Covid: Won’t Get Fooled Again John Tierney How Really to Be Antiracist Kay S. JudgeTheStevenMakeMakeHymowitzAmericaAgainMalangaEmpireofFeesGlock Wokeism, the Highest Stage of ImpossibleGuyInflationNicoleManagerialismMalcomKyeyuneGelinasonandGothamSormanonChina’sDreamofOrderSPRING2022$6.50
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Theodore Dalrymple Oh, to England
After
26 China’s
Rodney Cook, Jr.’s Atlanta project seeks to reinvigorate American civic art.
authorities
Judge Glock 46 The Empire of Fees charges and fines drive government growth
power
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John Tierney Won’t Get Fooled Again the pandemic, Americans should never let public-health deprive them of their liberties.
106 Monumental Ambitions
Lance Morrow Columbia County, NY Diarist
John Paul Wright alleging that the United States imprisons too people rely on faulty history and bad facts.
Teach
Matt DeLisi and 68 Mass Incarceration
Brilliant,
60
Brian Patrick Eha Plural Like the Universe restive, alternately depressed and exhilarated, Portuguese poet Pessoa “Random”
19
to build anything in
Nicole Gelinas Inflation and the City New York will have to grapple with exploding prices, both economically and fiscally.
Stephen J. K. Walters Urban Renewal, Redlining, and Race Baltimore’s experience suggests, taking the eminent-domain bulldozer local governments will encourage Harris New York’s why it’s so hard Gotham.
The
restore
38
As
Malcom Kyeyune 54 Wokeness, the Highest Stage of Managerialism progressives wield institutional to impose a new political and social order.
be in
Building Costs One-of-a-kind regulations illustrate
Well-educated
Kay S. Hymowitz How Really to Be an Antiracist black kids to read.
Guy Sorman Impossible Dream of Order by past humiliations, the nation’s leaders seek to what they see as its rightful place in the world.
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had second thoughts about everything. Departments 3 In Prospect 4 Soundings Different Outcomes, Not Different Treatment; Nothing
Hysteria
away from
Steven Malanga Make America Make Again Amid a supply-chain crisis, Biden administration policies thwarting efforts to bring industrial jobs back home.
The Bookseller’s Tale 127 Contributors
The
Repetition, with Variations
has deep roots. Urbanities Catesby
better development. Connor
Fernando
many
12
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SPRING 2022 1 C ontents
Haunted
John O. McGinnis Lawyers for Radical Change legal profession, once a guardian of republican government, now a force for social upheaval.
76
Those
Geoff Shullenberger of the Idols new iconoclasm Leigh
About New York Street Violence; Give Kids a Sporting Chance; and other matters.
90 Deconstructing
How
98 Twilight
is
Paul Beston
Editorial Assistant Madeleine Miller
Daniel TheodoreKennellyKupfer
William Andrews, Michael Knox Beran, Claire Berlinski, Theodore Dalrymple, Stephen Eide, Nicole Gelinas, Edward L. Glaeser, Judge Glock, Victor Davis Hanson, Howard Husock, Kay S. Hymowitz, Andrew Klavan, Joel Kotkin, Charles Fain Lehman, John Leo, Heather Mac Donald, Rafael A. Mangual, John O. McGinnis, Bob McManus, John H. McWhorter, Judith Miller, Lance Morrow, Peter Reinharz, Aaron M. Renn, Christopher F. Rufo, Allison Schrager, Fred Siegel, Lee Siegel, Guy Sorman, Harry Stein, William J. Stern, John Tierney, Michael J. Totten, Adam J. White, Luigi Zingales
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Published by the Manhattan Institute 2022 2
Volume 32, Number
Planted (14”x18”, oil on canvas), by Jessica Dalrymple, who studied fine art at Hamilton College and trained as a painter at the Art Students League of New York. She has exhibited in many national and regional juried shows and received numerous awards, including the Fenimore Award, which granted her a solo exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York.
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New mayor Eric Adams can’t solve the inflation crisis on his own, Gelinas argues, but smart leadership can temper its worst effects. The fragility of supply chains has Democrats and Re publicans alike saying that they support the return of manufac turing to America. Yet as Ste ven Malanga’s “Make America Make Again” (page 38) shows, the Biden administration’s policy goals seem intended to drive in dustry off. Malanga suggests a betterJamesway.Burnham’s 1941 clas sic The Managerial Revolution a book that influenced George Orwell’s 1984—argued that an educated managerial class was emerging that would take con trol of the economy, replacing traditional capitalists. Burnham’s predictions proved only partial ly true, but if he were alive to day, says Malcom Kyeyune, he might see wokeness as the new managerial ideology, asserting power over society on behalf of progressive managers. Ky eyune’s “Wokeness, the Highest Stage of Managerialism” (page 54) explains what’s happen ing—and why the phenomenon is most advanced in the United States. Lawyers are part of the reason, too, contends John O. McGinnis in “Lawyers for Radi cal Change” (page 76). Earlier in American history, lawyers were a source for stability and repub lican institutions, as the Found ers expected. But no longer. Just look at the American Bar Association, which, these days, pushes incessantly for social up heaval. McGinnis celebrates the work of the Federalist Society, which seeks to restore the origi nal conception of law. “Antiracism” teaching is ubiq uitous today, but Kay S. Hy mowitz’s “How Really to Be an Antiracist” (page 19) says that all this agitation presumes that its intended recipients can actu ally read—and that’s far from the case. As Hymowitz explains, American students’ reading scores are not great generally, and for black kids, they’re truly dismal, condemning them to the lifetime disadvantages of illitera cy. The tragedy is that we know what works in teaching children to read: phonics. That disproven pedagogies remain in classroom use is an outrage. Big government isn’t just about runaway taxing and spending. As Judge Glock ob serves in “The Empire of Fees” (page 46), charges and fees— many hidden from taxpayers— account for most of the growth of government and are now top sources of revenue for states and localities. Any agenda seek ing to rein in government must take them into account, says Glock.Critics on the left and the right lament America’s propen sity to lock up criminals, but as Matt DeLisi and John Paul Wright counter in the mythbusting “Mass Incarceration Hysteria” (page 68), compelling data show that prisons should be fuller, not emptier. Many re cidivist serious offenders avoid prison, and when they do get put behind bars, they’re often released early. It’s time for a more realistic assessment—pub lic safety depends on it.
SPRING 2022 3 In P rospect M ore than two years have passed since the Covid-19 pan demic began, and it’s clear now that key parts of America’s pub lic-health response—unprec edented lockdowns, shutting down in-person schooling, and mask mandates—weren’t “the science,” as their proponents claimed, but evidence-free mis takes, with disastrous economic, educational, and social effects. Some want to continue such measures indefinitely. With vaccines and herd immunity bringing the virus under con trol, freedom and sanity seem to have prevailed, at least for now. But John Tierney’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (page 12) offers a stark warning: we mustn’t surrender our core liberties so meekly ever again. Covid has disrupted global supply chains, causing shortag es of essential goods and driv ing up the costs of transporting them. Combine that massive supply shock—which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will only make worse—with unprecedent ed levels of debt-fueled govern ment spending, and you get inflation spiking to levels unseen for decades. Nicole Gelinas’s “Inflation and the City” (page 60) assesses the likely impact on New York’s economy and budget: a slump in Wall Street profits, public unions demand ing double-digit wage hikes, and exploding construction costs— the last always a problem, even in low-inflation times, given the city’s draconian regulatory re gime, as Connor Harris explains in “Deconstructing New York’s Building Costs” (page 90). All of this will make Gotham’s re covery from Covid-19 tougher.
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Photographs by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty
One might expect that the investigators found that physicians and nurses demeaned or dispar aged patients based on their race. So what were the negative words that allegedly show bias? The most common was “refused.” If a patient refused treatment, refused recommendation for a procedure, refused allowing a blood draw, or refused a medication, the authors consider a physician’s or nurse’s writing about the refusal in the medical record an indicator of racism. But that word describes the patient’s actions—it is a fact, not an opinion. Other words that the AI robot found to indicate biases were “not ad herent” and “agitated.” Health Affairs highlights this paper in its advertising, but its spuriousness can be discerned only with a close look into its methods and results sections. Medical research is rife with similar studies. Another study, cited hundreds of times in the medical literature and published in the New Eng land Journal of Medicine, used simulated patient cases to determine whether physicians would assess black patients with chest pain differently from the way they would white patients with similar complaints. The physicians treated black men exactly the same as white men but referred black women less often for cardiac procedures than white women (it is not clear why). Journal ists and academics cite this study to support the idea of racism in cardiac care, but they rarely point out that men received equivalent care.
CITY JOURNAL4 T he political dis tortion of medi cal research has a sordid history, but it’s unfortunately not just a thing of the past. Today, a popular narrative has taken hold that a racist havereasonestablishmentmedicalisthethatblacksshorterlife expectancies, worse clinical outcomes for many diseases, and even excess maternal and infant mortality. The claim is unsupported by evidence, however, and believing it won’t do anything to improve black patients’ health.
Search for the terms “racism” and “medicine” in the National Library of Medicine database, and thousands of scientific publications appear. Journalists and a growing number of doctors re gard this as proof of medical discrimination. But most of these studies do not prove any causality; they merely document disparities in clinical out comes and medical services for black Americans. Nonetheless, they increasingly serve to justify such discriminatory practices as preferentially reserving scarce Covid-19 therapies for blacks. A rush to find racism typifies most of the many thousands of opinion pieces, original in vestigations, and review articles on the topic of clinical outcomes for black patients. That litera ture supports a media that has eagerly adopted the narrative of racism embedded in American health care. The result undermines the trust in medical care needed for successful patientphysician relationships and diverts scarce re sources in combating a nonexistent factor in poor health outcomes. The rules for conducting robust scientific re search require scientists to try to disprove their own theories. One can never absolutely prove a hypothesis correct; one can only show that experiments fail to disprove it. The investigator should begin by doubting the hypothesis and do his best to disprove it with carefully designed experiments. Unfortunately, too many studies on medical racism are carried out by investigators who, following the prevailing political trend, set out to confirm their ideas of a racist health-care system. A biased experiment can easily lead to a desired outcome, and emphasizing some re sults while ignoring others can lead to a faulty conclusion.Consider a 2022 research article in the highly regarded journal Health Affairs. Titled “Negative Patient Descriptors: Documenting Racial Bias in the Electronic Health Record,” the study uses automated systems to review more than 18,000 electronic medical records. It finds that “bad de scriptors” are used in the medical records 2.54 times as frequently in the records of black pa tients compared with white patients. The head line: “Our findings raise concern about racial bias and possible transmission of stigma in the medical record.”
NotOutcomes,DifferentDifferentTreatment
Most studies of alleged discrimination in medical care document racial disparities in clinical results, not biased treatment. Stanley Goldfarb
The widespread availability of large databases like the one used by the Health Affairs investigators allows studies of the difference between black and white pa tients’ utilization of procedures and health outcomes. A notori ous example, published in the Proceedings of the National Acad emy of Sciences, used a database from Florida to show that black newborn babies had a greater chance of survival if they were treated by a black pediatrician. A dangerous conclusion might be that patients should seek out physicians matching their own race. If this study is correct, we could be on the path to medical apartheid.Butthe study suffers from fa tal mistakes. Any study using a large database to assess the cause of death should undertake a chart-level assessment of the circumstances of the patient’s death. A large database is often riddled with errors, as the vari ous entries are made by administrative person nel who are rarely, if ever, trained in health care. It’s a game of telephone: the truth can become hopelessly muddled after multiple rounds. In this paper, the infant mortality data were never checked at the level of the patient’s chart, so it’s impossible to know which doctors actually cared for the patient during any acute event. More over, the authors had no way of determining the race of the physician of record besides scanning available photos, and almost 2,000 of the nearly 10,000 doctors in the sample had no photos (they were excluded from the analysis). Finally, it was not clear whether the infants who died had been referred from outlying hospitals to large medical centers because they were already critically ill. If so, the treating physician under whose care the patient died may have received a desperately ill baby with little chance of survival. These flaws notwithstanding, the study was widely cited in the press as proof of the need for more black physicians. USA Today headlined its story: “Black babies are more likely to survive
SPRING 2022 5 when cared for by Black doctors, study finds.”
Soundings
The coverage only fed the narrative that racism permeates American medicine. One could go on dismantling studies like these. But the key finding lacking in any of the studies of racism in medicine is evidence that the countless diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings to which doctors are now subjected would alter patient outcomes. A vast gulf re mains between methods of traditional medical research and these alleged remedies. In medi cal research, cures are proposed and then test ed in two populations; if an improvement in outcomes results between the two groups, the therapy may work, and the “null hypothesis” is rejected. But with an antiracist approach to improving medical outcomes for black patients, a cure is proposed, consisting of expensive and time-consuming antiracist training, but the test ing step is ignored. One simply must adopt the antiracist cure and implement it widely. To the extent that medical research exagger ates racism in clinical outcomes, it does a disser vice to identifying the real basis for discrepant results. Disparities aren’t always due to discrimi nation. If a genetic trait is the culprit—for exam ple, increasing susceptibility to chronic kidney
Soundings victim, and the media and the police generally labeled the incident a “random” attack.
In mid-February, Christina Yuna Lee was fol lowed into her Chinatown apartment and mur dered by Assamad Nash in what was termed a “random” assault. Nash had been arrested seven times in the previous nine months.
Doctors should conduct research and find treatments that work. They shouldn’t treat pa tients differently based on skin color. Doing so would undermine everything that physicians pledge when they first are called “doctor.” N ew York City is mired in a frightening swamp of violent crime. Assurances progresscatesTheselevels,belowrateabout,nothingreformcriminal-justiceproponentsfromofthatthere’stoworryasthecrimeisstillwellearly1990sringhollow.sameadvoforsocialwould
A few weeks later, Dorothy Clarke-Rozier, a middle-aged grocery-store employee, was on her way to work before dawn when she was sud denly stabbed to death by Anthony Wilson, who was described as emotionally disturbed and non compliant with his treatment regimen. “It was random,” reported the police. “He was a stranger to her. No relation.”
not be consoled if they were told that maternal deaths and poverty rates were worse in the 1990s. That crime isn’t as bad as it was 30 years ago is no consolation.Peopledo not experience life measured in decades but as it happens—and the sudden ac celeration of the murder rate in 2020 was pro foundly dislocating. Even if New York logged more murders in an earlier era, the city has never experienced a 40 percent rise in homicides over just one year. This sudden plunge into violence made people feel that the streets were chaotic and dangerous—and as criminologists attest, the impression that streets are unsafe is enough to deter many people from venturing out. In recent months, a series of depraved acts has shocked even the most jaded New Yorkers. On January 16, Martial Simon, a mentally ill career criminal, shoved Michelle Go into the path of a subway car, killing her. Simon did not know his
For the assailants, however—generally seri ously mentally ill, or with extensive criminal records, or both—little about these incidents deserves the label “random.” Certainly, nothing is random about their choice of prey. If street violence were truly random, we would expect the occasional assault on a strapping young bodybuilder, or a brawny retired ironworker. But those people never seem to be “randomly” attacked. Instead, victims of street assaults are generally vulnerable: women (often petite), older men, or the disabled or indigent. By labeling escalating street violence “ran dom,” we let criminals and public officials off the hook. The criminals may be mentally ill, but they are rational enough to attack people weaker than themselves. Our public-safety and disease—then encouraging physicians to become activists will do nothing to improve patients’ outcomes. The failure of antiracist programs to do anything to improve clinical outcomes for black patients will only deepen the frustration of clinicians and the dismay of patients.
In March, Gerald Brevard, a mentally ill man from Washington, D.C., shot three homeless peo ple in his hometown before traveling to New York to continue his killing spree. He shot two homeless men while they slept, killing one. The attacks were widely characterized as “random.” In 2018, Brevard was sentenced to a year in pris on for assault with a deadly weapon, but the sentence was suspended. This list could go on. The sense that one could at any time become the target of violent assault speaks to the anonymous nature of street crime. There is certainly a random quality to such attacks—but only from the perspective of the victims, who were merely going about their business when brutalized for no reason. For them, the violence is indeed arbitrary.
CITY JOURNAL6
YorkAbout“Random”NothingNewStreetViolence
The media and public officials portray the city’s escalating violent-crime problem as arbitrary—but the assailants and their targets are both entirely predictable. Seth Barron
nearly half of all parents of youth athletes say that their kids have yet to get back to sports participa tion after the virus put an end to their youth leagues. The results, researchers say, include rising obesity rates and levels of depres sion. With many local sports groups collapsing after more than two years of lockdowns and parents reporting less interest by children in sports, reviving this valuable contributor to kids’ health and well-being won’t be easy. In an Aspen Institute survey on youth sports released late last year, some 45 percent of Ameri can parents said that local community programs and so-called travel teams had either disappeared during the pandemic or returned with reduced capacity. Nearly a quarter said that the lost programs were an impediment to getting their children back into games, and 28 percent admitted that, since the shutdowns, their kids had lost interest in organized sports. That’s up from 19 percent in a similar survey taken a yearCovidearlier.has worsened what was a troubling trend even before the pandemic: a sharp de cline in children’s participation in physical ac tivity. From 2012 through 2019, Aspen surveys revealed, the share of American children partici pating in sports had declined to 31 percent, from 38 percent. Among lower-income and lower-mid dle-income kids, especially, studies show a sharp rise in inactivity. Meantime, rates of childhood obesity have been climbing, from about 11 per cent of all kids in the mid-1990s to 19 percent by 2019, and 22 percent last year. Participation in youth sports has also been closely associated with improved mental health and socialization skills. Not surprisingly, curtail ing local programs has taken its toll. A survey of youth athletes after the first round of Covid mental-health officials know that the untreated mentally ill pose a significant threat to society, and they should not shelter them under the guise that the violence they commit is unpre dictable. It is entirely predictable. If you continu ously throw rocks off a city roof, randomness may determine who gets hit—but that someone will be hurt is a certainty. As pandemic restric tions drag on in many parts of the United States, their negative impact on the mental and physical health of America’s children has become more obvi ous. Persistent school closures, in particular, have contributed to a decline in student achievement and a rise in men tal-health problems. Closely tied to school shut downs has been a dramatic curtailing of youth sports. Though children as a group have large ly escaped the most serious effects of Covid-19, Give Kids a SportingChance
The lockdown of youth athletics has taken a steep toll on physical and mental fitness.
SPRING 2022 7 Soundings
Steven Malanga
CITY JOURNAL8 Soundings
fornia parents of student athletes said that their kids had lost interest in sports. Similarly, in New York State, 38 percent of parents report that children have aban doned sports during Covid. By contrast, in Texas, with far looser Covid require ments, only 18 percent of kids have lost interest in sports, parents told pollsters. Athletes, parents, and or ganizers have grown frus trated by inconsistent Covid policies, which sometimes put low priority on getting kids back to play. In early 2021, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s admin istration delayed the opening of winter scholastic sports by nearly two months, even though Covid cases were declining and the state had allowed bars to reopen weeks earlier. Par ents and athletes protested the decision at the state capitol. The superintendent of Detroit pub lic schools, Nikolai Vitti, wrote a caustic letter to Whitmer, pointing out that more than 99 per cent of student athletes had tested negative for Covid the previous fall and warning that par ents and coaches were threatening to sue the administration.Insomestates and districts, advocates for youth sports balked at restrictions that shut down games, even as neighboring jurisdictions played on. In early 2021, Michigan coaches be gan lining up games next door in Indiana, a state with fewer restrictions. Pennsylvania gover nor Tom Wolf surprised parents and organizers by announcing at an August 2020 press con ference that he opposed school sports resum ing. That recommendation sent the state’s high school athletic association, which was ultimately responsible for making that decision but had not been consulted by Wolf, scrambling. By con trast, in neighboring New Jersey, as local papers noted, Governor Phil Murphy had worked with the state athletic association to develop a plan lockdowns in 2020 found 70 percent reporting moderate to high levels of anxiety when sports ended. Scores on quality-of-life tests, which as sess an individual’s overall mental well-being, also plunged, according to University of Wis consin researchers. Conversely, half of parents surveyed in the Aspen Institute study found that kids’ mental health greatly improved when they returned to play. Research has consistently demonstrated a long-term value of participa tion for youth development. One study found that the longer children participate in sports, the less likely they are to develop emotional prob lems like panic attacks and social phobias. Re sponding to the idea that playing sports during the pandemic put kids at risk, one researcher on the University of Wisconsin study said, “I take the opposite view. . . . We need to give them sports opportunities to keep them safe and healthy.”Athletics have suffered the most in places with the strictest lockdowns, such as Califor nia. Los Angeles County, for instance, initially required all youth athletes to wear masks while playing—even outdoors, where transmission is rare. In the Aspen survey, 40 percent of Cali
Terrorists also learned that politics is cor rupting our scientific organizations. From fed eral agencies to private universities, ideology is distorting science. When science is filtered through the lens of politics, nobody is likely to have much respect for empirical fact-finding. Thus, mixed public-health messaging eventually leads sensible people to the conclusion that some scientists refuse to admit their own ignorance.
America’s political polarization has taught ter rorists that our divisiveness will prevent any immediate and unified response to a biological attack. Many Democrats expressed doubt about Covid vaccines when Donald Trump was in the White House. When President Biden took office, some Republicans began questioning the vac cines. Some states demand vaccines and masks everywhere; some leave it to individual choice. that reopened youth sports. Though the Penn sylvania athletic association ultimately allowed school athletics to resume, opposition from state officials was so strong that entire athletic confer ences declined to play in the fall of 2020. Some school districts attributed their decision to cancel sports to liability fears, given the pushback from state health department officials. Two years of Covid has taught us much. We know that youth are at much less risk of se rious outcomes from the virus. Transmission rates among kids are substantially lower than those among adults, as numerous studies have shown. Conversely, lockdowns have exacted a steep toll on students’ physical, emotional, and academic life. We may be seeing the effects on this generation of young people play out for years after we’ve tamed Covid. Fortunately, the educators, politicians, and experts of some dis tricts have recognized the importance of youth athletics and have worked hard to get them go ing again. Before the pandemic, some 8 million high school students participated in at least one sport. Understanding the value of youth athletics is the first step toward rebuilding this essential American institution. A merican coun terterrorism experts’ biggest fear remains a biological weap ons attack in the United States. A conventional bomb can kill hundreds or even thousands, but a biological weapon can surreptitiously invade, spread, mutate, and kill millions. Biologi cal weapons have been used throughout history, from poisoning wells to “gifting” smallpox-infect ed blankets. Whether you believe that Covid-19 came from bats sold in a wet market or escaped from a Chinese lab, terrorists are observing the pandemic’s toll on America and taking notes for a future biological attack. What lessons might they have learned from America’s reaction to Covid?
The next lesson: America does not affirma tively defend itself from biological threats. We train our police to respond to active shooters in schools. We take off our shoes for scanning before we get on planes. But we do not regularly monitor wastewater supplies for the presence of new and dangerous pathogens. Only now are some local governments discovering that they can track Covid outbreaks by testing wastewater. We also leave our water supply wide open to at tacks; ten terrorists in ten cities adding a highly infectious virus to the water supply would have a devastating nationwide impact.
Terrorists can plan on the nation not having a ready-made response to any tailor-made virus.
