartment, or a lease for a business, is so much easier.”

And so it is economic opportunity, rather than reactionary politics, that has fuelled the South’s renewal. Most southern states — even Texas, which is suffering a contraction in its energy industry — have lower unemployment rates than California and those in the Northeast. Overall, southern states have also enjoyed far more robust job growth over the past decade than most of the country, accounting for six of the eleven fastest growing states.

Some progressives have dismissed this growth, suggesting that the South is where capital goes to “slum”, citing low wages, anti-union laws and housing costs. Paul Krugman, for example, ascribes Texas’s success to low wages and better weather, suggesting that he hasn’t visited the state during the impossibly miserable summers.

Certainly, the region’s growth in the post-war era rested largely on low-paying industries such as textile and food processing. Today, however, DFW is home to 24 Fortune 500 company headquarters, ranking behind only New York and Chicago. Even NASDAQ is reportedly considering a move to Dallas-Fort Worth from the New York area.

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Tech employment has also been on the rise. Over the last five years, the South accounted for four of the top eleven tech growth regions: Austin, Orlando, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham all greatly outperformed the glamorous hubs of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Perhaps more important still, the South has become the epicentre for new job creation in professional and business services, the largest well-paying job classification. It also has held on to more manufacturing, and is now emerging as both the industrial, construction and energy capital of the country. For higher paying blue-collar jobs, southern regions account for a majority of the 15 strongest performers, while places like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago continue to languish.

Of course, construction plays a huge role. The South — as is evident everywhere from west Houston and north Dallas to the exurbs of Charlotte, Nashville, and Atlanta — is building far more new houses than their counterparts on either coast. Texas, with one-quarter fewer residents than California, has permitted more than twice as many new housing units this year, and has no housing crisis. Tennessee, now one of the 10 most popular destinations for immigrants from California, last year issued half as many housing units as California, despite having about one-sixth the population.

This is one reason why housing costs, even in the South’s hottest markets, tend to be as low as one-third, when adjusted by income, of places such as coastal California. Indeed, it is the opportunity to own a home that has likely made the South — which accounted for 43% of all sales in July — the predominant place for young families.

Yet the resurgence of America’s South still remains vulnerable. Yes, companies continue to move from the Northeast and California to Texas, Tennessee and other Southern states. But a number of corporate executives, particularly in the tech sector, have responded with horror to their socially conservative legislation. Texas’s recent abortion ban, for example, generated a strong set of counter-measures among tech firms: they blacklisted anti-abortion websites and offered protections for their own employees, including Uber and Lyft drivers who might be liable for transporting women to clinics.

Simply put, laws such the abortion bill, with could be enforced by state-sanctioned vigilantes, are unlikely to be a pull-factor for many would-be Southerners. Recent polls have found the majority of Americans disapprove of the bill, while at least one survey found that tough abortion laws would lead a majority of college-educated workers to move elsewhere.

The future of the South, then, depends on how it negotiates the rise of progressive politics — and its success will depend on how it negotiates their rise. Bills passed to restrict transgender rights, regulate voting or abolish critical race theory may have broader support than restrictions on abortion, but they have still led to boycotts, costing state economies millions of dollars.

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The South’s biggest enemy, however, remains its own troubled historic legacy on race. All too often Southern conservatives allow racism to slip through the cracks. Just last year, for example, several Republican County Chairs in Texas tweeted openly racist memes; one of the offenders was from Harris County, where non-Hispanic whites make up less than one-third of the population. This behaviour, combined with draconian measures such as the abortion bill, could ultimately hand Texas to the Democrats — whose calls for a ban on fracking would, according to a US Chamber of Commerce report, would cost more jobs than those lost in the Great Recession.

And then there’s Covid-19, which, given the region’s low vaccination rates, also presents a serious danger to the prosperity of the South. Southern conservatives such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis may be rightfully critical of extreme lockdowns and school closings, but opening up too quickly has had dire consequences in a region that suffers higher obesity and diabetes rates than the rest of the country.

For the South to thrive, then, it needs to find a programme that both respects its traditions and embraces a more pragmatic, economics-oriented focus. It needs to overcome the ghosts of its tragic past and avoid the pitfalls of progressivism. The South, in effect, faces a balancing act. And if it succeeds, it will be the states of the late Confederacy could shape the future of their one-time conquerors.