LearnedTerroristsWhatfromCovid America remains vulnerable to pathogens. Thomas Hogan and Jim Fitzgerald
SPRING 2022 9
The first is that America is unprepared for a biological attack. Our national defense experts tend to look backward to past threats rather than preparing for future ones. The U.S. botched the response to swine flu under the Obama ad ministration, avoiding a damaging experience only through some good luck, but still failed to engage in research to address future threats.
Soundings
The pandemic has revealed that America’s in vestigative capabilities—scientific and military— are either fragile or fainthearted. Two years in, we still have no definitive answers about the origin of Covid. Nor do we appear to be press ing China particularly hard for an explanation. Tracing biological weapons is difficult unless you act quickly, competently, and decisively.
Breachers of the Peace A day at the park in Astoria, Queens, can be a bucolicbattalionsuntilexperience—thebikershowup.
Soundings W hen I moved to New York, I left behind my small cen tral running:ing,Gotham.toria,hometownPennsylvaniaforAstowhichisasclosebucolicasitgetsinSincemovI’vetakenupIgotonew
Finally, potential bioterrorists have learned that Americans are physically vulnerable to a biological attack. Our borders are porous. Our population is exceptionally obese and unfit. Particularly in dense urban areas, this lack of physical vitality makes an inviting target for weaponized viruses. The coronavirus took a dis proportionately heavy toll on obese Americans. If you’re a terrorist designing a virus, this is hard information to ignore. Yet some good news remains. The United States retains the ability to innovate quickly: through Operation Warp Speed, American phar maceutical companies performed a miracle in creating and mass-producing vaccines in an in credibly short time frame. Not since the nation geared up for World War II have we seen such a concerted effort to achieve a singular result. And Americans remain a strong, independentminded people. Even as the government bungled an economic response to the pandemic, markets rebounded. The American public has awakened to the fact that its leaders and the media might not be fully trustworthy or competent, so the age-old national tradition of questioning author ity has returned with vigor.
Last, any terrorist planning a biological attack on the U.S. will have to deal with the reality that Covid has acted as a national stress test. Somewhere in the depths of American law en forcement, agents, prosecutors, and scientists are considering the strategic implications of what we have been through in recent years. They are running models, preparing new approaches and defenses, and learning new lessons. With hard work and luck, they will have solutions in place if and when such a threat emerges.
CITY JOURNAL10
Theodore Kupfer
neighborhoods, size up nearby Greek restau rants, and find forgotten pockets of northwest Queens. I usually end my runs in Astoria Park, which sometimes reminds me of home—trad ing the Susquehanna for the East River, the Blue Mountain Ridge for the Manhattan skyline. It’s one of the things that made the transition tolerable.Still,everywhere has its annoyances, and As toria is one of many New York neighborhoods beset since the pandemic by noise from drag racers and dirt bikes, which can sometimes make one long for leaf blowers—that scourge of suburbia. (See “The Gotham Cacophony,” Au tumn 2021.) Organizing their meet-ups online, the racers constitute a discrete subculture. A former participant in New York’s drag-racing scene told me in an online message that a meetup some years ago was “one of the best days of my life.” But of all hobbies, it’s one of the more antisocial.Thisisn’t some isolated complaint from a hay seed. Vehicle noise is a common theme of com munity meetings for the NYPD’s 114th Precinct, and commenters on a neighborhood forum that tends to deride precious newcomers have coined the term “fart cars” for the problem. In October 2020, the New York Times published a long report on the city’s “insanely loud car culture.” Local politicians have sought to combat it: State Sena tor Andrew Gounardes, a Democrat representing South Brooklyn, sponsored the Stop Loud and Excessive Exhaust Pollution Act, which raises fines for modifications that make vehicles louder and requires police to carry decibel meters that can measure vehicle noise. The law takes effect thisButspring.officers can do only so much, as I discov ered on a balmy March afternoon, when I took The politicization of science, egged on by the mainstream media, has reduced public trust. Covid also taught terrorists that American supply chains for critical materials are weak, fractured, and often reliant on materials from outside the United States. Necessary supplies for vaccines, tests, and medical items come from other countries, forcing the nation to face short ages of items critical to our medical defenses. For instance, the United States struggled with a shortage of Covid testing kits. Over 50 percent of those kits are manufactured in China.
the cops!” When I said that I might, they circled one more time before tak ing off, but not before the last biker reached out and pounded me on the back of the head. It didn’t hurt much, but I wanted to prove a point (plus, onlookers seemed sympathetic to my situa tion). So I took the gentle man’s invitation and called the police, even though the bikers were long gone by now. After the cops ar rived and scolded a group of kids for playing on the rocks by the river, they thanked me, told me that they would send more pa trols to the area, and con ceded that there wasn’t much that they could do. To the responding of ficers’ chagrin, New York cops have been barred from giving chase to otherwise-law-abiding dirt bikers since 2012—because someone could get hurt. The motorcyclist’s assertion that he loves the police may well have been true, I was told. Bikers know that cops can’t do anything to them, and they relish reminding the authorities of this Nothingfact. about the incident shook me, but someone who isn’t a man in his twenties might have felt menaced. And while I’m under no il lusions about what living in New York actually entails, you can see why these kinds of incidents can make some people want to stay away. Bik ers roaming the streets with impunity—ruining a quiet weekend for a family outing at the park, or subjecting everyone else to ear-splitting en gine noise at 2 am—is one of those “grinding, day-to-day incivilities and minor street offenses that erode the quality of urban life, make people afraid, and create the milieu within which seri ous crime flourishes,” as the great criminologist George Kelling described such incursions. I don’t plan on changing my routine, though. You can’t let them win. advantage of the now-seasonably warm weather and set out running down Shore Boulevard, a two-mile stretch of road bordering the water that’s been closed to traffic since spring 2020.
SPRING 2022 11 Soundings
My noise-canceling earbuds were blaring either the new Animal Collective album or the latest episode of Bill Simmons and Ryen Russillo’s interminable NBA talk show, but neither can block out the unmistakable noise of bikes. Sure enough, when I looked over my shoulder, I saw a convoy of motorcyclists racing down the street. Admittedly, I antagonized them: I yelled something like, “Get in the bike lane!” as they passed and gestured helpfully to show them the way. I maintain that the motorized five-man weave that they were carrying out was the origi nal antagonism, but the bikers objected to my admonishment. They turned around and started circling me, and an unfriendly colloquy ensued. I didn’t want to compromise my pace, and they didn’t want to dismount, so the six of us con tinued yelling at each other as we made our way down the road. But when I informed one of my interlocutors that, actually, this street was only for pedestrians, they took that as a chal lenge. One invited me to “call the cops! I love
CITY JOURNAL12
Won’t Get Fooled Again
M ore than a century ago, Mark Twain identified two fundamental prob lems that would prove relevant to the Covid pan demic. “How easy it is to make people believe a lie,” he wrote, “and how hard it is to undo that work again!” No convincing evidence existed at the start of the pandemic that lockdowns, school clo sures, and mask mandates would protect people against the virus, but it was remarkably easy to make the public believe that these policies were “the science.” Today, thanks to two years of ac tual scientific evidence, it’s clearer than ever that these were terrible mistakes; yet most people still believe that the measures were worthwhile— and many are eager to maintain some mandates evenUndoinglonger.this deception is essential to avoid further hardship and future fiascos, but it will be exceptionally hard to do. The problem is that so many people want to keep believing the false hood—and it’s not just the politicians, bureau crats, researchers, and journalists who don’t want to admit that they promoted disastrous policies. Ordinary citizens have an incentive, too. Adults meekly surrendered their most ba sic liberties, cheered on leaders who devastated the economy, and imposed two years of cruel and unnecessary deprivations on their children. They don’t want to admit that these sacrifices were in They’revain.engaging in “effort justification,” a phenomenon famously demonstrated in 1959
SPRING 2022 13
The Biden administration rewarded Anthony Fauci for his Covid failures by giving him a new title, Chief Medical Advisor to the President.
PHOTOSTOCKIMAGES/ALAMY2020
John Tierney After the pandemic, Americans should never let public-health authorities deprive them of their liberties.
being whipped by belts—became more willing to make charitable donations to their club than were members at similar clubs with less extreme ceremonies.Ifonebrief bad experience can transform people’s thinking, imagine the impact of the pandemic’s ceaseless misery. It’s been a twoyear-long version of Hell Week, especially in America’s blue states, with Anthony Fauci and Democratic governors playing the role of frater nity presidents humiliating the pledges. Ameri cans obediently donned masks day after day, stood six feet apart, disinfected counters, and obsessively washed their hands while singing “Happy Birthday.” They forsook visits to friends and relatives and followed orders to skip work and church. They forced young children to wear masks on the playground and in the classroom— a form of hazing too extreme even for Europe’s progressive educators. Some Americans refused to submit to these rituals, but their resistance only intensified soli darity among the faithful. The most zealous kept their masks on even after they were vaccinated, even when walking alone outdoors. The mask became their version of a MAGA hat or a fra ternity brother’s ring; some have vowed to keep wearing theirs long after the pandemic. They’ve already called for permanent mask mandates on airplanes, trains, and buses, and they’ll probably clamor for more school closures and lockdown measures during future flu seasons. Facts alone will not be enough to change their minds. To undo the effects of the hazing, we need to ease their cognitive dissonance by show ing that they’re not to blame for their decisions. The mental mistakes were not made by citizens who dutifully sacrificed for two years. They as sumed that the Centers for Disease Control knew how to control disease and that scientists and public-health officials would provide sound sci entific guidance about public health. Those were reasonable assumptions. They just turned out to be wrong. After a great disaster, the traditional response is to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to investigate it, and a bill has already been introduced in Congress with an experiment involving a tame version of a hazing ritual. Social psychologists Elliot Aron son and Judson Mills offered female undergrad uate students a chance to join a discussion group on the psychology of sex, but first some of them had to pass an “embarrassment test.” In the mild version of the test, some students read aloud words like “prostitute” and “petting.” Others had to pass a more severe version by reading aloud from novels with explicit sex scenes and lots of anatomical obscenities (much more embarrass ing for a young woman in the 1950s than for students today). Afterward, all the students, in cluding some who hadn’t been required to pass any test, listened in on a session of the discus sion group, which the researchers had staged to be a “dull and banal” conversation about the sec ondary sexual behavior of lower-order animals. The participants spoke haltingly, hemmed and hawed, didn’t finish their sentences, mumbled non sequiturs, and “in general conducted one of the most worthless and uninteresting discus sionsButimaginable.”itdidn’tseem
Other studies showed the same effect in people who had undergone real-life initiation rituals to join fraternities and other groups. The more effort involved in the initiation ritual, the more valuable seemed the reward of membership. Researchers also reported that “shared dys phoric experiences” produced “identity fusion” within a group, making members more loyal and more willing to make further sacrifices for their comrades. Thus, fans of English soccer teams who suffered together through a losing season were more devoted to one another than were fans of a winning team, and members of Brazilian jujitsu clubs who endured a painful graduation ceremony—walking a gauntlet while
CITY JOURNAL14 Won’t Get Fooled Again
that way to the women who’d undergone the severe embarrassment test. They were far more likely than the other stu dents to give the discussion and the participants high ratings for being interesting and intelligent. The experiment confirmed the then-novel the ory of cognitive dissonance: the young women didn’t like thinking that they’d gone through an ordeal for the sake of a worthless reward, so they avoided this mental discomfort (cognitive disso nance) by rewriting reality to justify their effort.
Instead of heeding all this evidence of their mistakes, federal officials did their best to sup press it and silence dissenters. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, wrote to Anthony Fauci in October 2020 urg ing “a quick and devastating takedown” of the “three fringe epidemiologists” responsible for the Great Barrington Declaration. These three researchers—from the “fringe” institutions of Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford—criticized the deadly harms of the lockdowns and urged an al ternative strategy of focusing protection on the high-risk elderly, allowing natural immunity to grow among the younger population at low risk. Fauci and Collins went on a media offensive, dis missing the focused-protection strategy as “very dangerous” and “not mainstream science.” Other scientists quickly joined the attack on the Great Barrington Declaration by signing a rebuttal, the John Snow Memorandum, which asserted that lockdowns were effective and dismissed the idea of natural immunity, claiming that “there is
SPRING 2022 15 to create a Covid commission. In theory, this could be a worthy public service, allowing experts to sift the evidence impartially and determine which strategies worked, which ones failed, how much needless damage was done—and whom to blame for it. But in practice, which experts would the cur rent Democratic administration or Congress ap point? Presumably, the pillars of the public-health establishment—the same luminaries whose advice was followed so calamitously the past two years. Before Covid, the United States drew up plans for a pandemic and maintained the world’s most lavishly funded sci entific and medical institutions to deal with one. When the coronavirus arrived, the leaders of those institutions should have identified who was at serious risk and who wasn’t and adopted proven strat egies to protect the vulnerable while doing the least harm to everyone else. They should have monitored the effects of their policies and ad justed them based on what they learned. By hon estly communicating the risks and considering the overall public good, they could have tamped down needless fear and united the country be hind their efforts. Instead, they proceeded to ignore their own plans as well as the basic principles of science and public health. Leaders of the CDC terrified the public with worst-case scenarios based on computer models—and then used those bla tantly unrealistic projections to claim unprec edented powers and experiment with untested strategies. Their pre-Covid planning scenarios had rejected business and school closures even for a pandemic as deadly as the Spanish flu of 1918, but when the Covid-19 pandemic came, they imposed lockdowns without even pretend ing to weigh the hypothetical benefits against the tangible economic, medical, and social costs— not to mention the intangible costs in emotional hardship and lost liberty. Randomized clini cal trials conducted before the pandemic had repeatedly shown that masks did little or no good at preventing viral spread, but the CDC proclaimed them effective against Covid and promoted mask mandates nationwide. As the pandemic wore on, federal health officials looked for excuses to justify the lockdowns and man dates, hyping flawed studies and cherry-picked data, while failing to sponsor rigorous research testing their strategies. They stubbornly ignored the hundreds of studies around the world showing that, except in a few isolated places, lockdowns did not reduce Covid mortality and that mask mandates were generally ineffective and senselessly cruel in classrooms. The most glaring evidence came from places with the least restrictive policies, like Florida, along with the Nor dic countries Sweden, Finland, and Norway, which avoided lock downs and mask mandates—yet did as well as, or better than, the average in preventing both Covid deaths and overall mortality during the course of the pandemic.
“CDC leaders used unrealistic projections to claim unprecedented powers and experiment with untested strategies.”
be smarter to have an international organization do it, looking at the overall questions of manage ment, because if it’s only an assessment of the U.S., then it naturally becomes a political blame game.” But which international organization could be trusted to do a fair investigation? The obvious candidates, like the World Health Orga nization or the World Bank, would presumably rely on establishment figures loath to admit their mistakes. And even if they honestly evaluated the pandemic strategies, how much impact would no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.”
CITY JOURNAL16 Won’t Get Fooled Again
It was a remarkably irresponsible claim, given already-existing evidence at the time (the fall of 2020) that people’s immune systems developed defenses after a Covid infection. It would have been surprising if an infection didn’t produce durable protection. Yet this denial of natural im munity appeared in The Lancet and was signed by thousands of scientists and doctors, including Rochelle Walensky, who enshrined this unsci entific notion as CDC policy when she became the agency’s leader during the Biden adminis tration. It didn’t matter that natural immunity was repeatedly shown to be stronger and lon ger-lasting than vaccine immunity, or that other countries exempted people with natural immu nity from vaccine mandates. The Biden admin istration insisted on vaccinating everyone—and firing workers who refused, including hospital staff and other essential workers whose prior Covid infections gave them stronger immunity than their vaccinated colleagues. Instead of unit ing Americans against the virus, public-health officials chose painful policies that divided the faithful from the disobedient. The public needs to learn what went wrong dur ing the pandemic, but they’re not going to hear it from the Biden administration. It rewarded Fauci for his failures by giving him a new title, Chief Medical Advisor to the President, and would surely resist any serious investigation of its Covid strategies. Republicans could start the process if they win control of Congress in November and es tablish a Covid commission, but they’d be taking on the federal bureaucracy as well as the publichealth establishment. Scott Atlas, the health-policy analyst from the Hoover Institution who joined the Trump administration’s Covid task force and fought unsuccessfully against Fauci’s pandemic policies, says that his experience in Washington has convinced him that any government-run commission would be a mistake. “It’s massively naïve to think that our gov ernment will do anything objective,” Atlas says. “Any U.S. government panel would be viewed as, or be in reality, 100 percent partisan. It could
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SPRING 2022 17 no match for their media-savvy opponents, as Stanford’s John Ioannidis recently concluded after analyzing the credentials of the two sides. By considering how often the scientists’ re search had been cited in the scientific literature, he found that the signatories of the Great Bar rington Declaration included just as many topcited scientists as did the signatories of the John Snow Memorandum. But there were a few cru cial differences: the Snow signatories had many more Twitter followers, and they received a lot the report have? The mainstream press would probably either ignore it, as it ignored a recent meta-analysis concluding that lockdowns had “little to no effect” on Covid mortality, or attack it with the same tactics used to smear the Great Barrington Declaration as “not mainstream.”
The Great Barrington scientists’ ideas about focused protection and natural immunity have been vindicated—unlike the counterclaims and unproven strategies promoted in the John Snow Memorandum—but these researchers were Americans obediently forced young children to wear masks on the playground and in classrooms—a restriction too extreme even for Europe’s progressive educators.
CITY JOURNAL18 Won’t Get Fooled Again
fended his state’s draconian mandates by claim ing that an additional 40,000 Californians would have died if he had followed Florida’s policies. But that misleading figure, repeated uncritically by journalists, was based on a crude compari son of the states’ Covid mortality rates without accounting for the larger percentage of elderly people in Florida. When properly adjusted for the age of the population, the cumulative Covid mortality rate in Florida has been below the national average. As of late March, Florida’s rate was the 19th low est among the states, only a little higher than California’s, which was the 14th lowest. And by a more important indicator—the rate of excess mortality, a measure of how many more deaths than normal from all causes occurred during the pandemic—Florida has fared slightly bet ter overall than California, and notably better among the young. The rate of excess mortality among young adults has been consistently lower in Florida than in California, where the strict lockdowns presumably contributed to deaths from other causes. If California’s cumulative rate of excess mortality equaled Florida’s, about 5,000 fewer Californians would have died dur ing the pandemic. And if California’s unemploy ment rate equaled Florida’s last year, 500,000 fewer Californians would have been out of work.
Those are the hard truths that Americans need to hear after two years of Covid hazing. It won’t be easy convincing them that they fell for a decep tion, but it can be done, as DeSantis demonstrated at a recent appearance in Florida when he urged a group of college students on the podium to take off their masks. “We’ve got to stop with this Co vid theater,” he said. “If you want to wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous.” As usual, the facts were dis torted by the press, which pretended that by giv ing the students a choice, DeSantis was somehow guilty of “bullying”—as if these poor students hadn’t been bullied for two solid years into wear ing masks that they didn’t need. Some students on the podium kept their masks on, looking like meek pledges during Hell Week, but a few were emboldened to uncover their faces and breathe fresh air. At least for the moment, they were free to wonder whether this ridiculous fraternity was worth staying in anymore. more attention on Twitter than in the scientific community. They had the dubious distinction of scoring much higher on a scale called the Kar dashian index, named after the celebrity Kim Kardashian, which measures the discrepancy be tween a scientist’s social-media footprint and the citation impact of the scientist’s research. Twitter enabled activist scientists to exert an outsize im pact on the public debate over Covid strategies. The lockdowns and mask mandates came to be perceived as “the science,” parroted by the main stream press and enforced by censors on socialmedia platforms. The activists kept pretending that those strate gies worked, but their narrative became harder to sustain. Surveys by the Pew Research Center showed that the public’s trust in scientists rose at the start of the pandemic and then began fall ing. The earliest and steepest declines occurred among Republicans, so that today only 15 per cent of Republicans have “a great deal of con fidence” in scientists—while more than a third have “not too much” or “none at all.” Democrats remain far more trusting, but even their confi dence in scientists is now lower than at the start of the “Publicpandemic.trustin science is over unless there’s a thorough review of the pandemic policies,” says Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, one of the Great Barrington Declaration scientists. Unlike Atlas, he believes that a federal Covid commission could serve a purpose. “The harms of the lock downs are so obvious, and the failure to protect the vulnerable so obvious, that it would be hard for a commission to whitewash the facts. It’s go ing to take political will, but it needs to be done to restore trust in public health.”
For now, the best opportunity for a public airing of the facts may be the 2022 election cam paign. Some candidates are already attacking the lockdowns and mask mandates, and pandemic strategies could become a major issue in the 2024 presidential race, especially if Ron DeSantis runs on his success as Florida’s governor. That pros pect has already inspired hit pieces in the media and attacks from Democrats like Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, which suffered one of the nation’s worst surges in unemployment dur ing its strict lockdowns. Newsom recently de
SPRING 2022 19
T here’s an old joke about a chem ist, a physicist, and an economist stranded on a desert island with only a sealed can of food. The chemist and physicist each pro pose their own ideas about how to open the can. The punch line comes from the economist, who proffers: “First, assume a can opener.” I’ve been brooding over this joke while watch ing “antiracism” teaching—some might call it Critical Race Theory (CRT) or social justice—take over the American education world with Omi cron-like speed. Lesson plans, books, tips for inclass activities, discussion points, and curricula swamp the teachers’ corner of the Internet. The proposals come from a metastasizing number of pedagogic entrepreneurs and activist groups, some savvy newcomers, some influential vet erans like Black Lives Matter at School, Learn ing for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance), Teaching People’s History (the Zinn Education Project), the Racial Justice in Education Resource Guide (from the National Education Associa tion), and, of course, the current star: the 1619 Project (the Pulitzer Center). To me, all these ideas seem like the ruminations of desert-island economists. They start with an impossible prem ise: that the students of these recommended texts actually know how to read. I am overstating, but not by much. A signifi cant number of American students are reading fluently and with understanding and are well on their way to becoming literate adults. But they are a minority. As of 2019, according to
How Really to Be an Antiracist the National Association of Education Progress (NAEP), sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, 35 percent of fourth-graders were read ing at or above proficiency levels; that means, to spell it out, that a strong majority—65 percent, to be exact—were less than proficient. In fact, 34 percent were reading, if you can call it that, be low a basic level, barely able to decipher material suitable for kids their age. Eighth-graders don’t do much better. Only 34 percent of them are proficient; 27 percent were below-basic readers. Worse, those eighth-grade numbers represent a decline from 2017 for 31 states. As is always the case in our crazy-quilt, mul tiracial, multicultural country, the picture varies, depending on which kids you’re looking at. If you categorize by states, the lowest scores can be found in Alabama and New Mexico, with just 21 percent of eighth-graders reading proficiently. The best thing to say about these results is that they make the highest-scoring state—Massachu setts, with 47 percent of students proficient— look like a success story rather than the medi ocrity it is. The findings that should really push antiracist educators to rethink their pedagogical assump tions are those for the nation’s black schoolchil dren. Nationwide, 52 percent of black children read below basic in fourth grade. (Hispanics, at 45 percent, and Native Americans, at 50 per cent, do almost as badly, but I’ll concentrate here on black students, since antiracism clearly centers on the plight of African-Americans.)
Kay S. Hymowitz Teach black kids to read.
The numbers in the nation’s majority-black cit ies are so low that they flirt with zero. In Bal timore, where 80 percent of the student body is black, 61 percent of these students are below Charts by Alberto Mena
In April 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Ap peals ruled in favor of former students suing Detroit schools for not providing an adequate education. The suit cited poor facilities and inad equate textbooks, but below-basic literacy skills were the primary academic complaint. One of the plaintiffs was a former Detroit public school student who went on to community college and ended up on academic probation, in need of a reading tutor. His story is typical enough as to be barely worth mentioning—except for the fact that he graduated at the top of his public high school class. And as if this isn’t bad enough, the numbers appear likely to get worse, with the im pact of Covid-19 disruptions. The tragedy for black children and their fami lies, as well as a nation trying to reckon with racial disparities rooted in its own history, can’t be overstated. If you want to make sense of ra cial gaps in high school achievement, college at tendance, graduation, adult income, and even incarceration, you could do worse than look at third-grade reading scores. Three-quarters of be low-proficient readers in third grade remain be low proficient in high school. Before third grade, children are learning to read; after that, they are reading to learn, in one well-known formula tion. All future academic learning in humanities, social sciences, business, and, yes, STEM fields depends on confident, skilled reading. “The kids in the top reading group at age 8 are probably going to college. The kids in the bottom reading group probably aren’t,” as Fredrik deBoer, the iconoclastic author of The Cult of Smart , has put it. And the absence of a sheepskin is hardly the Racial gaps in third-grade reading scores offer a window onto everything from college graduation rates to adult income levels.
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CITY JOURNAL20 How Really to Be an Antiracist basic; only 9 percent of fourth-graders and 10 percent of eighth-graders are reading profi ciently. (The few white fourth-graders attend ing Charm City’s public schools score 36 points higher than their black classmates.) Detroit, the American city with the highest percentage of black residents, has the nation’s lowest fourthgrade reading scores; only 5 percent of Detroit fourth-graders scored at or above proficient. (Cleveland’s schools, also majority black, are only a few points ahead.)
SPRING 2022 21
How Really to Be an Antiracist and Pearl Harbor, much less grasp their signifi cance enough to facilitate comprehension? Pro gressive educators are not only failing to factor in the sad truth about students’ reading ability but also overlooking the fact that American students do even worse in geography and history than in reading.Another lesson plan for elementary and mid dle school students, this one recommended in the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 portal, reveals a similar chasm between politicized pedagogical fantasy and student reality. “In this unit, students learn to identify underreported stories of migration, and what is missing from mainstream media representations of migrants’ experiences,” the plan reads. “They analyze nonfiction texts and images, practice identifying perspectives in me dia, and synthesize their learning to form a new understanding of migration. In their final project, students communicate how their perspective on migration has grown or changed through a creative project, original news story, or existing news story edited to provide a more holistic pic ture of migration.” The lesson’s unspoken pur pose is to impress students with the putatively anti-immigrant slant of American news. But an elementary schooler probably doesn’t know what the “mainstream media” is and is even less likely to have read any of it. Basic readers will have difficulty deciphering words like migrant or im migration. (Unless they have family there, they also won’t know the location of Syria or Sweden, two of the immigrant countries mentioned in the lesson plan—there’s that geography problem again.) The same obstacles are bound to trip up the typical middle schooler; remember, 68 per cent of eighth-graders can’t read proficiently. This is not education but indoctrination: teach ers are being told to foist an opinion worthy of debate on ill-informed children, while denying them the capacity to evaluate it critically.
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The irony would bring tears to the eyes of Mar tin Luther King, Jr. Before the Civil War, most Southern states had laws forbidding slaves from reading or writing. Enslaved men and women were known to risk whippings and death in order to learn their letters, sometimes with the aid of a sympathetic white but frequently on the strength of their own determination. “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free,” the most famous of those readers, Frederick Douglass, promised. What would he, or King, make of an education system that leaves more than half of twenty-first-century black kids barely literate?
Scour antiracist education sites on the Internet, and you’ll get the distinct impression that no one in the field has grasped the implications of this reality or that educating children in any familiar sense of the term was never the goal, anyway. In fact, a number of antiracist activists and educa tors have been blunt about their indifference to teaching reading. What else could it mean when the chancellor of the nation’s largest school sys tem scorns “worship of the written word” as an imposition of white supremacy? In fairness, most educators are probably simply assuming the pro verbial can opener—namely, competent readers who also have considerable background knowl edge, including basic facts about the world and history. Learning for Justice, for instance, recom mends a fourth-grade text about a woman named Helen Tsuchiya. Though Tsuchiya was born in the U.S., the site tells us, she was moved “to an internment camp surrounded by barbed wire af ter the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” What are the chances that the fourth-grader reading at a ba sic level—never mind the majority of black chil dren who are reading below basic—will be able to decipher words like internment, barbed wire,
Social-justice educators would doubtless object that the catastrophic literacy rates of black stu dents are solid proof of the structural racism and teacher bias that they’re intent on fighting. They would rightly observe that reading scores corre late with parental income and education; black children tend to come from less affluent and less educated homes, a fact at least partially tied to worst of it. Upward of 80 percent of adolescents in the juvenile justice system are poor readers, according to the Literacy Project Foundation. Over 70 percent of inmates in America’s prisons cannot read above a fourth-grade level. It’s been said that authorities use third-grade reading scores to predict how many prison beds will be needed. That meme is probably apocryphal, but the sad fact is that it makes sense.
SPRING 2022 23 they’ve seen before, and to guess, with the help of illustrations and intuition, when they encoun ter an unfamiliar word. The guiding assumption is that reading is a natural process and teachers should just guide kids toward literacy. Children don’t need direct instruction to read any more than they need instruction to learn to talk. historical racism. But evidence that racial disadvantage should not be an obstacle to literacy is there for anyone who bothers to look. Nearly 60 percent of black children in New York City charter schools read pro ficiently; that’s true for only 35 percent of those in district schools. (And 80 percent of the kids in New York City charters are economically disadvantaged.) Unless someone can prove that district teachers are more racist than those at charters— an unlikely theory—it would seem that charters simply do a better job of teaching kids to read. The differ ences between states also point to a pedagogical, rather than whitesupremacist, explanation for racial discrepancies. People might rea sonably predict that poor Southern states would have lower overall reading scores than more affluent states in the Northeast, and they’d be right. But the Urban Institute has developed a nifty interactive chart that lets us compare states adjusting for race and poverty (or other variables). The counterintui tive results show that Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation and one with a dreadful racial history and an equally dreadful education record, is turning things around. The state is now more successful at teaching disadvantaged black chil dren to read than top-ranked and affluent Massachusetts and New Jersey. These successes are no mystery, but they do require a quick history of the na tion’s long-simmering “reading wars.” For at least a generation now, American educators’ preferred approach to reading has been known as “whole language.” Whole language encour ages teachers to do “shared” and “interactive” reading with children, to sight-read words that “Once you learn to read, you will forever be free,” said Frederick Douglass. COLLECTION/NEWSCOMEVERETT
CITY JOURNAL24 How Really to Be an Antiracist learn to blend those sounds, or phonemes, together into syllables, which they then combine into words. With practice, the process becomes fluent, even automatic, freeing up the bandwidth for a fuller comprehension of the mean ing of the words. One example from journalist Emily Hanford, who has done some of the best work on reading science, succinctly cap tures the problem when children are not taught to decode. Hanford interviewed a group of adolescents reading at a third-grade level in a phonics-oriented class in a Hous ton juvenile detention center. She asked 17-year-old DeShawn what he is learning in his class. “Like Ωph.≈
Struggling Readers SOURCE:
http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=Reading,4
Percentage of U.S. fourth-graders reading below NAEP’s basic level ALL U.S.
BLACKHISPANICFOURTH-GRADERSFOURTH-GRADERSFOURTH-GRADERS34% 45%52 % SliR
It’s a Ωf,≈ like physics,” DeShawn ex plained. “I never knew that.” Though whole language has been failing many millions of schoolchil dren like DeShawn (and some un known number of middle-class kids whose parents can afford to spend money on private tutors to teach the decoding skills that their children should have learned in school), ed ucators have been loath to give up their dreams. So they introduced a (supposedly) new approach with the benign-sounding name “bal anced literacy.” In theory, balanced literacy blends the two methods of whole language and phonics; in practice, phonics gets short shrift. Few ed schools or teaching pro grams show student teachers how to teach phonics in the defined, log ical progression necessary for students to catch on to the complexities of the English language. Basement-level reading scores haven’t budged. Still, signs of change are evident. In 2013, legislators in Mississippi provided funding to start training the state’s teachers in the science of reading; I’ve already noted their encourag ing results. Other states, including Florida, Colorado, and Tennessee, are gesturing toward But over recent decades, linguists, cognitive psychologists, and data-driven educators have reached a consensus that this is not what makes Johnny read. The beginning reader needs, first of all, to “de-code.” To accomplish that, teachers must systematically impart “phonemic aware ness.” The shorthand for this approach is “pho nics”—that is, the relation between the letters on the page and the sounds of speech. Children NAEP Report Card:
ber of school districts are interviewing prospec tive teachers, even those for elementary school, fixated on one question: “What have you done personally or professionally to be more antira cist?” The best answer to that question would be: “Teach black children how to read.” Better yet, change the question to “What’s the best way to teach reading?” and we might see some real ra cial progress. taking reading science more seri ously. And David Banks, New York City’s new schools chancellor, can celed his predecessor’s dismissal of the “white worship of the written word.” Teachers have been “teach ing wrong” for 25 years, Banks said. “ ΩBalanced literacy≈ has not worked for Black and Brown children. We’re going to go back to a phonetic approach to teaching.”
The good news comes with some cautions: first, for reasons no one understands, a significant minority of children will learn to read compe tently without getting any direct in struction in how to sound out words; their success continues to have the unintended consequence of provid ing balanced literacy supporters cover for their otherwise disastrous results. Second, phonics needs to be taught systematically from kinder garten through third grade; no one should expect solid results with a ran dom sprinkling of “phonemic aware ness” here and there, the practice in most balanced literacy classes. Third, learning how to decode is not every thing; to become proficient readers, children also must know what words mean. They will, in other words, need to develop a rich vocabulary and var ied background knowledge. Finally, intelligent teaching methods are not a panacea for racial and income dis parities; no matter how well black children are taught to read, white children are still more likely to grow up with educated parents, which means that they will be hearing more vocabulary words, more complex language, and more useful information about the wider world. This problem can be solved over time but only if more disad vantaged kids are given the chance to pass on the benefits of their own literacy to their children. The reading emergency should be the primary focus for educators, especially those in a posi tion to help black children. Yet a growing
num A Big Difference Reading-Proficientin Students SOURCE: NYC Charter School Facts 2021–22, New York City Charter School Center, fact-sheets/charter-factshttp://nyccharterschools.org/policy-research/ NYC CHARTERSNYC PUBLICBLACKSHISPANICSSCHOOLS35%37% 58% 53%
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China’s Impossible Dream of Order by Europeans, Americans, and, in a supreme humiliation, the Japanese. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Chinese emperors had to sign treaties of surrender in bunches and to surrender territory, before the Empire collapsed totally in 1911. Then followed a half-century of violent strug gle between warlords, until the victory of the Communist army, led by Mao Zedong and sup ported by the Soviets, which put the Communist Party in power. The real reason Mao and his successors found acceptance among the various peoples of China was not due to the new lead ers’ Marxism; it was because they ended the civil wars. They replaced the wars with the eradica tion of the middle class, totalitarian constraints on private life, the destruction of ancient cus toms, and the crushing of religions—but for the Chinese, anything was better than the horror of ceaseless civil strife. Too often in the West, we believe that the Chinese Communist Party’s le gitimacy is based on economic growth, but this didn’t take off until 1979. More fundamental than growth is order. The Beijing regime is, in a way, akin to Franco’s Spain, more fascist than Communist, though any classification should be historically contextualized. China under the CCP wants to maintain order, then, but it also wants to erase the stain of the co lonial period. The official historiography blames
The Lithuanian government dared to allow Tai wan to open a representative office in Vilnius, the capital, using the name Taiwan, instead of Taipei, the term that China prefers. Taipei is a city whose existence the Chinese regime cannot deny; Taiwan is a dissident republic that isn’t supposed to exist. The Lithuanians, fiercely antiCommunist after enduring Soviet Union occupa tion, acted deliberately. Perhaps they underes timated Beijing’s aggressive reaction—but then the West sometimes has difficulty grasping what appears to be Chinese paranoia.
Guy Sorman Haunted by past humiliations, the nation’s leaders seek to restore what they see as its rightful place in the world.
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In trying to understand China, Henry Kiss inger observed—and he practiced this advice— one should put oneself in its place. Chinese leaders, haunted by a desire for international recognition, perceive the slightest breach in dip lomatic protocol as a resurrection of imperial ism. China was once the world’s greatest power, but it was late to recognize the West’s rise, as well as the importance of science and industry in fueling that rise. This blindness led to China’s ef fective colonization in the nineteenth century—
ince November 2021, Lithuania has been China’s enemy Num ber One. How did a country with 2 million inhabitants man age to provoke Chinese leaders to the point of ending diplo matic and commercial relations?
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The Empire of Lies , my interlocutors would ask why I was writing about their country and not my own, France. It is true that Westerners have published countless books on China; there are comparably few written about the West by Chi neseThisauthors.Chinese indifference to the external world characterized the Empire, as the story of the ad miral Zheng He illustrates. In 1405, the Yongle emperor of the Ming Dynasty tasked Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch, with exploring the world be yond the seas. Was this curiosity, or a will to conquest? The project was without precedent for this rural empire, which had never before even had a maritime fleet. Admiral Zheng He would head up a gigantic squadron, carrying, at its apogee, nearly 30,000 warriors on 300 vessels, and undertaking seven expeditions from 1405 to 1433. These journeys took Zheng He from what is today Indonesia to the Horn of Africa. Zheng concluded that none of the civiliza tions he encountered was of comparable power to China or, indeed, of much interest. At no point did he envision taking possession of faroff lands. After the Yongle emperor’s death, in 1424, his son, the Hongxi emperor, ordered the the colonizers for all the woes that brought down the Empire. Chinese historians thus greatly ex aggerate the importance of the Opium Wars (fought between 1839 and 1860), which were merely local conflicts, intensified by commercial rivalries between Chinese and British businesses. In reality, the Empire was a victim above all of its incapacity to modernize—a task that Japan, dur ing the same period, accomplished. If we consider this mind-set today, we’ll be less surprised that a rising China is indignant that international institutions, international laws, and human rights are imposed on it, while it had no part in their elaboration. If we were Chinese, we would not easily accept the pres ence of the American fleet patrolling our coast lines. As a Chinese ambassador to France asked: How would the Americans react if they saw, ev ery day, the Chinese war fleet along the Califor nia coasts? T he Chinese, including in intellectual circles, bristle when Westerners put them under a mi croscope and judge them. When I traveled ex tensively in China in the mid-2000s for my book Chinese president Xi Jinping has amassed Mao-like authority.
Italy also possess considerable soft power, as one can see in their ability to attract tourists and the worldwide appeal of their fashions. Soft power can also be ideological: the Soviet Union’s draw came not from Russian literature but from its model of society, which propaganda presented as a shining alternative to capitalism and colonial ism. It was all a deception, of course, but it fooled many for a long time.
Chinese leaders’ aspiration to international le gitimacy demands a soft power as attractive as that of the Americans and Europeans. Mao real ized this as he exported the revolutionary ide ology that bore his name, inspiring movements that shook India, Indonesia, Peru, Italy, and France during the 1960s. Western intellectuals flocked to Beijing seeking enlightenment, just as an earlier generation went to Moscow to bow be fore the dictatorship of the proletariat. Maoism was eradicated after Mao’s death. Since then, China has exported almost nothing immaterial, whether ideas, films, or books. (Only Chinese science fiction has found an international audi ence, in the translated works of Cixin Liu and a few other writers.)
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In the early 2000s, one could still find the old pagodas here and there, surrounded by facto ries. Today, the ancient city has been leveled. Only a few vestiges, such as the Forbidden City, survive as tourist attractions, and these are badly restored amid Beijing’s ordinary buildings and urban highways. Beijing is not only among the most polluted capital cities in the world; it is also theTheugliest.poverty of contemporary Chinese culture holds true in literature. When Gao Xinjian, the greatest contemporary Chinese writer, received the Nobel Prize in 2000, the Chinese govern ment, far from celebrating his achievement, let maritime explorations stopped (though Zheng He conducted one last voyage under the Yon gle emperor’s grandson). The construction of new boats was banned, and the existing fleet destroyed.Thememory of these expeditions remained largely effaced until 2006, when a great exhibi tion in Beijing resurrected it. The contemporary goal was ideological, not historical: to show how China, unlike the West, had always respected other civilizations, never imposed its religions or norms, and never colonized distant lands. This was intended to reassure Africans and Asians about the presence of Chinese maritime bases, which the newly assertive government was seek ing to establish around the globe. “There is nothing to learn from others,” the Ming emperors had concluded. This haughty stance reemerged when European religious mis sions, beginning in the seventeenth century, and then diplomatic and commercial missions, failed to forge relations with the emperor. Over three centuries, all emissaries—Jesuits, ambassadors, and business interests—were sent away for the same reason: China had nothing to learn from theThisoutside.indifference has not totally disappeared. It was not until the regime of Deng Xiaoping, after Mao’s death, in 1976, that China began watching the West closely, careful to import only techniques and not cultural and political ideas. It was then that the number of Chinese students in American universities surged, mostly in techni cal fields. President Xi Jinping has been explicit in this emphasis, continually repeating his hos tility to liberal ideas; piracy of Western technolo gies, on the other hand, is encouraged.
China’s soft power has dropped to near-zero because the Communist Party systematically destroyed Chinese civilization. Mao began the destruction. In a speech delivered in 1949 from Tiananmen Square, he called for “an ocean of smokestacks” in the capital, which had been known as the “city of a thousand pagodas.”
T he Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye popularized the term “soft power,” denoting vari ous nonquantifiable cultural values of universal significance. The soft power of nations depends on their ability to win the admiration, and even the allegiance, of people in other countries. By this measure, the United States remains the lead ing soft-power nation, thanks to its incomparable cultural vitality, both popular and elite—from Disney to the Metropolitan Opera. France and Portrait of Zheng He, the fifteenth-century admiral whose voyages led him to conclude that China had little to learn from the outside world.
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B ack in 2006, it was still possible to find traces of religiosity in a nation once profoundly reli gious. In China, religion must be spoken of in An early sixteenth-century painting found in Taiwan’s National Palace Museum; Taiwan has become the repository of much of traditional Chinese culture.
The result has been a kind of two-level reli gious practice in temples, mosques, pagodas, and churches, with an officially sanctioned form and a continuing illegal fervor. The Commu nist Party succeeded in bureaucratizing the two largest official Chinese religions, Taoism and it be known that he did not represent China— it pretended that he was not truly Chinese but French, as he was living in Paris when awarded the Nobel. (In reality, Gao writes in Chinese and does not speak a word of French.) Then Beijing pressured the Nobel committee to honor a true Chinese writer—that is, one selected by the Communist Party: Mo Yan. The Nobel jury gave in, crowning him in 2012. When I met Mo Yan in Beijing that year, I noted that, in his books, he denounced the destruction of the Chinese patri mony but had never mentioned the 1989 massa cre of students in Tiananmen Square. We were in a busy café, and, nervously looking around, he responded: “It is much too early to speak of that.”
the plural, such as it lives on in Taiwan. Before the Communist conquest, the Chinese adhered to Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim, Catholic, and Prot estant forms of worship. The Communist Party, after trying to eradicate these spiritual tradi tions by assassination of religious leaders and other repressive measures, decided to tolerate them, as long as they accepted party control. As Xi Jinping declared in 2017, at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party: “Religious personnel or leaders in China must be Chinese in orientation and provide active guidance to religions so that they can adapt themselves to socialist society.”
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SPRING 2022 31 ness; and also an economic model that some think is more effective than the West’s liberal capitalism. The exportation of Chinese soft power goes partly through the so-called Confucius Insti tutes, which the Communist Party has sought to spread across the world, especially on university campuses. Since the institutes are unencumbered by any academic ethic and censor truths unpalat able to the party, leading American universities refuse to host them. But some schools, needing the funds, accept them. One might be surprised by the institutes’ name. After all, Con fucius is, in principle, hated by the Commu nist Party, since his thought exalts a lost paradise—the antith esis of the progress that the CCP prom ises. True, Confucius counsels obedience to rulers, but he also ar gues for revolution if their behavior is immoral. But the party is of the view that, beyond China’s borders, Confucius is a recognizable brand. Still, China’s soft power, at a low ebb since the Tiananmen massacre, has continued to de cline with Xi Jinping’s rise. The limited creative freedom in Communist China that had emerged before Xi has now vanished. The relatively pre dictable rules of succession that Deng Xiaoping established—collegial leadership, a maximum of ten years in power—have been replaced by a new personality cult and a government that, in some ways, is as oppressive as that under Mao. It is a regime unlikely to win over people in China or outside of it. Xi is betting on China’s vast construction of new infrastructure in other countries to ex pand its influence globally—the new silk roads. But the Belt and Road initiative, as the project is known, hasn’t always gone smoothly, espe cially when poorer countries in Africa or Central America discover that they must pay back Chi nese loans at rates higher than those in the world markets and that the specific building projects are directed, and often executed, by Chinese ex patriates, who frequently despise the locals. Buddhism, the oral teaching of which depends on the quality of masters, who were exterminated, exiled, or replaced by patriotic personnel. Islam is no better tolerated, though it is practiced by some ethnic Chinese, whose families converted centuries ago. The fault of the horrifically op pressed Uighurs of Xinjiang is to be both Muslim and of another race. As for underground Christi anity, from what I have seen in its secret gather ings, it is a hodgepodge of beliefs borrowed from various Christian sources—more reflecting a de sire for Westernization than expressing a coher ent faith. I emphasize the disappearance of re ligions because they were constitutive of the old China and be cause the Communist Party fears them more than it does demo cratic dissidents. Liu Xiaobo, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, who died under guard in a Chinese hospital in 2017, managed to convince his Western interlocutors, including me, that democracy was compatible with Chi nese civilization; but few know of him outside of university circles. The same is true of Wei Jingsheng, considered the leader of the Chinese democracy movement. He was freed from Chi nese captivity in 1997, following pressure from President Bill Clinton, but since then, he has lived in exile in America and is without a signifi cant audience in China. The most destabilizing recent protest against the Communist Party, by contrast, was of religious origin: in 1999, 10,000 members of the Falun Gong Buddhist commu nity occupied, in silence, an area near the party’s Central Committee compound in Beijing. The sect was subsequently crushed in China, but party leaders still ask themselves how it could have escaped their vigilance. What form of soft power, then, is to be ex ported, and how, given the rest of the world’s lack of appetite? There is, of course, the Chinese language—the official Mandarin—useful in busi “Xi is betting on China’s vast construction of new infrastructure in other countries to expand its influence globally.”IMAGESIMAGES/GETTYIMAGES/HERITAGEARTFINE
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that the emperors accumulated over 1,000 years. Imagine the treasures of the British crown re moved by the Irish and exhibited in Dublin! Be yond these material artifacts, Taiwan is home to the arts and traditions of classical China at its peak: music, opera, calligraphy, lacquered and ceramic artwork—all that has disappeared from Communist China. Similarly, all the religions banished from the mainland are freely practiced in Taiwan, especially Taoism, the Chinese reli gion par excellence. It is in Taiwan (and, until recently, Hong Kong) that the books censored in Beijing appear. These works find their way clan destinely from Taiwan to the mainland, sold un derground or published on the Internet, in sim plified characters, as only Taiwan preserved the ancient calligraphy of classical China.
In Taiwan, the Taiwanese language, imported from Fujian province, is spoken by those who have inhabited the island for several genera tions, while Mandarin, the official language of Communist China, is spoken by more recent im migrants. This linguistic difference, a cultural form of democracy, obviously displeases Beijing, since it reminds people that China was once a federation of peoples, cultures, and languages, as India remains today.
In any takeover, Beijing would not hope to confiscate Taiwan’s riches—these would van ish with the flight of entrepreneurs, just as Hong Kong is being emptied of its financiers. The ob jective would be to eliminate the example of a free, authentic, and prosperous China—one without the Communist Party. Is a military move likely? It may seem to Xi that the time is propitious, with America seem ingly weakened and less inclined to rush to anyone’s aid—and such concerns are even more amplified now, given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war in that country. That Xi con tinually references Taiwan in his speeches seems designed to prepare global and local opinion for a military operation. An attack would also dem onstrate that China now has a powerful military, helping to obscure the memory of a number of external defeats—in Korea in 1950, in the 1969 Russian conflict, and against Vietnam in 1979. Would war with Taiwan make it possible to rally the Chinese people around a national When Kissinger asked about China’s plans for conquering Taiwan, Deng replied, in essence, “We are in no hurry.” At the time, China had other priorities—above all, its economy, as the country was still very poor. With Xi, Beijing seems to be in more of a hurry. In official talk, Taiwan is an obsession—much more so, in my experience, than among the general population. This recurring obsession has many facets. One is historical. In 1949, the last troops of the na tionalist armies, with their leader, Chiang Kaishek, took refuge in Taiwan, escaping from Mao, who had no navy. To take Taiwan would be to complete the Communist military victory. It is also the party’s view that no historically Chinese territory should escape Beijing’s authority. This notion is important for understanding Chinese geographic claims over borderlands conquered by earlier dynasties: Tibet, eastern Turkestan (today Xinjiang), the frozen deserts of Himalaya, the lost islands in the China Sea, and a few rocks disputed with Japan. Yet Taiwan, one should note, was not always Chinese but frequently independent, peopled by Austronesian aborigi nes—and later, by Dutch and Japanese colonists. Yet, for party doctrine, whatever was for even a day Chinese must again be Chinese. This puts in question a large part of Siberia, which Russia today occupies—though Chinese leaders don’t say this aloud. Having crossed the Amur River, which forms the border with Russia, I observed that Chinese peasants and traders in this part of Siberia acted as if it were their home—indeed, the Chinese consider eastern Siberia to be right fully China’s, but they are in no hurry in this case, either—while the Russians, few in number, pretended not to notice. Both sides remember the deadly 1969 military engagement on the Us suri River, when the Soviets beat back the Chi nese army, at the cost of many casualties on both sides.Another reason an independent Taiwan infu riates Beijing: it is a prosperous democracy, right at China’s doorstep, and is more authentically Chinese than the mainland. In fact, Taiwan is a conservatory of Chinese culture. As he fled the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek took with him all the treasures of the Imperial City; the National Palace Museum in Taipei contains major works
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SPRING 2022 33 ical despotism. Until the regime of Xi Jinping, the post-Mao Communist Party had sought to com bine economic growth with public safety, while deploying a security force that worked to ensure that nothing escaped the party’s grasp. But now, the collecting of personal data is taking despo tism to a new level, with high-capacity comput ers enabling the government to keep files on every Chinese person and assign each an algorithm that tracks behaviors and expectations, establishing a “social-credit” score. The state will thus know what every person hopes and fears and will be able to deliver customized goods and services— or sanction every deviation from the party line— withThisprecision.system already exists for attributing cred its for consumer goods or for obtaining lodging, especially in China’s large cities. Abetting it is facial-recognition technology, which is highly advanced in China, allowing the government to identify unwanted behavior and monitor nonHan persons, including Uighurs and Tibetans, who are, by definition, suspect. In the streets of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the cameras that proliferate across the city make it possible immediately to identify the Uighurs by their cause? For Xi, nationalism could serve as a sub stitute ideology for Marxism-Leninism, which now rings increasingly hollow. But this would be a Western importation, since the Chinese have never practiced nationalism; traditionally, each person was from his own province, the language of which he spoke, while also seeing himself as a subject of the emperor. With Mao, a conversion to permanent revolution was required—but not to nationalism. By supposing that the Chinese people would endorse en masse the taking of Taiwan, which I doubt, and supposing further that the Chinese army would prove to be up to an unprecedented combat, there remains the question of Taiwanese forces and, in the possible absence of the Americans, an intervention by the Japanese army and fleet, among the world’s most technologically advanced. In the geopoliti cal scenarios surrounding China, we often forget Japan—and that is a mistake. Most troublesome for the West is something still emerging: a formidable political innovation, which Chinese leaders consider an unrivaled al ternative to Western democracy. Call it technolog Covid-19 dealt a blow to China’s aspirations for expanded soft power.
Ten years ago, no one foresaw an economic ascent as astounding as what China has experi enced. Two-thirds of the population have reached the standard of living of the middle classes of Western countries, at least in appearance. Nevertheless, housing is mediocre, health ser vices are archaic, and life outside large urban areas is difficult. Despite an average annual prepandemic economic growth rate of 8 percent, a quarter of Chinese peasants live in poverty. The villages of western China are no better off than the poorest in India or Africa, but the more vigor ous inhabitants have the opportunity of leaving for worksites in the east or the south. They will be exploited there, and they lack rights because their domestic passport, or hukou , ties them to their place of origin, where the police can return them at any moment. This reserve army of the proletariat, to bor row Marx’s vocabulary, exerts downward pres sure on Chinese salaries, contributing to the international competitiveness of the country’s industries. Communist China has, in this regard, remained a model of classical economics. Deng Xiaoping was the first Chinese leader to understand that China could not invent an original model for growth and that it would have to bend to the scientific laws of econom ics. The government returned the land that Mao had collectivized to the peasants, who, property owners once again, went back to work. They succeeded in feeding themselves, supplying physiognomy and to arrest purported Islamic troublemakers and incarcerate them in reeduca tionChinesecamps.leaders mock Western democracy for its disorder and inefficiency. But without a real alternative, the Communist Party long mimicked the external forms of democracy. The people elected representatives, mayors, and assembly members—but the elections were parodies, with unanimous results. A few attempts at genuine local elections in villages occurred in the early 2000s. I witnessed several, along with Jimmy Carter, whose foundation financed the purchase of ballots and printing of bulletins. The experi ment proved disastrous for the Communist Party, with independent candidates regularly beating the party choices. After a year or so, the government returned to the simulacra of elec tions, closing a rare opening that made it pos sible to see what many Chinese really thought of the Nationalparty. sentiment remains mysterious to day, at least to the outside world. If I trust my own observations, which are far from scien tific, the Chinese I know have renounced po litical action and taken refuge in family life. Resistance to the Communist Party still shows up privately. When Deng Xiaoping, seeking to limit China’s population growth, mandated that families have only one child, many couples had two, despite facing fines. Then Xi, worried about a rapidly aging population, ordered fami lies to have two children; but many parents de cide to have just one. Even the parody of democracy will soon be abandoned. In a new technological despotism, what the Chinese continue to think in their hearts will escape the algorithms—but the party won’t care. What will matter is outward behavior: con formity to the party line, enforced by omnipres ent surveillance. Xi claims that this will allow society to flourish; as he puts it, the Commu nist Party “really strives for the happiness of the Chinese people.” We might scoff at this sciencefiction-like project, but China’s leaders see in it a future that will guarantee the eternal power of the Communist Party. What is most probable in China, however, even in an era of algorithmic control, remains
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the unexpected. A virus that began infecting people in Wuhan in late 2019 wound up sever ing the supply chains linking China to the world, cutting the growth rate in half for a time—and launching a global pandemic that killed millions and has transformed economies, altered political arrangements, and left social and cultural rami fications that will take years to absorb and un derstand. (And Covid-19, whatever the truth of its provenance, will do no good for China’s soft power, either, such as it is.) Nor can we exclude the possibility that new social movements could arise in China, perhaps of a religious inspiration. The history of China is haunted by religious re volts that brought down dynasties.
SPRING 2022 35 ization of trade. It is access to the global market, in the absence of a liquid domestic market, that has spurred so much annual growth.
The Chinese have also borrowed from the clas sical model the key role of innovation. Growth, on this view, is based first on an exodus from ru ral areas, which improves productivity, and then on innovation, which takes up the baton. But in novation costs a lot before yielding marketable goods and services—unless one takes a shortcut, as Japan did in the 1920s and South Korea in the 1950s: copy what others have done. The Chinese did not invent the pi rating of patents and intellectual property, but they systematized it on a grand scale and even improved it. High-speed trains are an example. In the 2000s, the Chinese asked global lead ers in building such trains to submit project proposals for a Chi nese system, which they did. Chinese engineers closely examined these models and combined elements in order to devise an improved Chi nese version. This method of recombination or “tweaking” has become an oft-deployed method in China. The Chinese do not see themselves as copying, and they even file patents so as to give their approach legal protection. This helps explain why the Chinese appear to register the greatest number of patents in the world, though these are recognized only in China. To measure China’s true capacity for innovation, one should refer to the patents called “triadic”—that is, rec ognized in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Under this classification, the U.S. is still well in the lead, followed by Japan and Europe. China, as well as India and Russia, is more or less invis ible. The future will not be written in China, but in America. At the end of 2021, under the guise of restrain ing monopolistic behavior, Xi Jinping curbed the expansion of the two largest service enterprises on the Chinese Internet: Tencent and Alibaba. They food to the cities, and reaping surplus value and freeing up part of the labor force. This allowed factories to run at low cost and to begin to ex port to Western consumers. The profits thus ac cumulated made it possible to modernize pro duction methods. There never was a Chinese economic “miracle” but only the application of the laws of classical economics, applied to a society eager to escape poverty, with workers prevented from rebelling against abusive work hours and low pay. Beyond what it borrows from classical econom ics, the model has dis tinctive characteristics that cannot be repro duced. Are we so sure that the Communist Party wants the im poverished quarter to be absorbed into the general economy? A recent example makes me skeptical: Shein, a world leader in low-priced fashion, has an office in the city of Guangzhou and copies new styles within 48 hours of their appearance in Paris, Lon don, or New York. The copies get assigned to thousands of subcontractors, who subcontract, in turn, down to the most isolated villages, where labor costs are minimal. In less than a week, the completed styles come back to Guangzhou and are then exported to the world, at a quarter of the price of European or American competitors. The unknown village workers remain unknown, with no right to future orders or social protec tion. The head person at Shein, an American of Chinese origin, acknowledged that the clothing line was made in the “far west”—that is, China’s extremely poor west. Shein’s method of produc tion is widespread in China, which now exports more to countries of middling development in Asia, Africa, and Latin America than to the ad vanced West. The Chinese economic story exemplifies the classical theory of the division of labor, identi fied by Adam Smith in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations . What may be truly miraculous is that China’s conversion to classical economics coin cided with a historically unprecedented global “Despite annual pre-pandemic economic growth of 8 percent, a quarter of Chinese peasants live in poverty.”
An effective way of getting rid of rivals, per fected by Xi, consists in accusing them of corrup tion. The accusation is easy enough to back up because corruption is widespread in the party— from the “red envelope” slipped to a low-level apparatchik to give him the right to open a shop or build a building to the granting of stupendous contracts at the top, passing through a family member or a mistress in favor at court. Once, long ago, I was designated by the French gov ernment to hand over an important envelope to a Chinese courtesan, so as to obtain for a French business the contract to build an opera house. Alas, the courtesan’s name had a homonym, and I approached the wrong recipient. No mat ter; I was asked to make another trip and hand off a second envelope, and the business was concluded.Thisexample, apart from the blunder, is not isolated but a common practice in commercial relations between the Western business world and its Chinese interlocutors. The key to success is to identify the right intermediary to bribe, who will then take care of everything. This practice likely helps explain Western business execu tives’ enthusiasm for the Chinese model, since, for a certain sum, they can break through bu reaucratic barriers and violate all the rules. It’s simpler than in today’s United States or Europe, where one must now fulfill so many social or en vironmental requirements.
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CITY JOURNAL36 China’s Impossible Dream of Order
In relations between China and the United States, American leaders, along with many commenta tors, seem to invert the famous formula of John Quincy Adams in 1821, warning against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” It suf fices to analyze China, such as it really is, to see that it is neither the enemy, nor even a true competitor, of the United States. In every domain, China is sig nificantly behind the United States. As testimony, consider the more than 300,000 Chinese students in the United States who enjoy freedom and learn ing unavailable in China. China often serves as an imaginary threat distracting Americans from their domestic quarrels, in the same way that Chinese leaders accuse Americans of interference to dis tract their own people from their lack of freedom, were forbidden to raise further funds or to extend further offers of service without government ap proval. Western observers were stupefied, as these businesses and their founders had earlier been cel ebrated and held up as exemplars of success for Chinese youth. On reflection, however, this power play—even with the cost of slowing down the national econ omy and its technical capacities—is consistent with the nature of the regime. It is permissible to make money, as long as no aspersions are cast on the dominion of the Communist Party. The sanctioned firms were also gathering data on the Chinese people, but the party considers it self alone authorized to control such data, which are a major tool for the emerging technological despotism.Everything by the party, for the party, and under control of the party—that could be the re gime’s motto. But what is the party? It is not the state. The state functions as an administration, as in the West, but every decision that it makes is supervised by the party’s delegates—political commissars inserted into all the organs of politi cal, economic, and judicial power. All leaders, public and private, are generally, though not necessarily, party members. What matters most is that they report to the political commissars above them. At the Communist Party’s summit, one finds mostly men and engineers. You find few philos ophers or sociologists; the party is in the hands of a technocracy very different in its recruitment and temperament from the mandarinate of the Empire, which was made up of learned men, versed in literature and political philosophy. For a party that views itself as Marxist, one finds few women or workers in its decision-making ech elon.Another particularity of the party is its dy nastic character. The leaders are almost all sons of leaders, including Xi himself. If one had to synthesize to the extreme, China is in the hands of technocratic dynasties, for whom nothing is more important than holding on to, and trans mitting, power. If, by chance, the party changes course, which happened often in Mao’s day and after, this is the result of palace revolutions— fights to the end between ruling dynasties.
SPRING 2022 37 ent in all international institutions. But it has no right to aggression. To encourage economic development and discourage aggression—this seems to be an attitude toward China that the United States and Europe could share. China as a monster to destroy, on the other hand, would be an error of analysis. China does not fit the role; it cannot be compared with the USSR. The Soviets wanted to conquer the world and to export their ideology. China has no such ambition. It only de mands the place that, according to its leaders, it deserves. This is of the order of negotiation, not of war. the mediocrity of their cultural life, the oppression of workers, and rural poverty. The proper realist attitude for the United States to adopt must, it seems to me, be founded on two pillars. First, it would be well to know the Chinese better—the people as well as their leaders, their frustrations and their ambitions. The second pillar might take inspiration from a strategy that proved effective in confronting the Soviet Union: containment. China has the right to develop itself, and its inclusion in the global order is a net benefit for the Chinese, as it can be for non-Chinese. China has the right to be pres The Chinese Communist Party has created a technological despotism, with omnipresent surveillance of its citizens.
CITY JOURNAL38 Make America Make Again
SPRING 2022 39
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Steven Malanga Amid a supply-chain crisis, Biden administration policies are thwarting efforts to bring industrial jobs back home.
O ptimism among American manufacturers hit a 20-year high during the Trump ad ministration, but the mood changed swiftly after Joe Biden was elected. Fearing a tsunami of onerous and expensive new regulations, manufacturers be gan halting expansion projects and trimming planned investments. The CEO of a midsize Ohio company, Alloy Precision Technologies, told USA Today that his firm had spent $9.5 mil lion on new equipment to expand domestic pro duction during the Trump years. Now, though, it was delaying an additional $2 million in spend ing for equipment and hiring because the Biden administration’s new directives raised costs on everything from labor to opening and expanding industrial facilities. As USA Today noted, in his first few weeks in office, Biden signed “a whirl wind of executive actions” dismantling Trump’s deregulatory agenda, which the Republican president had initiated to cut costs, especially for industrial firms. Just a few months after Biden took office, the United States faced a crisis unanticipated Last summer, dozens of cargo ships waited outside American ports to unload their goods.
CITY JOURNAL40 Make America Make Again
Some Republicans responded with plans that amounted to putting American industry on a war footing, with government decreeing certain sectors essential and requiring that their goods be made here. What both sides largely ignored is something that industrial companies themselves have said for years: the Number One reason they’ve off shored jobs is costs, and 50 years of growing regulation at the federal, state, and local levels contributed enormously to that burden. By one count, industrial firms must adhere to some 300,000 federal regulations alone—a bureau cratic tax of hundreds of billions of dollars annu ally. Local zoning and environmental laws often short-circuit valuable industrial projects, even when they pass federal muster. The Trump ad ministration, to its credit, understood this, which is why it initiated a regulatory review of indus trial policy and began hacking away at some of the most arduous and outdated regs. But it didn’t get far enough in one term, and Biden already has undone much of what Trump accomplished. Still, any cursory examination of the effects of these regulations, many decades old, suggests that the first step in re-industrialization—the low-hanging fruit—would be deregulatory pol icy that makes manufacturing in America more competitive, including enabling firms to build new plants and staff them at reasonable costs.
It’s doubtful that the Biden administration, which somehow imagines that a green energy policy would alleviate the supply-chain crisis, will make such an effort. But some future progrowth president will likely make that project central to bringing back more U.S. jobs.
“How did the most dynamic country on the planet become so sclerotic? We did it to our selves,” economist Eli Dourado noted in the New York Times last year. “We enacted laws that privi lege the status quo at the expense of change and progress. We liberally passed out veto rights to anyone with the money and wherewithal to hire a lawyer. If we want to reverse the damage and create a more prosperous future, we must make it easy to build”—and to manufacture. T he decline of American manufacturing has been a long process, with many causes. Industrial jobs peaked in the U.S. in the late 1970s, at about 19.4 million, began falling in the steep recession ary period of 1980 through 1982, and then kept cycling downward, to about 12.2 million today. As a portion of the private-sector economy, the manufacturing decline has been even more dra matic, falling from more than a quarter of all jobs in 1980 to around 10 percent today. Liberalization of trade policies that encouraged globalization of manufacturing, plummeting transportation costs, a rise in output in Third World countries that began mass-producing goods: all played a role in the massive shift away from industrial production in the U.S. and in other developed economies.Thisglobalization brought lower costs and greater availability and variety of goods for U.S. consumers. And the larger American economy has kept expanding, despite manu facturing’s contraction, adding some 45 million private-sector positions since 1980. But a price was incurred as well, in the decline of regional economies that once depended substantially on industrial jobs, and in the greater reliance in the U.S. on goods from around the globe—a de velopment that has contributed to the current supply-chain crisis. Even pre-pandemic, American firms had be gun talking about “reshoring” industrial jobs and by his agenda: a pandemic-related breakdown of worldwide supply chains that caused wide spread shortages of goods ranging from medical gear and medicines to microchips and everyday items like cleaning wipes and toys. In February 2022, the crisis grew worse with Russia’s inva sion of Ukraine. Sanctions, severed trade routes, and a ban on importing Russian oil provoked rare unanimity among Democrats and Republi cans: the United States needs to make more stuff here in America, instead of relying on foreign suppliers.Howto pull that off remains the question. Fac ing intense pressure, the Biden administration is sued a policy paper claiming that the U.S. could revive domestic industrial output by toughen ing employment standards—which inevitably would raise costs—to create “good jobs” and by subsidizing favored industries like clean energy.
Manufacturers argue that a
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Over the past 40 years, the National Asso ciation of Manufacturers calculates, the federal government has issued an average of one new regulation a week affecting industrial firms. And, if anything, the pace of new regulations has sped up, though the U.S. already has some of the developed world’s strictest standards on everything from workplace safety to labor prac tices. During the tenure of President Bill Clinton from 1993 through 2000, the federal government issued an average of 36 major regulations (those costing more than $100 million to employers) a year. During the Obama administra tion’s first term, that number doubled, to 72 major new regula tions yearly. Donald Trump built a significant part of his presidential campaign on reinvigorating American manufacturing. Once he was elected, some of his policies—especially imposing tariffs on imports—drew intense criti cism from free-market economists. And he took a heavy-handed approach to firms that announced that they were moving jobs overseas—threaten ing, for example, the heating and cooling com pany Carrier with reprisals when it announced that it was eliminating 1,000 jobs at an Indianapo lis factory. Carrier eventually accepted $7 million in government incentives to stay. But Trump officials also recognized that the regulatory regime was a significant drag on American jobs. Shortly after assuming office, Trump instructed the Commerce Department to study how to streamline regulations affecting the industry. Federal officials sought comments from company officials describing the rules they must adhere to, as well as their price tag. Manufacturers complained about, among other things, how often federal rules required them to inspect and report on their operations. One industrial firm told officials that it had to send an employee weekly to the roof of each of its eight plants to ensure by sight that they weren’t leaking emissions. Since 2011, the unnamed firm
woes have more firms thinking this way. A recent Thomas Indus trial Survey found that 83 percent of U.S. man ufacturers that make products overseas were considering reshoring some of those jobs. The survey also found widespread interest among American companies in shifting some supply contracts from foreign sources to U.S. produc ers. Automotive companies, slammed by micro chip shortages and other supply delays, along with natural-gas and oil businesses, are the most motivated to switch back to American sources. The potential added value to the U.S. econ omy of such moves is nearly $450 billion, says Thomas.Butsignificant obstacles remain—above all, the continuing high cost of manufacturing things in America. Some 40 percent of firms still list that as the top concern. For years, manufacturers have argued that a thickening regulatory tangle makes it more expensive to hire workers, delays the opening of projects and plants as they wait for bureaucratic approval, and requires consid erable outlays to comply with government man dates and (once again) to pay for energy.
Some of the movement to reshore has been a re sponse to escalating expenses overseas—includ ing labor—that have eroded the price advantage that came from making things elsewhere. Indus trial wages in China, for instance, have risen ap proximately threefold since 2000. Another key factor: falling energy costs in the U.S., spurred by the nation’s natural-gas and oil-fracking boom. Some companies have already acted on the reshoring front. One survey estimated that, between 2010 and 2015, U.S. firms that make things overseas had brought back some 240,000 jobs. A 2013 Boston Consult ing study suggested that new investments in American plants and equipment could add 2.5 million to 5 million industrial jobs in the country, under the right Pandemic-relatedcircumstances.supply
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SPRING 2022 41 buying more supplies from domestic sources.
The administration’s proposed PRO Act would end right-to-work features of federal law, which allow states to let workers opt out of unions, even when the workplace is organized. Today, 28 states are right-to-work, and they accounted for 70 percent of manufacturing-employment growth in the economic rebound after the 2008 recession. Right-to-work has become a key fea ture of site selection for foreign firms looking to open industrial plants in the U.S. and for domes tic firms expanding their manufacturing work force here. Many of the biggest new U.S. plant projects announced recently, including those by Ford, General Motors, and Volkswagen, are lo cated in right-to-work states. Ending this option wouldn’t boost unionization; instead, it would further discourage reshoring and likely dampen said, it had made more than 700 such inspec tions, consuming 1,000 worker hours, without observing a leak.
Another business noted that, while it had once spent most of its environmental resources on equipment that reduced emissions, its regulatory costs lately had grown because of increased re cordkeeping, demanded by the feds. Other com panies complained, a Commerce Department report said, of “inadequately designed rules that are impractical, unrealistic, inflexible, ambigu ous or lack understanding of how industry oper ates”; of duplicative regulations; and of lengthy approval processes for projects and deadlines that federal bureaucrats regularly missed.
Those gains coincided with a sharp uptick in manufacturers’ optimism. In a survey by the Na tional Association of Manufacturers in the third quarter of 2016, 61 percent of manufacturers said that they were optimistic about their business. By the fourth quarter of 2017, that number had hit 94.6 percent, and then climbed still higher, to 95.1 percent, in mid-2018—an all-time high for the industrial index.
Biden’s push to impose labor-union orga nizing on companies and raise the country’s already-high labor standards would inflate the already-high cost of making goods in America.
Biden agreed broadly with Trump’s desire to bring more manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Soon after his inauguration, he signed an executive order attempting to strengthen exist ing federal efforts to use government’s massive procurement spending to buy increasingly from domestic sources. But other Biden executive or ders and legislative proposals have proved far more troubling to industrial firms. Biden’s plan to enact a minimum corporate tax, for instance, would undo some of the Trump tax relief by ef fectively ending key deductions for investing in local plants and equipment, manufacturers have warned. “Right now, any savings get invested into our people and our operations,” the INX chief fi nancial officer said about the proposed Biden tax hike. “Any loss will negatively affect that.”
The momentum that such steps created clearly influenced manufacturers’ plans. After slump ing 1.85 percent, to $2.085 trillion in 2016, man ufacturing output in the U.S. surged to $2.334 trillion in 2018, a gain of nearly 12 percent for the first two years of the Trump administration.
The Commerce Department later recom mended that every federal agency that issued regulations affecting manufacturing should de velop a reform plan. It also urged accelerated permitting for industrial facilities using the fed eral FAST Act, originally designed to provide rapid approval for transportation projects. The report criticized the cost-benefit analyses that many federal agencies must do in evaluating projects, finding that they often fail “to capture the true costs of implementing regulation.” Com merce officials urged agencies to adopt more rig orousAddedmethods.tothese
reform initiatives were the Trump 2017 tax cuts, which reduced the basic corporate rate and offered incentives to encour age companies to invest more of their foreign earnings back in America. One global manufac turer, Illinois-based INX International, recounted late last year how it had boosted investment in the U.S., thanks to tax-reform savings—includ ing expanding its workforce by 7 percent and purchasing new equipment. “We have not had one year since 2017 without raises or an increase in benefits,” the company’s top finance officer said. “That’s because the company has been do ing pretty well—reaping the benefits from the economy and tax reform.”
CITY JOURNAL42 Make America Make Again
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duction Act to impose federal controls on pro duction in key industries, are additional favor ites. But while such measures might help a few sectors through government subsidies and pro tections, they would do little to solve the broader supply-chain problems affecting the country. Manufacturers are just as concerned about the Biden administration’s energy policies— from the refusal to support key energy projects to proposed higher taxes on natural gas to halt ing new leases for gas and oil extraction on fed eral lands. The administration rolled out these American manufacturing em ployment.ThePRO Act reflects a broader Biden administra tion commitment to intensify regulations, increase bureau cratic oversight, and funnel resources to favored indus tries. That’s clear from a June White House report, purport edly on how to reinforce the country’s supply chains and revitalize manufacturing. In some 250 pages, the report manages largely to ignore the chief reason that manu facturers locate jobs over seas—those high domestic costs—and focuses instead on a parade of “woke” goals for industry and on government interventions that inevitably will make it more expensive for most firms to operate. The document attributes some of the country’s supply prob lems, for example, to “lost Ein steins,” who never fulfill their destiny to become “workers, researchers, and entrepre neurs” because of America’s “inequality in income, race, and geography.” The admin istration commits to new, unspecified “pathways” to de velop these resources. Another key to solving supply-chain problems, the report says, is to in crease pay and benefits for manufacturing and logistics workers through higher labor stan dards—though many of these workers, even in nonunion shops, earn considerably above the average for similarly educated employees in other fields. The administration’s focus is also on developing green industries—ensuring, for instance, that enough rare minerals are available to manufacture lithium batteries for electric cars. Government interventions, including subsidies for green products and using the Defense Pro Many of the biggest new U.S. plant projects are in right-to-work states—like Tennessee, where workers are seen assembling Volkswagen sedans at the automaker’s plant in Chattanooga.
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businesses SOURCE: National Association of Manufacturers FEDERAL OTHERFINANCE/CASHCONSTRUCTIONR&DATTRACT/RETAINEMPLOYEEREGULATIONSISSUESCUSTOMERSorPRODUCTIONorMAINTENANCEFLOW 88 % 42 % 24 % 20 % 58 % 15 % 8 %MENAALBERTO
W hat should be the agenda, then, for making domestic manufacturing more competitive? For now, Repub licans and moderate Democrats in Washington should try to stop the Biden administration from continuing down its cost-increasing path. One important move would be to block any future legislative attempts to federalize required unionization. Biden has al ready showed that he wants to suppress compe tition among states in this area. The significant policies even as worldwide prices of oil and gas rose and then soared even higher with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hampering manufacturing worldwide. In Europe, some energy-intensive firms even went as far as shutting down produc tion following a 250 percent increase in naturalthat manufacturers say most affect their
CITY JOURNAL44 Make America Make Again gas prices last year. In the U.S., where an explosion of oil and gas production had kept prices down for the last de cade, costs doubled in 2021, spiking upward even more after Russia’s at tack and the Biden administration’s ban on importing Russian oil. Even with extraordinary gains in efficiency over the last 30 years, industrial com panies still use a quarter of all the energy consumed in America, so the future health of the sector depends on keeping those costs under control.
The Regulatory Burden Issues
Manufacturers applauded Trump’s moves to stimulate energy production and distribution, including an execu tive order to fast-track approval of in frastructure projects like the Keystone XL pipeline. Biden, by contrast, killed the pipeline, threatening America’s “energy security,” the National Asso ciation of Manufacturers said. When the administration later announced that it would release oil from the country’s strategic reserve to curb skyrocketing prices, the manufactur ers’ association dismissed the action as a “Band-Aid.” “A true energy strat egy would strengthen our energy in dependence, enhance manufacturers’ competitiveness and alleviate many of the other supply chain challenges fac ing our nation,” the group contended. “Instead of asking OPEC and Russia to fill the void, we should let Ameri can energy workers take the lead.”
energymovesapplaudedManufacturersTrump’stostimulateproductionanddistribution.
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SPRING 2022 45 tries’ emissions and waste. Over the decades, the U.S. has made enormous strides in this area, only to see the weight on industry keep getting heavier. According to the Environmental Protec tion Agency’s own data, for instance, since 1980, the U.S. has seen lead levels in our air decline 99 percent, while carbon monoxide has fallen 75 percent and sulfur dioxide 93 percent. Yet despite such gains, a growing federal environ mental bureaucracy has extended the time that it takes to approve new facilities and has hugely increased expenses. Consider the wantedthesionstechnologythetheplantpanywhichofentiated“vintage-differregulations”theCleanAirAct,requireacombuildinganewtoincorporatelatest(andusuallymostexpensive)foremiscontrol.In1970,authorsofthatacttoensurethat firms rapidly adopted the newest technology to reduce pollution. Over time, though, as tech nologies have improved, the need to install the very latest equipment in any new plant or in an expansion of any older facility has become a dis incentive to such projects—including plants that companies might build to return jobs to the U.S., according to research by Harvard environmental economist Robert Stavins.
The Biden administration’s study calling for a domestic-manufacturing revival proclaims: “We must rebuild our small and medium-sized busi ness manufacturing base, which has borne the brunt of the hollowing out of U.S. manufactur ing.” Yet it’s smaller industrial firms that bear the heaviest load from government regulatory poli cies. The average bill to comply with regulations amounts to nearly $35,000 a year per employee at manufacturing firms with fewer than 50 work ers—almost triple the proportionate weight that government policies impose on large manufac turers, according to one study. But Biden intends to add expensive new rules and mandates. It’s a giant discordance between cause and effect that will only make it harder to bring jobs back to America. manufacturing gains in states that rank among the least taxed and most sensibly regulated in the U.S. offer a clear lesson in how to boost in dustrialPoliciesemployment.thatoffer expanded social benefits that discourage work should also be opposed. Extra stimulus rounds during the pandemic, including supplemental federal unemployment benefits that stretched into last summer, under mined the nation’s jobs recovery, as many of the unemployed simply stayed home. Biden has other proposals that industrial firms say would worsen this disincen tive problem, among them dropping the age of Medicare eli gibility from 65 to 60. That move, experts at Kearney Consulting argue, would “encour age more workers to retire earlier,” dispro portionately manufacturersaffectingbecause
a quarter of their work force is already 55 or older. Similarly, the strong push within Democratic circles for free college for all would likely pull many potential indus trial workers into college, whether that was right for them or not. By contrast, Biden should main tain initiatives, endorsed by both the Obama and Trump administrations, to funnel more aid into manufacturing-training pathways, including ap prenticeship programs, which often reward stu dents with well-paying industrial jobs. There is harder work to be done, probably by some future pro-growth president and more moderate Congress. High on the list would be to reinstate the regulatory reform efforts that Trump began for manufacturers but that Biden quickly rescinded. Industrial firms have urged Biden to continue to reduce regulations on the sector, to expedite environmental reviews by federal agencies, and to pressure the bureau cracy to meet its deadlines for reform. An even bigger task would be to reform out dated federal laws. Legislation from the 1970s such as the Clean Air Act and the National Envi ronmental Policy Act sought to address serious environmental problems by regulating indus
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The Empire of Fees PHOTOSTOCKALAMY/COLLECTIONWALKERCHARLES
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CITY JOURNAL46
hen I wake up in the morning at my home in Aus tin, Texas, I turn on the lights, and thereby pro vide a few cents to the city government’s electric company. I flush the toilet, owing a few more to Austin’s sewer service. When I pour myself a glass of water, the city water department gets a piece. After I get dressed and step outside, I watch the city take my trash, my recycling, and my compost—each pickup costs a few dollars. Sometimes, I discover a $25 ticket for parking my car in the wrong spot. Then I swallow my anger and drive down the MoPac high way, where I pay a toll to the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority. I park in a garage downtown owned by the Austin Transportation Depart ment, pay them a few bucks, and walk to my office. If I need to take a trip out of town, I pay $1.25 for a Capital Metro District bus to the city-owned Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, where, along with the price of my plane ticket, I pay a $5.60 fee for the benefit of being patted down by a TSA agent, a Passenger Facility Charge, and a small part in any rents the city charges restaurants and retailers. Only when I’m in the air does the drain to the government stop. In one typical morning, I handed over money to several government bod ies. But I didn’t pay any taxes—only fees, charges, and fines. These are the future of government in the United States. The idea that government operates just by taxing and spending money is anachronistic. A growing share of its revenue comes from charges that the government imposes in exchange for its services or as a penalty for breaking its rules. In 1950, about 1 percent of Americans’ income went to
Judge Glock How charges and fines drive government growth
charges from state and local governments. To day, that number is 4 percent. Include federal fees and charges, themselves the fastest-growing part of federal revenue, and that number rises to over 5.5 percent. Though largely hidden from the public, fees and charges account for most of the growth in government over the past 70 years and have become the top source of revenue for state and local governments. Two factors drive this new reliance on spe cial charges. First, governments are expanding the “businesses” they run—hospitals, universi ties, airports—and forcing users to pay more for them. Second, governments are using charges to avoid voter opposition to, and constitutional restrictions on, raising taxes. Those hoping to re strain the size of government need to understand the role of fees and charges. Though govern ments complain about private citizens evading taxes, the biggest tax evaders are governments themselves: charging citizens while avoiding anything that might be called a tax. In the pro Any living thing today is subject to licenses as well as fees: even magicians who pull a rabbit out of a hat must get a federal rabbit license for $40.
Not every government service can be paid for with fees. Governments must provide what economist Paul Samuelson called “public goods”—things that benefit everyone and from whose benefits no one can be excluded. It is both wrong and impossible for the government to im pose fees for public goods, the classic examples of which are public safety and clean air. A city can’t charge for the use of public safety because it benefits whoever happens to be there. Border line cases, such as parks and local roads, could potentially exclude anyone who couldn’t pay; but in practice, it’s easier for a government to keep these amenities open to all and fund them through general taxes. But for many “private goods,” from which people can be excluded, charging individuals di rectly for services is easier and more justifiable.
SPRING 2022 47 cess, they’re nickel-and-diming Americans from cradle to grave.
The old saying of former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith holds true: if you can find three examples of a business in a local phone book (today, we would say online), then the city should not be in that business. But while selling off these assets is a no-brainer, cities keep build ing more of them, hoping that the charges will ease their budgets. More often, the businesses weigh them down. Cities also run noncompetitive businesses, or what are known as natural monopolies: electric, water, gas, and sewer lines—and sometimes, highways, ports, and airports. Though these ser vices are not public goods by the usual defini tion, it is not easy to have two or more competing companies provide them. A stronger argument exists for government involvement in these sorts of enterprises, though governments themselves do not have to run them. (As E. S. Savas shows in Privatization in the City , turning these services over to private companies can cut costs and in crease efficiency by 30 percent, on average, and their fees can still be regulated.)
To see how direct government ownership of a so-called monopoly can increase both fees and government spending, consider public transit. In the early post–World War II period, private companies ran and operated most bus and rail systems in the United States. Their fees were regulated and occasionally subsidized by city governments. With some federal as sistance, including that provided by the Mass Private companies run some roads, parks, and golf courses and impose fees for their use. Gov ernments can provide such private goods and charge fees for their use, too. What distinguishes a fee from a tax? The tech nical definition is that you pay a fee in exchange for some activity that you could have avoided: taking a toll road, parking illegally, or patroniz ing a government business. Many politicians and policy wonks justify the growth in charges as a move away from taxes to “user fees.” They argue that people who benefit from a government ser vice should be charged for it. On one level, this is true. It’s better to charge people for using a public golf course than to make it free and have the general public pay for it. Charges both pre vent the rationing that occurs with any free good and help align the costs and benefits of services. Yet the larger question is whether the govern ment should be providing these services in the first place. A user-fee system beats a general tax, yes—but it also demonstrates just how many private goods governments now provide. If gov ernment can charge for something and prevent those who don’t pay from using it, it’s not a pub lic good. Democratically elected governments regulate or subsidize businesses all the time. But should the government really be appointing the CEO of the golf course and purchasing its land scaping equipment? City governments are responsible for much of the growth in fees and charges. They have become accustomed to running all sorts of busi nesses and charging for them, usually in di rect competition with private companies. One in every five golf courses in the United States, for instance, is a municipal course. The U.S. is home to municipal universities, hospitals, re tirement communities, industrial parks, power plants, tech incubators, parking garages, shop ping malls, convention centers, hotels, stadiums, arenas, and theaters. Most large American cities own several municipal housing complexes. All charge their so-called customers to sustain city budgets.Politicians claim that they run these busi nesses to reduce charges on citizens. What looks
CITY JOURNAL48 The Empire of Fees like an increase in government fees, they say, is just a switch away from more expensive private options. Yet governments tend not to run busi nesses more efficiently and instead use subsidies and regulations to push out private alternatives. The subsidies to these public businesses of ten become larger than the charges themselves. In 1991, Memphis built a 20,000-seat, pyramidshaped arena that would supposedly pay for it self by charging rents to a major-league sports team. As befits a pyramid, however, almost no living soul set foot in the place. The city now collects a modest rent from a Bass Pro Shops megastore located inside while continuing to lose millions. Other local governments have had similar problems renting out their municipal hotels and shopping malls.
SPRING 2022 49 Transportation Act of 1964, many cities began buying these private companies. In 1970, the fees charged by municipal transit still covered their cost. But by 2020, public transit users cov ered only one-fourth of the systems’ cost—about $16 billion—while federal, state, and local gov ernments paid $60 billion. The total amount of charges had risen, but the taxes and subsidies to support inefficient operations grew even more.
Charges and fees in cities have gone from 11 percent of city budgets a few decades ago to 40 percent today—more than any other single revenue source. Taxes didn’t fall. Charges simply rose more rapidly. While city govern ments run brick-andmortar businesses, state morebusinessgovernments’portfolioisexpansive.States run tolled highways and large ports or airports, as well as some liquor busi nesses held over from the post-Prohibition era. But they also administer esoteric financial concerns. For instance, many states along the Gulf Coast manage hurricane-insurance companies for property own ers and, of course, charge for the benefit. States also run student-lending corporations, mortgage com panies, business-lending companies, farm-lending companies, property-insurance companies, autoinsurance companies, and other enterprises. Some states operate their own bank-deposit-insurance businesses, separate from the more well-known Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation program. We think of some of these businesses as so cial support, but states run them for profit and sometimes exploit their position to extract more money. Consider workers’ compensation pro grams for on-the-job injuries. While some states allow employers to purchase this insurance from a subsidized public company or from private firms, others, such as Ohio and Washington, al low businesses to purchase it only from the stateowned workers’ comp company. These financial businesses aren’t usually good investments for states. Sure, they bring in regu lar interest and premium payments. But thanks to lax government accounting standards, they don’t have to take off bad loans until they’ve al ready gone bust. Thus, state budgets show large revenues from these programs, even as they falter and fail. Many remember the hundreds of millions that the federal government lost on loans to solar-power company Solyndra, but similar state-level examples abound. Rhode Is land, for instance, once guaranteed $75 million in loans to a local video-game company, which quickly failed. States’ annual fi nancial reports help fully contain a section on their “BusinessType Activities,” which demonstrate their scope. State businesses together hold over $600 bil lion in assets, mak ing them larger than Walmart and Amazon combined. When off-bal ance-sheet public corporations and authorities are accounted for, state businesses hold over $1.5 trillion in assets, making them larger than the five biggest corporations in America combined. These proliferating businesses explain why state charges, though not as ubiquitous as those in cit ies, have swollen to more than 25 percent of state revenue. The charges have almost doubled as a proportion of states’ revenues in recent decades, and therefore account for most of the growth in stateUniversitiesbudgets. and hospitals are the two largest sources of revenue for both state and local gov ernments. The “eds and meds” that power many urban centers constitute about half of all govern ment charges. Public hospitals earn almost $175 billion annually in patient fees, and public uni versities bring in $125 billion annually in tuition and other fees—all this on top of billions of dol lars of public subsidies. Since education and health care are the two fastest-growing parts of the American economy, government’s expansion into these fields is unsurprising. But few areas of modern life are more sclerotic than a public hospital or a public “Charges and fees in cities have gone from 11 percent of city budgets a few decades ago to 40 percent today. ”
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CITY JOURNAL50 The Empire of Fees
The most visible government charges are the regulatory fees and fines for drivers’ licenses, construction permitting, illegal parking, and so on. The increase in such fees—and their expan sion into every corner of modern life—has been rapid. For instance, governments today find it impossible to resist imposing charges on anything with a motor. Fees have risen on issuing titles, li censes, and registrations for cars, boats, all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, motorcycles, and planes. Anyone who actually uses these vehicles will pay other fees. Dozens of cities now charge drivers for the costs of responding to on-the-road incidents.
(I once witnessed two slightly tipsy individuals try to get married in a Washington, D.C., office. The man was yelling that the fee had gone up since the last time he was there; the woman then started yelling, since he had told her that he’d never been married before.)
Licensing fees have become a revenue source for government. Economists across the political spectrum have been outraged by the increase in occupational licensing, which now forces about 30 percent of all workers to obtain government permits to do their jobs. These licenses restrict competition and raise prices, but economists ignore how they also raise money. The New York State Division of Licensing Services, which unironically places its title next to a “New York, State of Opportunity” logo on its paperwork, extracts fees from every imaginable profession. Nurses must pay up to $228 to apply for their first license and another $103 for periodic re newal. Interior designers pay $377 to apply for their initial license. Cosmetologists pay $15 for taking their written exam, $40 for their initial li cense, and another $40 for renewing their license every four years. The state licensing division helpfully notes that such application fees are nonrefundable: if you apply but don’t have the interior-designer qualifications, the state keeps yourStatesmoney.claim that these fees are necessary just to administer the licensing agencies. But most states have a version of what Arizona calls the 90–10 rule: 90 percent of fees go to the agency, but the general government still keeps 10 per cent. In reality, the legislature often sweeps any so-called excess funds from these agencies back into the general budget. Many such fees bear no relation to costs. Courts have upheld fees even if they are three times higher than any plausible costs to provide licenses or services. Even basic government functions have be come riddled with fees. In some cities, “Pay for Spray” programs require people to pay annual firefighter subscription fees and more when ever firefighters respond to an emergency call. In Olbion County, Tennessee, firefighters have let houses burn when they realized that the homeowners were in arrears on their subscrip tion. Prisoners have found themselves subject university, both of which tend to jack up fees while providing declining service. Governments can improve the quality of education and health care without owning and operating these institu tions at an increasing loss to the public.
The Cost Recovery Corporation, a company from Dayton, Ohio, has made a business helping cities charge motorists hundreds of dollars after they are in a traffic accident. If such charges once made sense under a userfee model for drivers who benefited from public roads, they are less defensible today. State and local governments are diverting tens of billions of such charges, as well as general gas taxes, to mass transit, bicycle paths, and so forth. These charges aren’t user fees, and they don’t align costs and benefits. They’re just another way to extract revenue. Any living thing today is subject to licenses as well as fees. Many cities require annual dog licenses, with larger fines if you somehow for get to renew such an essential piece of paper work. The Department of Agriculture has spe cial licenses for those who want to sell or exhibit animals. This means that magicians who pull a rabbit out of a hat must get a federal rabbit li cense for $40. If you want to keep chickens in Texas, you’ll need at least $35 for a Fowl Reg istration Application. For flora, you must apply for, and then periodically renew, a plant-nursery license. If you want to sell plants at a temporary location, however, you’ll need a special-event li cense with another fee. Then there are marriage licenses, which can cost over $100 in some states.
While state and local fees and fines have been the biggest drivers of government growth, federal fees are mounting, too. They now constitute 10 percent of federal revenue, or more than $330 bil lion a year. Despite the gradual decline of the larg est source of federal fees—namely, the U.S. Postal Service—such fees have grown more rapidly than any other kind of federal revenue over the past fourPropellingdecades. the growth in federal fees are pre miums for Medicare, as well as crop-, flood-, and bank-insurance programs; fees for the Trans portation Security Administration at airports; fees for patents and trademarks; and rents from federal land. Federal agencies love these fees because once they receive them, they can spend them without having to go through congressio nal appropriations and oversight. to everything from co-pays for doctors’ visits in the infirmary to phone charges of up to $1 per three minutes, rates not seen in the private sector for decades. Many jails also have “pay to stay” charges. In Mahoney, Ohio, the jail charges a $100 booking fee and $50 for each night spent in lockup.Also bothersome to citizens are the unex pected fines, from parking tickets to jaywalk ing charges, that have come to define many local governments. The increase in fines came to public attention in 2014, following riots in Ferguson, Missouri. It turned out that the city’s income from fines doubled in the years after 2010, reaching 23 percent of its total budget. And Ferguson’s fines were no exception. A study by Governing found dozens of local governments getting more than 50 percent of their total bud get from fines, with many governments garner ing higher than 90 percent. Every year, state and local governments collect about $15 billion in fines, with speeding tickets, of course, being the most important source. But dozens of other mi nor fines can surprise people. Many cities have Public hospitals earn almost $175 billion annually in patient fees, on top of billions of dollars of public subsidies.
laws requiring bicycle registration. Though hap hazardly enforced, failure to get a license can get you a $50 fine in New Jersey. You might also be fined for riding a bike without the required bell.
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Though fees are theoretically distinct from taxes, many are taxes in all but name. For in stance, after California’s Proposition 13 capped property-tax rates, the state gradually replaced property taxes with hikes in “impact fees” for building new housing. These can cost over $150,000 per unit, enough to buy a home in much of the United States. Most of the increase in li cense fees and trash-pickup fees have come in the wake of similar state constitutional restrictions. Some citizens and taxpayer groups have tried to limit charges and fees, with little success. In 1980, Missouri passed the so-called Hancock Amendment, requiring voter approval for any new “tax, license, or fee.” State courts knee capped the law by interpreting the word “fee” to exclude any charges “for services actually pro vided,” thus protecting most government fees. In a 2010 referendum, California voters approved Proposition 26—the Stop Hidden Taxes Initia tive—to redefine certain regulatory fees as taxes subject to a two-thirds vote of local residents. Al most every local government in the Golden State has since ensured that its fees count as one of the enumerated exceptions. The federal government also leads the way in civil-asset forfeiture—the taking of private prop erty on the suspicion that it was used for a crime. It raises more than $5 billion a year from such forfeitures, much of it shared with state and local governments. Usually, these funds are insulated from legislative or congressional oversight; of ten, the proceeds directly benefit the police who make the seizures. One study noted that federal civil-asset forfeiture takes more from citizens ev ery year than burglars do. A n important reason for the increase in fees and fines is that they allow government to in crease revenue sub rosa, without voter input or judicial control. Since the 1970s, many citizen groups have secured constitutional amend ments that let voters weigh in on tax increases at the state or local level. Not surprisingly, vot ers have been reluctant to increase taxes. Thus, more governments have been boosting their fees, and courts have agreed with them that such fees aren’t subject to the same constitu tional restrictions. City governments now run all sorts of businesses and charge for them, usually in competition with private companies—one in every five golf courses in the United States, for instance, is a municipal course.
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“Any new federal constitutional restrictions on fees are unlikely, but Congress can make these fees more transparent.
State laws in Illinois, Texas, and California mandate that governments prove the connection between the charges they impose and the services they provide—but in reality, these laws have spawned an industry that writes elaborate userfee studies showing, for instance, that wastepickup charges should account for millions of dollars of city administrative overhead or that a new housing development causes a dozen more visits to a city park, which itself costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. These studies have less to do with actual costs than with letting govern ments charge what ever the citizen will bear. Since govern ments don’t include the cost of user-fee studies themselves in their estimates, these must be covered by taxpayers. They’ve become just another subsidy created by the charging of fees. For many government functions, the move to fees can be an improvement. Fees force those who benefit from a program to bear the burden of sustaining it. But fees should be a substitute, not a supplement, for raising taxes. Instead, as currently structured, charges and fees let govern ment both expand and draw on more subsidies and taxes. They are a way around accountability, not a means toward it. The fight against the inexorable growth of government must contend with charges and fees. The best way to limit them is to at tack spending in general. Many states already do this; today, 15 states have limits on overall spending growth. Most of these, however, al low either the shifting of burdens to local gov ernments (which don’t have the same limits) or easy overrides by the legislature. The 1992 Colo rado Taxpayers Bill of Rights Act, which limited the increase in total state and local government spending to population growth and inflation, is a better model. Despite obvious skullduggery by politicians and bureaucrats, Colorado and
SPRING 2022 53 states that have imitated it manage to control taxes and spending more than most. An Ari zona state judge recently struck down a 3.5 per cent income surtax because the amount of funds raised would have busted through the constitu tional spending limit. Efforts to rein in extraneous fines have borne fruit. Some states cap fines to a certain propor tion of a city’s budget. After the Ferguson issue came to light, Missouri said that cities could not raise more than 20 percent of their budgets from fines. This figure is not particularly encouraging, but it’s a start. More promisingly, the Su preme Court, in the 2019 case Timbs v. In diana , finally applied the Eighth Amend ment clause against excessive fines to state and local gov ernments. In this case, the government took a $42,000 Land Rover that plaintiff Tyson Timbs had bought with the insurance money from his father’s death. The government claimed that the car had been used to carry drugs. Some revenuehungry jurisdictions may now think twice before charging large fines or seizing property. Any new federal constitutional restrictions on fees are unlikely, but Congress can make these fees more transparent. A bipartisan bill, the Agency Accountability Act, would end bureau crats’ control over their own fees and deposit them back into the general Treasury fund. This would end the practice of keeping such revenue as a bottomless kitty outside of congressional oversight. So far, however, the bill has not ad vanced in CitizensCongress.arecatching on that taxes and charges are both symptoms of a wider problem: the ab struse, impenetrable nature of proliferating gov ernment programs. To limit taxes or fees without limiting the spending that enables them both is to delay the inevitable. Fees are the latest trick that government has devised to expand its scope, but they won’t be the last. If we want to stop pouring money down the government drain, we need to curb spending itself.
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Malcom Kyeyune Well-educated progressives wield institutional power to impose a new political and social order.
I t can be easy to forget how new our political and culture-war con flicts are. Ten years ago, critical race theory was something you’d encounter only online or in academic settings, Democratic politicians were still talking about civil unions for homosexual couples, and the media and federal government were busy pointing out how far America had come in repairing the broken race relations of the past. Today, little remains of that old order. Just how fast has this transfor mation unfolded? Consider a simple measure of how frequently the word “racism” appears in the nation’s four largest newspapers: after staying basi cally constant from the 1970s to 2010, its usage explodes around 2012, with the Washington Post and the New York Times leading the charge. Though this “Great Awokening” has scrambled political coalitions and upended widely held truths, wokeness itself remains a muddled concept. The obvious definition—that it is a belief system, what writer Wesley Yang has dubbed “the successor ideology”—has considerable merit. (See “The Identity Cult,” Winter 2022.) But as American polarization increases, it becomes clear that wokeness is also a social, economic, legal, and politi cal phenomenon; it cannot simply be reduced to the ideas inside people’s heads. (See “The Genealogy of Woke Capital,” Autumn 2021.)
If wokeness is an institutional force, a comparative analysis can help describe it. Most Europeans can remember when America was considered stodgy and conservative, compared with progressive Western Europe. And yet, in 2022, the U.S. is experiencing deeper levels of polarization and so cial strife than other Western countries. Polls suggest a rapid loss of faith in public institutions. Americans identifying with either political party in creasingly see the other party as a threat to democracy itself. Why is it, then, that people in traditionally progressive countries—my native social-democratic Sweden being a prime example—can believe the same things, read the same books, and propound the same ideas as their American counterparts, without their societies experiencing the same sort of catastrophic polarization afflicting the U.S.? Why is it that capital seems to have gone woke in the U.S. more than in the rest of the West, with large companies intervening directly in political battles in a way that would be unthinkable in the Nordic countries? If this behavior were simply a product of neo-Marxist or socialist ideology, one would think that it would be more
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Wokeness, the Highest Stage of Managerialism
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The core thesis of James Burnham’s 1941 The Managerial Revolution helps explain what is hap pening in the West today. A former Trotskyite who later became a leading figure in postwar American conservatism, Burnham argued in that book that Western society would not see the col lapse of capitalism and its replacement by social The 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, by James Burnham (left, seen here with Arthur Koestler), described a new form of class power—in which managers, not capitalists, would control the real economy.
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ism. Instead, he maintained, America would likely see capitalism replaced by a nonsocialist succes sor—one dominated not by capitalists in the clas sical sense but by a class of managers that would come to control the real economy, regardless of formal ownership status. This distinction—between ownership of, and control over, capital—was a topic of some dis cussion in the interwar years, with early analy ses noting that apparatchiks in the Soviet Union had appropriated control over public resources. In the U.S., Burnham’s prophecy of a new prevalent in a country like Sweden, where the ruling Social Democratic Party still sings “The Internationale” at its congresses.
CITY JOURNAL56 Wokeness, the Highest Stage of Managerialism
wasn’t good enough; rather, Activision Blizzard would need to open up its internal hiring and firing decisions to some sort of public review to ensure that it met various “diversity” targets. If one reads between the lines of the controversy, it becomes clear that the owners of a company now must subject their hiring process to review by other managerial institutions. The main practical demand that wokeness places on society is a massive expansion of mana gerial intermediation in previously independent social and economic processes. With Activision Blizzard, a controversy regarding the work place environment quickly metastasized into a struggle to implement new, alternative humanresources structures that corporate leadership would not control, and to which it would have to pay, in effect, a kind of ideological protection money. In real terms, this represents a nontrivial abrogation of property rights: you may still own your company, but don’t expect to be free to run it as you see fit without the “help” of outside commissars. Another example of creeping inter mediation can be seen in the Hollywood trend to hire so-called racial equity consultants to ensure that characters from various minorities are suffi ciently represented in movies and TV. Time was when a screenwriter would conceive of a plot and populate it with characters, drawing upon crude, inequitable instruments such as empathy and imagination; this is less and less permissible. Populating stories with various minority charac ters is not just encouraged but demanded—and one must do so only after employing intermedi ary consultants. Writing now requires interces sion from a class of moral managers. Seen in this light, wokeness is not a mere scholastic ideology. Indeed, the woke tend to be uninterested in any form of Socratic dialogue regarding their suppositions. In 2017, the femi nist philosophy journal Hypatia descended into massive controversy after a writer, Rebecca Tu vel, published an argument that transracialism ought to enjoy the same sort of philosophical sta tus as transgenderism. Tuvel appeared to make her argument sincerely, in an effort to explore the philosophical implications of people who transcend social categories, but the effort ren dered her a pariah. managerial order came against the backdrop of the New Deal, which had coincided with a (somewhat understandable) loss of faith in capi talist ideas. The balance of power was shifting from property rights to a steadily increasing category of human rights, and Americans were becoming more accepting of state planning and control over larger parts of society. Burnham saw America in the early 1940s as being in a somewhat transitory phase. The old, capitalist order was clearly ailing, and manag ers were steadily growing their power at the owners’ expense. Still, the process of forming a new rulership class was by no means complete. While “control over the instruments of produc tion is everywhere undergoing a shift” toward managers, wrote Burnham, “the big bourgeoisie, the finance-capitalists, are still the ruling class in the United States.” New Dealism was not yet a “developed, systematized managerial ideology” that was capable of fully replacing capitalism. But if Burnham were alive today, he might see wokeness as exactly that: a systematized, mana gerial ideology capable of standing on its own as a claim to rulership over society on behalf of the new class of managers. Indeed, many of the dy namics that worried or fascinated thinkers like Burnham during the interwar and New Deal era seem to reappear today in hypertrophied form. Let us return to the question of ownership ver sus control. Here, wokeness serves to abrogate property rights, as seen in many controversies taking place in the business world. Consider the fate of the video-game behemoth Activision Bliz zard, recently bought by Microsoft. After various ex-employees leveled allegations of workplace mistreatment and a frat-boy culture at its Califor nia offices, the company found itself under siege from multiple directions. First, the state of Cali fornia sued it. Then, the media started covering the story with fervor. Various NGOs and activist organizations jumped into the fray, and the Se curities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation. Though the original accusations against the company had to do only with sexual misconduct in the workplace, the list of demands made on Activision Blizzard quickly expanded beyond the original crime. Firing the offending workers or instituting mere workplace reform
“If woke ideology has little use for academic discussions, it is quite adept at asserting control over institutions.”
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If woke ideology has little use for academic discussions, it is quite adept at asserting control over institutions. One cannot separate woke con troversies from struggles over hiring and firing privileges inside institutions. What appears to be a fight over principles is simultaneously a fight over institutional prerogatives and access to re sources.Likethe managerial ideology that Burnham anticipated, wokeness both asserts a wide vari ety of rights that supersede ownership and in sists upon the creation of a permanent caste of managers to monitor the implementation of these rights. This tendency toward in termediation now extends to almost ev ery facet of modern society, including in areas previously seen as foundational to the political system. De mocracy, for instance, is now seen as needing various forms of intermediation so as to function properly. Without the input of managers, the thinking goes, the raw expression of the popular will can lead to aberrations, such as the election of Donald Trump or Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. Calls are increasingly be ing made to impose a layer of experts qualified to judge just what political questions and issues could be safely left to purportedly benighted voters to decide. The instinct to resort to expert guidance and thereby remove contentious issues from the realm of public debate takes many forms. Con sider Extinction Rebellion, a radical environmen tal group of marginal prominence but one that has nevertheless articulated a vision for fixing our supposedly broken political systems along these lines. Extinction Rebellion envisions the introduction of “citizens’ assemblies” consisting of a representative portion of the population that would form a “mini-public.” This mini-public would then receive information selected by a caste of experts and formulate various recom mendations based on it. The experts would listen to the mini-public’s (nonbinding) recommenda tions before making their own decisions about what was best. But why has America become more woke than its European counterparts? After all, many planks of progressive ideology, such as legal same-sex marriage, were achieved in Europe much earlier than in the United States. The ideas are fairly simi lar on both sides of the Atlantic.
joys a much more sedate cultural environment than the United States. It operates a massive government machine to furnish the scions of the managerial class with all sorts of work. My own municipality, Uppsala, a city two-thirds the size of Reno, Nevada, employs almost 100 people as “communicators.” Their official workload mostly consists of managing the municipality’s social media accounts and writing policy documents. The communications department is notoriously dysfunctional; the municipality hired an outside consultancy to find out what all these employees do all day. But in at least one sense, it does what it is supposed to do: provide make-work jobs for university graduates who would otherwise risk going unemployed—and become potential so cialSwedenagitators.isrife with various taxes, carve-outs, fees, and other accommodations that together form a massive patronage machine employing artists, bureaucrats, gender-studies majors, ac tivists, curators, mindfulness consultants, en vironmental advocates, and much more. The state aggressively pays for art, education, NGOs, and even journalism—most major newspapers in Sweden depend heavily on subsidies to stay
In my view, the material insecurity of the American managerial classes, whose numbers, as Peter Turchin ar gued, have grown too large to be absorbed by society in ways commensurate with their lofty lessSweden,velopment.accountexpectations,economichelpsforthisdeConsiderwhichisfarpolarizedanden
Probably not. In Europe, managers are now facing backlash as disillusionment with the wel fare state grows. Regressive taxes have ignited fuel protests in Sweden, Finland, Ireland, and, most dramatically, in France. There’s no partic ular reason to expect Europe to be spared from large-scale conflicts between classes and political factions in the years ahead. If anything, the gilets jaunes ’ rebellion prefigured a growing dynamic in European Meantime,countries.scenesfrom both the United States and Canada suggest that workers operating outside the managerial structures of big unions are starting to resist intermediation by experts. Leftists were always taught that workers, once robbed of leadership and organization from a well-educated vanguard, would devolve into an inert mass of potatoes with no political agency or ability to make their voices heard. This has proved wrong, and the future promises more conflicts between workers and the managers seeking to impose further restrictions on them. What about the owners of capital themselves? The old assumption on the radical left—that small-business owners are the faithful incuba tors of reaction and thus will always end up on the opposite side of working people—may be disproved in the years ahead. Insofar as the petty gentry of capitalism is concerned, the managerial regime offers little in the way of carrots, while in the black. Perhaps the best illustration of the Swedish political economy is that Swedes pay in the neighborhood of $9 per gallon for gas. This massive cost difference owes almost entirely to taxes and fees, which fund social work. At first, the gas tax was intended primarily to pay for the maintenance of roads. Today, people argue for raising gas taxes to fund environmentalist causes. The managers running these causes are trying to fund themselves by imposing regres sive taxes on their blue-collar countrymen. Swedes, it’s worth observing, aren’t knock ing down monuments of Carl Linnaeus. Even as the frenzy of iconoclasm and statue-toppling swept America, Swedish activists were content to launch an online poll on the subject of statue removal and give up, once it was clear that they didn’t enjoy majority support. Statue-toppling is less attractive when the municipality that owns the statues is likely to be your employer. Even if they were not designed with this pur pose in mind, the social-democratic welfare states of Europe as a whole have been adapted to provide a new form of welfare for the collegeeducated, aspirational managerial classes. Ag gressive tax policies once enacted to eliminate disparities between workers and owners have now been altered so that, in practice, they hit hardest against rural small-business owners and workers, while funding various subventions and tax breaks for residents in the comfortable ur ban cores. As environmentalism furnishes these urban-dwellers with a plausible excuse for everincreasing intermediation in society, it is no ac cident that the base of green parties throughout Europe is almost uniformly wealthy, urban, and highly credentialed. In the United States, by contrast, while some public-sector sinecures exist, it is hard to imag ine such a pervasive culture of make-work ever taking hold. Deep-seated cultural assumptions weigh against it, as do other practical consid erations. The scope of the U.S. welfare state is narrower (though it has always been under stated and, indeed, is more redistributive than its European counterparts). Further, the U.S. remains more federalist, meaning that large, state-driven projects shifting resources from one segment of the population to another are more
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difficult to implement. In Europe, managerial dominance in the economy can be justified as a natural outgrowth of the responsible welfare state. The woke rarely have to lower themselves to highway robbery—they can merely call for additional gas taxes to fund whatever manage rial initiatives need funding. In America, woke managerial intermediation resembles a crude shakedown against private corporations and in stitutions.
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What is the future of the managerial society? Will the European response continue unabated? Will the U.S. overcome its unique idiosyncrasies and produce a uniform system in which tax col lection—or perhaps tribute extraction—funds the expansion of the managerial state, overcoming the constitutional design?
the ever-growing requirements of the expand ing caste of bureaucrats and commissars places an unsustainable financial burden on them. The dismal fate of Activision Blizzard also hints that, even for very large companies, the relationship between capitalists and managers isn’t necessar ily one of happy symbiosis; it is increasingly be coming one of strife and parasitism. In short, woke managers want to impose a new political and social order. Managerialism requires intermediation, and intermediation re quires a justifying ideology. Wokeness has ac complished what New Dealism never set out to At video-game firm Activision Blizzard, a controversy regarding workplace treatment led to new humanresources structures that corporate leadership would not control.
SPRING 2022 59 do in the 1940s: it serves as a comprehensive, flexible, and ruthless ideology that can justify almost any act of institutional subversion and overreach. But already, the cracks are starting to show. With gas prices now rising precipi tously and inflation running wild, the contra dictions inherent in managerialism are likely only to sharpen in the days ahead. If wokeness is indeed the “highest stage”—to borrow from Lenin—of the managerialist society that Burn ham saw coming nearly 100 years ago, then one needn’t be a revolutionary to ask: How long can it really last?
CITY JOURNAL60 Inflation and the City
Nicole Gelinas New York will have to grapple with exploding prices, both economicallyandfiscally.
A fter a 40-year break from high inflation, Americans are rediscovering what it means when the prices of goods and services rise rapidly. With 7.9 percent inflation in February, people now must spend $107.90 to buy the same food, clothing, day care, electronics, and other day-to-day needs that cost $100 a year ago. Inflation doesn’t just af fect household spending, moreover. If it contin ues, which seems likely, it will have a severe im pact on New York City’s economy and budget, as Wall Street profits suffer, public-sector work ers demand double-digit raises, and the cost of construction projects soars, among other conse quences. City government can’t entirely avoid this national shock. But smart leadership from Gotham’s new mayor, Eric Adams, can blunt it.
Two things cause inflation, and both are with us today, as they were in the 1970s, the last time America saw sustained high inflation. The first is supply shock: that is, something happens abruptly
Costs for construction, a bedrock of New York’s blue-collar economy, are soaring— stymieing critical infrastructure work.
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The second big factor is the money supply— the amount of ready money in the American economy available to spend or invest but not including sums already invested in assets such as stocks or houses. The United States, like most Western countries, runs on fiat money—that is, money not backed by gold or another store of physical value. Instead, the government, through the Federal Reserve, literally creates money, largely through setting interest rates at which banks can borrow. When rates are low, the money supply expands; when rates are high, the money supply shrinks. The Fed has a natural bias toward low interest rates and increases in the money supply, in order to keep up with the American public’s desire to borrow. But the Fed generally cuts interest rates more sharply, and thus more dramatically expands the money supply, when it fears recession—as it does when the economy suffers supply shocks. In the 1960s, the money supply doubled. But in the 1970s, as the Fed confronted shock after shock, the money supply tripled, from less than $600 billion to $1.5 trillion. The money supply would not rise as quickly again until after the 2008 financial crisis, when the Fed slashed inter est rates to an unprecedented low of zero and kept them there for seven years, until 2015. To revive the economy, the Fed reasoned, Ameri cans had to borrow more—even though record household lending had helped trigger the crisis in the first place. In January 2008, the money supply was $7.5 trillion. By February 2020, the eve of the pandemic, it had doubled to $15.5 tril lion, mostly because of this post-financial-crisis money creation.
CITY JOURNAL62 Inflation and the City
Though the purpose of growing the money supply is to boost economic activity, and thus employment, the intention can backfire. More money can stimulate more economic growth only if the economy can quickly respond to this demand creation by producing more goods and services.Ifthis happy result doesn’t occur, inflation re sults: more money chasing the same amount of goods and services that existed before. In the 1970s, inflation rose from 3.3 percent annually in 1972 to 11.1 percent in 1974. It remained per sistently high, often in double digits, until 1983. The 1970s were not a good decade for the U.S. economy. From 1974 to 1975, the country lost 2.9 percent of its jobs, and unemployment, having remained well below 4 percent for most of the 1960s, hit 9 percent in 1975. The Federal Reserve kept slashing interest rates, from 12.9 percent in mid-1974 to 4.6 percent in early 1977. Rather than spurring high growth, though, lower in terest rates just introduced Americans to new terms: “stagflation” and “the misery index”—a persistently double-digit rate of unemployment and inflation combined. In the early 1980s, then–Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker determined to break in flation’s back. To do so, he had to raise interest rates sharply, thus tightening the money sup ply and making it tougher for businesses and people to borrow. Rates, tremendously volatile already, blasted from 9.5 percent in mid-1980 to 19 percent by early 1981, where they stayed for six months. This sharp rise in the cost of money brought a short, but deep, recession. Even as the nation’s homebuilders and automakers pro tested, as potential customers couldn’t borrow, Volcker held fast. He had to prove not only that the Fed would cut inflation, whatever the pub lic uproar, but that it would never again coun tenance double-digit inflation. It eventually worked: by the mid-1980s, inflation had fallen below 5 percent; by the 1990s, it was hovering close to the Fed’s annual 2 percent target. For nearly 40 years thereafter, people and firms could invest and lend with confidence, know ing that the base that those decisions stood upon—the dollar—would reasonably maintain its value. to cut off the supply of a good that people use regularly and that they can’t easily substitute with another, cheaper good. In the 1970s, the supply shocks were two oil crises: the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and 1974, related to the Yom Kippur War; and in 1979, the Iran hostage crisis, which similarly sent oil prices into orbit. Today, the supply shock is largely due to pandemic-related disruptions around the world, which have kept people from manufacturing and shipping goods. Russia’s inva sion of Ukraine and the curtailment of Ukraine’s critical grain exports, as well as sanctions on Rus sia’s oil and gas exports, will intensify the effect.
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W hat now for New York? Though history never quite repeats itself, the parallels between the early 1970s and today are eerie. Just as in the 1970s, New York City doesn’t seem like a great place to live right now, if you have other op portunities. The city’s unemployment rate is 8.8 percent, more than double the national rate. As of December, the city’s private sector was miss ing 9.8 percent of its jobs, relative to December 2019; the only reason that the unemployment rate is lower than 9.8 percent is that some peo ple who lost their jobs left the city, searching for better chances elsewhere, and some people have given up entirely, leaving the workforce. Crime is skyrocketing, with the murder rate up more than 50 percent in two years. New York’s affluent population is falling: the number of white kinder garteners, a good, if rough, proxy for affluence, fell by 16 percent post-pandemic, far higher than among any other racial group. The city’s econ omy doesn’t start from a great position to with stand high inflation, to say the least.
“New York City fared worse than the rest of the country during the 1970s stagflation, losing 16.1 percent of its jobs.”
Why didn’t inflation spike after 2008, when the Fed slashed interest rates to zero? Partly be cause the economy suffered no supply shocks. In fact, the U.S. economy was awash with a surplus of goods made by cheap labor abroad. Abun dant cheap labor at home, via immigrants often working below the legal minimum wage, also restrained prices. The economy did experience a different type of inflation, however: asset infla tion. The price of stocks, houses, and other in vestments reached record highs simply because people had no other place to put their cheap money. In the after math of the pandemic, the Fed reduced rates, once again, to zero. Now, though, the more traditional cy cle, of increases in the costs of everyday goods and services, may be starting anew. After the pandemic began in March 2020, the Fed pumped the money supply at a rate never previously seen. As of this writing, the money supply stood at $21.8 trillion, thrice as high as it was barely a decade and a half ago. The economy has never had so much money looking for a place to go. New York City fared worse than the rest of the country during the 1970s stagflation, losing 16.1 percent of its jobs between 1969, a postwar high, and 1977. Though the nation at least grew in fits and starts between recessions during the 1970s, leaving the U.S. with more jobs at the end of the decade than at the beginning, New York would not recover its lost 1970s jobs total until 2008. Infla tion wasn’t the only culprit in New York’s decline, of course: the city suffered the destabilizing results of middle-class flight to the suburbs, skyrocketing crime, and a failing transit system. But inflation definitely made things worse. New York lost 11 percent of its financial-services jobs in the 1970s, for example. Inflation harmed banks’ profits; the business of financial services is investing and lending, after all, but both were moribund. The stock market ended the 1970s at a lower level than at the start of that lost decade; in inflation-adjusted terms, stocks plummeted. As for lending: if inflation erodes the value of the dollar as a borrower repays a loan, the lender can end up losing money. The low-inflation era that began in the 1980s, by contrast, jump-started New York’s economy. Wall Street took off, as both stock and bond (lending) markets boomed. The city’s popula tion rose again, as white-collar “yuppies” flocked to the city to work not just in banking but in related professional industries, such as lawyer ing and advertising, and as immigrants and other workingclass newcomers came in search of job op portunities created by this newfound wealth. The city rebuilt its tax base, giving it the re sources to reinvest in its neglected physical infrastructure and, a decade later, to help con front its violent-crime crisis.
Inflation would increase the cost that taxpay ers shoulder to employ city workers. Despite modest reductions in the number of city em ployees that Mayor Adams suggested in his first budget presentation, in February 2022, the city still employs more than 334,000 people as of this spring—at an annual cost, in wages and salaries, of $30.6 billion. As it happens, the city’s major labor agreements are expiring or have already expired. The labor contract with District Council 37, the biggest civilian union, with 59,000 work ers, elapsed in May 2021, and the agreement with the United Federation of Teachers, with 112,900 workers, ends this September. As inflation spikes, unionized city workers will demand raises to keep up. The state comp troller estimates that 1 percent raises would cost about $500 million. (Raises have knock-on ef fects for city-paid pension contributions, as pen sions are paid as a percentage of salary.) Yet city workers won’t be asking for a 1 percent raise. They’ll probably demand annual 5 percent raises and above to keep pace with rising prices—at a cost of $2.5 billion in the first year, $5 billion in the second year, and so on. Even if Wall Street profits hold up, the city would swiftly find itself drained of its $6 billion in reserves at this rate, and in deficit. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, New York actually used inflation to its advantage in paring And high inflation may worsen these trends.
Inflation and the City tive (and for other reasons, including, during 2021, relative freedom from Covid restrictions). That New York depends on Wall Street is noth ing new, but a downturn would be particularly acute now, with the rest of the city’s economy so fragile. Every job loss now amounts to a greater share of the city’s shrunken economy. Inflation could also have a direct impact on the city budget. Theoretically, inflation should not harm it directly, since, as private-sector wages rise, the tax revenues that the city collects would also rise and more residents would find themselves pushed into higher tax brackets. Yet this assumes that private-sector wages will rise in tandem with inflation and that people won’t resist paying more of that money to the government and decide to re locate to lower-tax states and cities.
Finance still powers New York’s economy, and one reason the city budget has withstood the last two years of turmoil, in addition to tens of bil lions of dollars in federal aid, is that Wall Street has earned record profits. Yet high inflation re mains bad for Wall Street, just as in the 1970s. On the stock-market side: inflation erodes consumer confidence, thus harming corporate profits. In flation also pushes up the price of the materials and labor that companies need to produce their goods and services, further slicing profits. On the lending side: financial firms, again, will be reluctant to make loans if inflation will erode re payment dollars. A struggling Wall Street would have an outsize effect on the city. As state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reported last year, Wall Street jobs con stitute just 5.2 percent of the city’s private-sector total—but those jobs pay nearly $407,000 on av erage annually, five times as high as the average $92,000 wage in the rest of the city’s private sec tor. Wall Street jobs thus make up one-fifth of all private-sector wages, and 14 percent of all eco nomic activity, “more than any other industry.” A steep drop in Wall Street profits and bonuses could shave $3 billion from New York’s per sonal-income-tax revenues alone, taking out half the city’s $6 billion in budget reserves against its $101 billion budget. This anticipated fall does not account for how, in a recession, Wall Street firms would look to cut costs, including real-estate costs—something made easier by how, during the pandemic, work ers proved that they can do their jobs outside of expensive midtown Manhattan. Even with record profits, as the comptroller notes, Wall Street has been shrinking, down nearly 2 percent in 2020, to 179,900 jobs. “The loss of industry jobs in the city, at a time when profits are soaring, may be attrib uted to a combination of advances in technology and the relocation of jobs,” writes DiNapoli. “In 2021, job losses appear to have accelerated, with the industry on pace to lose 4,900 jobs.” These New York losses come at a time when “Wall Street” jobs, in the rest of the nation, are growing, observes the comptroller; portions of the industry have moved to Florida and more hospitable climes, from a tax and cost perspec
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SPRING 2022 65 pressed, and if raises are not kept to reasonable levels, then there may have to be a serious num ber of layoffs.” If government workers hold out for inflation-linked raises, the city should simply allow agreements to remain expired for a few years. It’s easier to assess inflation costs in the past than in the future.
% Inflation, Consumer Prices for the United States,
SOURCE: World Bank, St. Louis Fed (http://fred.stlouis.org/series/FPCPITOTLZGUSA) 10.012.515.07.55.02.5-2.5DJUSTEDSEASONALLNOTPERCENTYA 201020052000199519901985198019751970 20152020 .0.5.0550 FEB. 2022 7. 9 % MENAALBERTO
Next, consider the cost of the city’s debt. The good news: New York City is far better off here labor costs. Mayor Edward Koch’s ad ministration held fast against granting inflation-adjusted raises, partly because state and federal oversight forced it to, after the city nearly went bankrupt in 1975. In 1980, city workers sought 14.5 percent raises yearly. Yet the mayor inked agreements with labor unions representing 200,000 workers for 8 per cent annual raises over two years. At a time when inflation was running at 10 percent, these agreements saved the city money in inflation-adjusted terms. Im portantly, the city never put clauses into contracts allowing wages to increase automatically with inflation, though the unions asked for them. “Inflation helped us,” says one former Koch budget official.Yetthis is a dangerous game. Adams can hardly award 7.5 percent raises to match inflation—nor can he award, say, 5 percent raises, hoping that inflation re mains high over the term of a contract; if inflation falls, the city would wind up paying more in real terms. “Rising ex penditures, including wages newly ne gotiated, in times when inflation is well above average could be a threat to on going fiscal balance if not supported on the revenue side,” says Tom Kozlik, head of municipal research and analytics at HilltopSecurities, an investment firm. “In terms of approaching the unions,” suggests Peter Goldmark, budget di rector under Governor Hugh Carey in the late 1970s, when the state oversaw Gotham’s emergence from the fiscal crisis, “both the state and the city should indi cate firmly and early to the unions that they are taking a broad, cooperative, and progressive approach to inflation. A central axiom of that approach should be that the more unions cooper ate in limiting raises during this difficult period, the greater will be the city’s capacity to avoid layoffs.” Goldmark adds: “Despite all the refer ences to miraculous pots of money and reserves of federal funds, the city operating budget over the next couple of years is going to be severely 1970– 2022
Inflation and the City produced such an infrastructure backlog that, a decade later, the Williamsburg Bridge almost collapsed, causing Koch to close it in the late 1980s for emergency refurbishment. The city’s public-housing stock already faces a $40 billion repair backlog—which, every year that infla tion remains at 13 percent, grows by close to $5 billion.Though the city doesn’t control the Metro politan Transportation Authority, which runs subways and buses, its residents and commut ers suffer from inflation pressure there, too. The contract for the Transport Workers Union, which staffs subways and buses, expires in 2023. The raises that the city awards to its own workers will help set the pattern for TWU workers. The MTA can’t award double-digit raises to its employees without hiking fares by an equivalent amount. But can subway and bus riders withstand, say, a 20 percent fare hike? Ridership remains at barely half of what it was pre-pandemic, with current riders mostly lower-wage retail, health-care, and other service-sector workers, already strapped by higher costs of food, child care, and other essentials.Thecity’s regulated housing sector also stands to suffer. Of the more than 2.1 million rentalhousing units in the city, two-thirds of New York’s housing stock, roughly half, or 966,000, are rent-regulated—that is, a city board, under state law, sets the maximum rent increase each year. Of course, the board can’t control how much property owners’ costs go up. Last year, the city’s rent guidelines board approved a rent bump of just 1.5 percent for people signing oneyear leases and allowed that increase to take place only during the final six months of the lease. This hike falls far behind inflation and comes as land lords struggle to collect back rent from hundreds of thousands of tenants who stopped paying rent due to the public-health emergency. If future rent increases fail to keep up with cost inflation, more of the city’s rent-regulated hous ing stock will fall into distress or abandonment, as landlords fail to maintain properties that don’t pay for themselves. In 1990, after two de cades of abandonment, 13.9 percent of the city’s rent-regulated housing units were distressed. The figure fell to a low of 4.9 percent in 2016, but than in the 1970s, when it didn’t balance its bud get and borrowed billions yearly just to make ends meet. The money had to be refinanced ev ery year, at the new, prevailing interest rate. The rate went up as inflation rose, as lenders wanted to ensure that they were compensated for the eroded value of the dollar and because the city’s credit was getting riskier. In 1973, New York paid a 5 percent interest rate on its bonds; by 1975, just before the city’s default, the rate had nearlyToday,doubled.thecity owes $94.2 billion. In contrast with five decades ago, this debt wasn’t incurred to meet day-to-day expenses but to improve New York’s physical infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, and school buildings. Further, most of this debt, $86 billion, like a long-term home mortgage, has a fixed rate of interest. Even if inflation rises, and lenders want a higher inter est rate to compensate, they’re out of luck. Per versely, if inflation mounts, the city can repay this debt with ever-cheaper dollars. “Sustained inflation theoretically would help existing debt become relatively more affordable,” says Kozlik. The flip side of this supposed advantage, though, is that New York needs to borrow more money. Over the next five years, the Adams administration wants to invest $100 billion in capital, including perhaps more than $9 billion to build jails in four boroughs in order to close Rikers Island. Most of this money, $95.4 billion, would be “city-funded”—that is, borrowed. Even with record-low interest rates, the city expects its annual debt-service costs—payments on princi pal and interest—to go from $6.8 billion to $9.6 billion over the next four years. Abruptly higher interest rates levied by lenders to compensate for runaway inflation would make such new bor rowing prohibitive, undoing some of the benefit of repaying older debt with cheaper dollars. Then, too, there’s the infrastructure that the city proposes to build with all that borrowed money. Though national inflation stands at 7.9 percent, inflation in the construction industry is running nearly twice as high, at 13 percent. New York cannot build its new jails anywhere close to budget with this double-digit inflation, nor can it even ensure that bridges remain in good condition. The high inflation of the 1970s
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“Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as fright ening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man,” said Ronald Reagan in 1978. Today’s New York already has too many muggers and rob bers; now it must contend with the violence of inflation, too. it has inched up since. In 2019, the figure was 5.5 percent.
New York City is not an island—and it can’t entirely insulate itself from the damaging effects of rampant inflation. For now, Adams should im press upon fellow Democrats in Washington, in cluding in the White House, that the government must get inflation down before it reaches double digits.Beyond this prevention, which is the best cure, the city must ready itself to hold fast against New York City mayor Eric Adams should impress on Democrats in Washington the importance of controlling inflation.
SPRING 2022 67 union demands for raises that keep up with un certain inflation. Adams also must ensure that New York spends every scarce dollar for infra structure wisely; the specter of inflation eating away at New York’s finite dollars for infrastruc ture is yet another opportunity to rethink the costly four-borough jails project, for instance.
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Charts by Alberto Mena
Those alleging that the United States imprisons too many people rely on faulty history and bad facts.
ince President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act in De cember 2018 to relax federal prison and sentencing laws, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) population has plummeted, reaching its lowest total since 2000. The federal government is not alone in try ing to reduce confinement: several states have enacted reforms with this goal. According to Bu reau of Justice Statistics (BJS) data, the American jail population declined 25 percent between 2019 and 2020; the jail incarceration rate is currently at its lowest point since 1990. During the same period, the state prisoner population is down 15 percent.Animating these reforms is a belief that the United States incarcerates too many people and that prison is ineffective or unjust. Many aca demics, journalists, and activists criticize incar ceration as unduly harsh on lawbreakers and corrosive to inner-city communities. Such orga nizations as the National Research Council of America’s incarceration rate is currently at its lowest since 1990.
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Matt DeLisi and John Paul Wright
Mass Incarceration Hysteria
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ontemporary reformists argue that rising incarceration rates in the late twentieth cen tury represented a sinister attempt to reimpose a racial caste system after the end of Jim Crow. For much of the twentieth century, they say, de spite increases in crime, new criminal statutes, and longer criminal sentences, prison popula tions and the amount of time served remained relatively unchanged—until the early 1960s, when politicians began to adopt tough-on-crime measures. Indeed, incarceration rates were low for much of the twentieth century, often not ex ceeding 150 per 100,000, at least using traditional methodology. Between 1880 and 1950, while the number of state prisons rose from 61 to 106, the U.S. population more than tripled, from about 50 million to about 152 million. But incarceration was more common than this history lets on—and the eventual crackdown on crime, when it came, was long overdue. While
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incarceration rates seemed low in the early twentieth century, Progressive reformers also built a variety of institutions to detain the poor and infirm, the delinquent, the criminal, and the mentally ill. By 1940, almost 218,000 citizens 18 and older were in prisons, with another 99,000 in local jails and workhouses. And these num bers were far exceeded by the population housed in state mental institutions: more than 591,000, many of whom had committed criminal offenses. By 1950, that number rose to 613,000, with an other 178,000 in state prisons, 86,000 in jails and workhouses, and 140,000 in youth facilities. Ex cluding the mentally handicapped, the total in carcerated population exceeded 1 million, for an incarceration rate of 670 per 100,000—far higher than the typically cited rate of that era of about 100 per 100,000. As the deinstitutionalization movement tar geted psychiatric prisons, individuals who had received treatment and other services in those fa cilities were set free. What deinstitutionalization advocates could not have forecast was the wave of social unrest and violent crime that emerged in the late 1960s and continued unabated for the next three decades. Yet state prison populations actually declined in the 1960s and early 1970s. There were 189,735 inmates in 1960 but only 176,403 inmates in 1970. “Proof is impossible,” noted William Stuntz in The Collapse of American Criminal Justice , “but the low and falling prison populations of the 1960s and early 1970s prob ably contributed to rising levels of serious crime during those years.” As crime rose, the criminal-justice system was revealed to be pathetically underprepared. Limited training, inadequate equipment, and overt corruption plagued many police depart ments. In the correctional sphere, the number of jail cells and prison beds had not kept pace with population growth, much less with unparalleled increases in crime. Given the scarcity of correc tional space, those arrested found themselves re turned almost immediately to the streets, where most continued to re-offend. The issue was not just one of resources. Sen tences for serious crimes were brief. In 1933, a person convicted for murder or manslaughter would serve a median 44 months before release; the National Academies, American Society of Criminology, and Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences have assailed the “systematic” and “en trenched” racism that allegedly characterizes our criminal-justice system. For many on the left, in carceration is simply a social evil. Some on the right also back such efforts, convinced that re ducing prison populations will save tax dollars or that embracing reform will yield political ben efits.But mass incarceration is an ill-defined notion that ignores what we have learned about the es sential role of government in controlling crime. Incarceration, appropriately applied, represents effective public policy, worthy of investment. Compelling data show that prison incarceration in the United States is lower than should be ex pected. While some states and public officials tout a hard line against crime, the reality is that many serious, recidivistic criminal offenders rarely see the inside of a prison cell. When they do, most get released after serving time well short of their actual sentence. Incarceration is the proverbial revolving door. Nevertheless, the mass incarceration narrative remains potent and retains bipartisan support—but its historical and empirical foundation is weak.
Reformists decrying mass incarceration don’t just advance a tendentious history. They also over look four key facts about the contemporary state of the U.S. criminal-justice system. Both the preva lence of behavioral disorders linked with crime and the annual offending numbers conveyed by
“Mass incarceration is an ill-defined notion that ignores what we have learned about controlling crime.”
The size of the inmate population likewise grew, from more than 288,000 in 1980 to more than 1 million in 1990, and then to its 2009 apex of 1.4 million state prisoners. If state spending on criminal justice increased dramatically after 1980, it was long overdue. As criminologist William Spelman notes, state spending also grew precipitously on education, parks and leisure, and health care as most state populations ex panded. Hence, states were spending pro portionately more on criminal justice, in cluding on prisons, partly because they had spent so little on their justice systems for so long and because states now had more rev enue to spend. Contrary to claims that incarcera tion is too expensive, the cost of housing state inmates has actually declined as a share of over all state revenues: in 1969, the cost was about 8 percent of all state revenues; today, that figure is just 2.9 percent. This brief summary vitiates the historical ar guments of today’s reformists. If mass incarcera tion ever existed, it was between 1930 and 1960. As crime worsened, governments were slow to react, getting a handle on the problem only well after the crime wave had begun. By then, how ever, the reformers who gave us institutions of confinement had turned against them, leaving millions of seriously mentally ill people to their own devices and then waging campaigns to re duce incarceration.
SPRING 2022 71 by 1980, the figure had risen somewhat, to 60 months. The median time served for a rape con viction held steady at 36 months. And between 1923 and 1981, the median time served for all of fenses fell from 18 months to 16 months. To manage the growing numbers of people arrested for serious crimes, states began hold ing people bound for state prisons in local jails. In short order, local jails were overflowing with inmates, and many suits were brought for Eighth Amendment violations relating to overcrowding. States and local jurisdictions also started to ma nipulate the levers of confinement. Proba tion caseloads soared as courts diverted many offenders from prison while states simultaneously lib eralized conditions for parole and good behavior. Revolvingdoor justice was born, not because of legislator contempt for public safety but because states had historically not ade quately invested in their systems of justice—allo cating resources to arrest, prosecute, and confine offenders—and thus were unprepared for how to handle a three-decade increase in serious crime. Increasing crime rates eventually became a federal issue. In 1968, Congress passed the Safe Streets Act, which created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, providing block grants for states and cities to improve police edu cation and training, develop and increase fund ing of institutes for research and training, and expand jail and prison capacity. The new law emerged out of the recognition that investment in the justice system had not kept pace with popula tion growth or crime. Before the Carter admin istration recommended the elimination of the block-grant program (and Congress agreed, in 1983), it would shift about $55 billion in inflationadjusted dollars to the states to combat crime. Federal funds encouraged states to modernize their justice systems, but jail and prison capac ity still lagged year-over-year increases in crime until the early 1980s, when many states started funding new prison construction. In 1980, for ex ample, the prison population rose by only 10,613. As more prison space was created through the 1980s, yearly admissions increased, reaching 75,521 in 1990 and approaching 80,000 in 1995.
1401601802002202400STHOUSAND 20012005 2015 202020222010
the prevalence of prison confinement in the United States has ranged from 0.1 percent to 0.9 percent of the population. This pales next to the estimated prevalence of clinical psychopathy (1 percent), clinical antisocial personality disorder (3–4 percent), career criminality (5–6 percent), and life-coursepersistent offending (10 percent). Extrapo lating from these estimates, one suspects that many criminal psychopaths, career criminals, and offenders with lifelong con duct problems remain free to continue their offending careers. And data from nations spanning North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia con sistently validate the career-criminal pro totype, the small group that accounts for more than half of the incidence of crime in a population.Second,the annual offending prob lem. Each year in the United States since 1980, the FBI Uniform Crime Reports have counted 10–15 million arrests. The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey has counted 20–42 million victimizations. Yet the total cor rectional population currently sits at 6.4 million, and the current prison confine ment population at 1.47 million, for all of fenders cumulatively sentenced over the past decades. Only a small fraction of the victimizations and arrests that occur annu ally culminate in a prison sentence—partly because of the incapacity of criminal-justice systems to process the magnitude of of fending that Reformistsoccurs.commonly lament the con finement of older prisoners, but the annual offending problem and the cumulative nature of the prisoner population counter such sentiment. A 2016 BJS report on the aging of the state prisoner population found that nearly one in three prisoners aged 65 and older was serving either a death or life sentence, and would never be released, barring exceptional circumstances. These would include multiple-homicide of fenders; those who murdered while committing other grievous crimes such as kidnapping, rape, or armed robbery; and those who murdered victim reports exceed incarceration rates, suggest ing that the system has failed to capture a substan tial portion of criminal offenders. The system also tends to be far more lenient than activists let on. Finally, the incapacitation of criminals itself offers public-safety benefits. First, the prevalence problem. Behavioral disorders and pathological criminal prototypes linked with serious offenders are far more com mon than is incarceration. Over the past 40 years, A Smaller Federal Prison Population SOURCE: Federal Bureau of Prisons
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In a population of federal correctional clients on supervised release after a term in federal prison, 36 percent of arrest charges in their criminal careers were dismissed. Are dismissed charges ipso facto evidence that the accused was wrong fully charged? In reality, most criminal charges are dismissed for triviality because the victim or witnesses in the case refuse to cooperate, or be cause the dropped charges were part of a plea agreement. A 2017 University of Chicago Crime police officers. Moreover, an aging prison population reflects not only the advanced age of the most recalcitrant offenders but also their ongoing annual offending. Be tween 1993 and 2013, the number of pris oners aged 55 and older admitted to state prison rose 400 percent. Third, the leniency problem. Activist, me dia, and academic narratives suggest that scores of people are in prison for possessing small amounts of drugs for personal use, be ing unable to pay their fines and restitution, or perpetrating trivial technical violations of their felony probation or parole. Reform ists assert a discriminatory process where offenders who are racial minorities face ex cessive confinement. But the truth is that the justice system tends toward leniency. Offenders get plenty of op portunities for community-based supervi sion, have many of their charges dismissed or reduced, and recidivate frequently before actually being sentenced to prison. Nation ally representative BJS data indicate that about one in four criminal cases—including nearly one in three violent criminal cases— is dismissed, and just 54 percent of violent offenses result in prison confinement. Most traffic, misdemeanor, and nonviolent felo nies that end in conviction bring their perpe trators fines, restitution, deferred sentences, day reporting, home confinement, electronic monitoring, community service, or the ubiq uitous probation. Less serious offenders comply well with these sanctions, complete their sentences, and exit the justice system, but even serious offenders receive these op portunities if their underlying charges are not grave. One example is Tom Latanowich, a 29-year-old probationer in Massachusetts who, in 2018, killed a police officer who was attempting to execute a warrant for his arrest. Latanowich had 111 prior offenses on his arrest record but received probation. His murder trial is ongoing.Manyarrest charges are dismissed, rejected in the interests of justice—meaning that the charges are considered too trivial to expend ju dicial resources—or are simply not prosecuted.
Declining State Prisoner Counts SOURCE: Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics 1.01.11.21.31.41.50SMILLION 20012005 2015 20202010 234
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CITY JOURNAL74 Mass Incarceration Hysteria offending, the fact remains that incarcerated of fenders can’t harm citizens. Data also challenge the wisdom of conserva tive cases for decarceration. In November 2019, for instance, Oklahoma enacted the largest single-day prison commutation in U.S. history. Governor Kevin Stitt described the event as “an other mark on our historic timeline as we move the needle in criminal justice reform, and my administration remains committed to working with Oklahomans to pursue bold change that will offer our fellow citizens a second chance while also keeping our communities and streets safe.” But while the Oklahoma Pardon and Pa role Board recommended 527 inmates for com mutation, 65 of those were wanted by another jurisdiction for criminal activity and could not be released. More than one in ten of these “non-violent, low-level offenders,” then, were ineligible for commutation because of the ex tensiveness of their criminal history. Among the 462 commuted prisoners released, 30 were back in custody by February 2020. That equates to an arrest rate of 6,494 per 100,000—more than dou ble the national arrest rate of 3,011 per 100,000 in the United States. The mass commutation saved $11.9 million from reduced confinement costs, equivalent to $25,758 per offender. How would those reduced prison costs compare with the per-offender costs of housing assistance, food vouchers, medi cal care, insurance, unemployment benefits, and substance-use treatment that are standard among inmates reentering society? How to value the public-safety threats arising from recidivism, which, BJS data make clear, is a near-certainty for most felony offenders? In the final analysis, the U.S. incarceration sys tem remains judicious. The narrative of mass in carceration fails on inspection. This is not to say that we should not question our use of prisons and jails—but a balanced and empirically in formed approach would also question the likely consequences of incarcerating too few. The pro gressive Left remains unwilling to define the boundaries whereby crime reductions are maxi mized through confinement, or where too little Lab report found that in Chicago in 2016, only 26 percent of murders and 5 percent of shootings were cleared by arrest, and a troubling propor tion of those did not result in conviction. The main reason for the low clearance and conviction rates was the unwillingness of victims and wit nesses to cooperate with law enforcement and prosecutors.Thecorrectional domain is especially lenient. With important exceptions, most states and the federal system drastically reduce prison sentences via “good-time” reductions (such a provision was included in the First Step Act). Theoretically, these encourage rehabilitation, allow inmates to serve sentences concurrently, as opposed to consecutively, and impose postconviction relief due to legislative changes. In practice, serious offenders often serve unseri ous sentences—undermining truth-in-sentencing and leading to miscarriages of justice. A 2021 BJS report found that the median time served in prison is 1.3 years. For violent crimes, the me dian is 2.4 years. For murder, the median is 17.5 years, with a mean of 17.8 years. Seventy percent of convicted homicide offenders serve less than 20 years before their initial release from state prison. And prisoners convicted of drug posses sion—the symbolic victims in the mass-incar ceration myth—serve a median nine months in confinement before release. Serious offenders must busily engage in crime to climb the punish ment ladder and receive a prison sentence, but once confined, irrespective of their conviction of fense, they are soon released. Finally, the incapacitation problem. Custody provides substantial public-safety benefits sim ply by incapacitating offenders. Increased in carceration through the 1980s and 1990s helped turn around the mounting levels of violence, though it was not the only factor involved. Stud ies find large reductions in crime attributed to earlier efforts to incapacitate criminal offenders.
Consider, too, a recent BJS report on more than 404,000 state prisoners released from custody in 30 states. BJS found that 68 percent recidivate within three years and 79 percent within six years. For prisoners with the longest criminal histories, recidivism estimates exceed 80 per cent. While a stint in prison may not deter future
The vast majority of violent crime—which exploded starting in the 1960s—is still committed by a small group of repeat offenders, often while out on bail.
surge was eventually blunted to unprecedented lows.Under normal circumstances, these changes would be understood as the by-product of ef fective public policy. The wholesale rejection of incarceration as an effective policy tool risks too much. If past is prologue, then we can learn much from the consequences of deinstitutionalization and the failure to invest in all components of our justice system. Both led to more human suffering and to lives lost, as would current efforts to de fund the police. We should avoid such mistakes and be reluctant to accept the kinds of promises that jeopardized public safety in an earlier era.
incarceration increases crime and violence—as it has in recent American history, such as now. The prison boom of previous years was the re sult of population growth, an explosion in crime and violence, and decades of neglecting our sys tem of justice. When the volume of crime finally exceeded the system’s capacity to manage it, pol icymakers on the left and on the right responded to their constituents’ demands for public safety by investing broadly in our justice system: bet ter-trained police, expanded probation depart ments, new intermediate sanctions—and newer, more efficient, and safer prisons. Through the combined efforts of police, prosecutors, judges, correctional officials, and legislatures, the crime
“Hell,” wrote Hobbes, “is truth seen too late.”
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he transformation of the legal profession marks a funda mental change in American democracy. In the republic’s early days, lawyers provided ballast for stability and served as an anchor against excessive populism. The judiciary’s so ber attachment to formal order was a primary reason for giving it the power to review the constitutionality of legis lation. Law was the profession most likely to preserve the enduring framework of republican government against the mutable pas sions of the Nowadays,hour.lawyers are a force for often-radical progressive change. Nothing symbolizes that shift better than the American Bar Association. Once an embodiment of conservatism, it has been captured by the Left. Its resolutions at its annual meeting constitute a wish list of Democratic Party proposals. It also deploys its influence in the accreditation process of law schools to make them even more monolithically left-wing than they already are. The reasons for the shift lie, at least in part, in the reorientation of law yers’ interests. Since the birth of the modern regulatory state, lawyers are no longer primarily the allies of commercial classes, as they were in the early republic, but instead the technocrats and enablers of regulation and redistribution. The more the nation intervenes in economic affairs to regu late and redistribute, the greater slice of compliance costs and transfer pay ments lawyers can expect to receive. Thus, they cannot be counted on as supporters of property rights or even of a stable rule of law. Their interest lies frequently in dynamic forms of legal transformation and the uncer tainty they bring. Far from supporting a sound, established social order, they are likely to seek to undermine it. Only an ideological attachment to older forms of legal orders, like that which Federalist Society members
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John O. McGinnis The legal profession, once a guardian of republican government, is now a force for social upheaval.
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I n Democracy in America , Alexis de Tocqueville admired the American experiment in republi canism but foresaw several dangers. Democ racy could turn excessively populist, he warned, as demagogues successfully appealed to the ill-considered whims of an excitable public. Democratic mutability would thereby endanger republican stability. By operating on the prin ciple of equality in the political sphere, democ racy also tends to impose equality throughout society, depressing excellence everywhere, in cluding in commerce and in the culture. That kind of egalitarianism can engender mediocrity, not were an important bulwark against such dangers. According to Tocqueville, Today’s American Bar Association uses its accreditation power to make law schools monolithically left-wing.
Lawyersmeritocracy.once
the importance of law in a republic made law yers peculiarly powerful in America. When the nobility and princes are excluded from govern ment, lawyers become the most effective govern ing class. Indeed, they are the closest group that America has to an aristocracy, albeit one of tal ent, not Tocquevillebirth. further believed that the nature of the profession makes lawyers’ power a be neficent force in the republic. Their devotion to law gives them the inclination to resist popular passions, and even a bit of contempt for the vac illations of democracy. The formal structure of law encourages an abiding suspicion of innova tions that would disturb it. Tocqueville praised, above all, the disposition of character that comes naturally, he believed, from the legal profession: “Men who have made a special study of the laws derive from this occupation certain habits of order, a taste for formalities, and a kind of manifest, can call lawyers back to the essential role they play in the civic life of our republic.
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Today’s bar looks nothing like that of the early republic. Far from being a conservative influence, lawyers are more liberal than the median voter. And those who train the next generation of law yers, the law professors, are overwhelmingly leftwing, favoring all sorts of foolish innovations— from abolition of prisons to putting the Federal Reserve in charge of setting prices for core goods. The rise of the regulatory state is partly to blame. At the time of the Constitution, lawyers obtained their fees largely from private transac tions. They negotiated and litigated contracts, conveyed property, and drew up trusts. But since the New Deal, much of law has become ad ministrative law because the modern state is the administrative state. Government lawyers’ prac tice consists in finding new ways to regulate. For private lawyers, it consists in finding new ways of complying with or avoiding regulation. Law yers thus gain with any increase in the scope of government agencies and complexity of the re latedTheprocedures.otherprimary factor behind the bar’s transformation has been the rise of living consti tutionalism and rights expansion, beginning in the 1960s. Under living constitutionalism, law yers and judges are not simply servants of the law but potentially tribunes of the people, be cause they can choose to create new rights and discard others. In a legal world without the for mal anchoring in text and precedents that charac terized the lawyer’s craft of the past, innovation and, indeed, radicalism are prized as sources of instinctive regard for the regular connection of ideas, which naturally render them very hostile to the revolutionary spirit and unreflecting pas sions of the multitude.” Tocqueville was not so naive as to assume that every attorney has such qualities. Lawyers are prominent in every kind of political movement, after all, including revo lutionary ones. But respect for tradition and re sistance to popular fads are important general tendencies.AsGordon
Despite Democratic-Republican attacks on the constitutionality of the Bank of the United
Hamilton’s defense of judicial review by refer ence to the conservative tendencies and merito cratic excellence of lawyers was vindicated in the early republic. The judiciary resisted the most populist impulses of the Democratic-Republican Party when it took over the presidency and Con gress after the 1800 election. Though they made enough appointments to establish a Supreme Court majority, three successive Democratic-Re publican presidents—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—did not alter its fundamental character.
CITY JOURNAL78 Lawyers for Radical Change States—itself a stabilizing institution for the fledgling networks of commerce in America— the Supreme Court upheld it unanimously in McCulloch v. Maryland . Jefferson blamed the Court’s intransigence on the magical powers of his cousin Chief Justice John Marshall, but it was the nature of the bar in the early republic that ultimately safeguarded the judiciary’s constitu tional role. The justices were prudent men who rose to prominence from a legal practice depen dent on arbitrating the private law among mer chants and thus were well disposed to protecting the commercial republic that the Constitution es tablished.
Wood writes in Power and Liberty , his superb book on early American constitution alism, Tocqueville saw judges’ power to void unconstitutional statutes as another restraint on democratic excess. In Federalist No. 78, the fa mous essay defending judicial review, Alexan der Hamilton justified the power of the federal judiciary by pointing to the sound judgment and acumen of the lawyers who would staff it. In re sponse to claims that the judiciary would consol idate power in the federal government against the plan of the Constitution, Hamilton conceded that judicial review would serve the republic only if it respected stable traditions of legal in terpretation. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Hamilton observed, “it is indispens able that [judges] should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.” And those capable of being judges will be “the few”—an allusion from political theory to elites such as aristocrats—con trasted with “the many.” Hamilton had confi dence in finding lawyers “who unite the requisite integrity with the requisite knowledge.”
Since then, the ABA’s resolutions have ranged even more widely, but con sistently leftward. It has recently passed resolutions, for example, to provide voting rights to those incarcerated for any crime, to prohibit states from preventing persons who are biologically male from compet ing in women’s sports at schools, and to forgive student debt. It has called for a minimum wage, too, though lawyers have no more expertise on this and many other subjects of resolutions than any other group of citizens. As the Anglican Church was once the Tory Party at prayer, the ABA is the Democratic Party at the bar. The ABA helps reinforce and expand the Left’s power chiefly through its influence in accrediting law schools. The ABA’s involvement in the ac creditation process initially focused on the issue of greatest concern to lawyers: making sure that they were paid comparably with doctors! Thus, the ABA imposed on law schools limits on how many hours law professors could teach. Two de cades ago, the Justice Department upended this cozy arrangement, seeing it as facilitating a car tel that drove up prices for students. As part of a consent decree, the ABA agreed not to impose requirements that affected salaries and certain “Since the New Deal, much of law has become administrative law because the modern state is the administrative state.”
SPRING 2022 79 power. Lawyers become no longer the rampart of the republic but the disrupter of its order.
The American Bar Association’s history reflects the lurch to the left. The ABA began in the 1870s. Until 1938, its positions on law and politics were conservative. It favored formalism in law and free enterprise in economics. Its members over whelmingly opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s scheme to pack the Supreme Court to assure approval of New Deal legislation. The ABA argued that such a move threatened re publican government; the group garnered both praise and blame for the plan’s eventual defeat.But as the regula tory state entrenched itself after the New Deal, the ABA grew considerably less con servative. By the era of President Lyndon John son’s Great Society and the rise of the rights ju risprudence of the 1960s, it was a more openly left-wing organization. The watershed public moment marking this shift was the decision in 1987 by four members of its Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary to rate Robert Bork “not qualified” for the Supreme Court. The commit tee’s remit was to evaluate nominees for judge ships based on their professional qualifications. Bork had been solicitor general of the United States, a professor at Yale Law School, and the author of the most influential book on antitrust law in the history of the subject. The judgment of the committee members represented an ideologi cal assassination under the veil of professional assessment. And it may have proved decisive, because Bork’s opponents trumpeted it as a po litically neutral reason to oppose his nomination. Subsequently, studies have shown that the Stand ing Committee has rated Republican lower-court nominees less highly than Democratic nominees with similar qualifications. For instance, it rated as barely qualified Professors Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook. When they took the bench, however, their colleagues on other circuit courts cited them four standard deviations more often than they did the average judge. By the 1990s, the ABA had begun publicly to endorse left-liberal positions. The most famous resolution was its 1990 affirmation of a constitu tional right to abortion. That approbation of the 1973 Roe v . Wade decision showed how far law yers had come from a conservatism based on le gal formality because the abortion decision was notoriously unmoored from the text of the Con stitution or any substantial precedent. As John Hart Ely, a liberal law professor at Harvard and supporter of abortion rights, once observed: “ Roe is not constitu tional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to be so.”
The new standards also require that a law school shall provide training and education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism at the start of the program of legal education, and at least once again before gradu
CITY JOURNAL80 Lawyers for Radical Change ation. This requirement breaks new ground by telling law schools that a social problem is so im portant that it must be addressed, even if not di rectly related to the subject of law. As a group of senior Yale law professors, not one a conserva tive, observed about the reality of this standard: “The new proposed requirements . . . attempt to institutionalize dogma, mandating instruction in matters that are unrelated to any distinctively legal skill.” Law schools already have a woke at mosphere because they are part of universities. The ABA is helping to ensure that they become even more of an ideological bubble. Beyond the baleful influence of the national or ganized bar, associations of lawyers at the state level also pressure society leftward. The most powerful mechanism for doing so: “Missouri plans” for the appointment of state judges (tak ing their name from a reform that originated in that state in 1940). Many states with such plans neither replicate the federal structure of execu tive nomination and legislative confirmation nor permit direct election of judges. The argument against such political processes is that they allow special interests to skew nominations. Instead, Missouri plans require the state’s executive to nominate judges from a list drawn up by a spe cial commission. Lawyers have a privileged posi tion on those commissions, with guaranteed seats for the bar. Not surprisingly, state supreme court justices selected under such plans favor the in terests of lawyers. For instance, they have often been hostile to tort reform, which tends to reduce the income of plaintiff lawyers. And in keeping with the enthusiasm for creating new rights that characterizes the modern bar, justices selected under these plans are often sympathetic to living constitutionalism. Missouri plans may reduce the power of some special interests in the nomination process, but they embed one special interest— lawyers—that wants a judiciary that serves their own financial and ideological interests.
The ABA’s leftward movement has spurred the growth of the Federalist Society. Though other economic matters. The result also shifted proposals for accreditation to the Council on Legal Education. But the council’s independence from the ABA is attenuated. Its head is approved by the ABA president, and most of its members are ABA lawyers, with a strong representation of pro fessors. The ABA can still reject the accreditation standards. The consent decree has not prevented ABA influence, in other words, but merely redi rectedNowit.that the lawyers’ guild cannot openly mandate policies to advance its members’ im mediate economic interests, it has switched to imposing requirements that reflect the pre dominant ideology of the profession. Just this year, the council has strengthened its require ments for race- and ethnic-based hiring of faculty, making clear that law schools may henceforth be compelled to take such consid erations into account, unless they are in juris dictions that explicitly forbid such hiring. The requirement offers fresh confirmation of how far the organized bar will go in using its influence for a progressive-favored cause. Even under current precedent that the Supreme Court will reconsider next year, the requirement would be illegal: the Court has approved racial preferences for student admissions but not for faculty hiring. And regardless of the standard’s legality, it is a striking abuse of political power for an accredi tor to mandate a policy nationwide that voters have rejected in almost every statewide referen dum on racial and gender preferences.
The older view of lawyers and the law, where excessive sentiment is seen as an impediment to justice, is reflected in this 1893 cartoon.
The rule will be almost certain to push law schools even further left. A recent study by Harvard and University of Chicago researchers found that many law schools currently lacked any substantial representation of conserva tives and that professors from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds (as well as female pro fessors) tended to be more left-wing than the median professor. Preferences in hiring would thus likely reduce law schools’ already-limited ideological diversity.
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conservatives constitute only a minority of lawyers, their abandonment by the ABA was enough to attract more than 80,000 to join the Federalist Society. The organization is dedi cated to promoting the jurisprudence of origi nalism—the view that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the meaning at the time it was enacted. While the Society does not lobby for the appointment of originalist judges, its network both refines the arguments for originalism and brings the best exponents to the attention of the relevant decision-makers in the White House and Congress. Without the Federalist Society, we would not have an orig inalist-leaning Supreme Court today, making the organization the most successful and impor tant new civic organization in America of the last five decades. Its success enrages the Left, undermining its near-monopoly of nonpartisan institutions that engage in legal and policy discourse. The Left dominates most of the commanding heights that influence the nation’s political agenda—univer sities, the media and entertainment world, phi lanthropies, and so on. It would dominate the legal sphere even more but for the Federalist Society.If,largely thanks to the Federalist Society’s ef forts, the Supreme Court is transformed, it may slowly change the legal profession as a whole. As the Supreme Court decides cases based on formal rules rather than policy perspectives or social visions, lawyers will again find themselves more concerned with formal order; after all, law yers must follow, to some extent, the tribunals before which they practice. And if the Court’s ju risprudence helps bring about a more restrained federal government and regulatory state, law yers would no longer see their interests so tied to increasing regulation. The bar may then return to the characteristic lawyerly virtues of pru dence and skepticism about rash innovation that Tocqueville celebrated. Lawyers as a class would then cease to be the sappers of republican stabil ity and once again serve as its shields.
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Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaking at the Federalist Society, an organization dedicated to promoting the jurisprudence of originalism
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Stephen J. K. Walters As Baltimore’s experience suggests, taking the eminentdomain bulldozer away from local governments will encourage better development.
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Urban Redlining,Renewal,andRace
Now Eaddy, along with hundreds of other res idents of a West Baltimore neighborhood called Poppleton, finds herself in a similar fight. Mem bers of Eaddy’s family have called the area home for three generations; in 1992, she and her hus band, Curtis, bought a row home there that dates to 1900. Crime-ridden Baltimore has suffered white and black flight for decades, and the city is using eminent domain to advance 15-year-old redevelopment plans in Poppleton, which is 88 percent black. But the Eaddys are stayers, even rebuilding after a devastating fire in 2012, and Homeowner Sonia Eaddy, who, with her husband, is challenging the condemnation of her home by Baltimore housing officials—and leading an effort to preserve the city’s historic Poppleton neighborhood
usette Kelo and Sonia Eaddy have much in common. Kelo be came famous for fighting in the late 1990s to save her home from the urban-renewal bulldozer. After she renovated a centuryold cottage in New London, Connecticut, the city announced that it would use its power of eminent domain to take Kelo’s little pink house and about 90 neighboring properties to make room for a Pfizer research facility and related amenities. Kelo battled all the way to the Supreme Court but lost, the Court ruling that lo cal governments could take private property not only for a public use (such as a highway) but for a public purpose (such as a tax-revenue-enhancing private office park). Adding insult to injury, the city’s grandiose plan was never realized.
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should have more slums like this. Don’t tell me there are plans to wipe this out. You ought to be down here learning as much as you can from it.” But, she observed, everything her planner friend had learned “about what is good for people and good for city neighborhoods, everything that made him an expert, told him the North End had to be a bad place.”
ixty years ago, when Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities , she told a story about the overcrowded, seemingly chaotic, and largely poor North End of Boston. After enjoying a walk there, marked by “buoy ancy, friendliness and good health,” she called a local planner she knew. “Why in the world are you down in the North End?” he asked. “That’s a slum . . . the worst in the city. It has two hun dred and seventy-five dwelling units to the net acre! I hate to admit we have anything like that in Boston, but it’s a fact.” Jacobs nudged him to find more data—all of which, to his sur prise, were favorable: low delinquency, afford able rents, positive indicators of public health. The planner even admitted that he’d found it “fun” when he’d actually visited the neighbor hood—though he still concluded that “we have to rebuild it eventually.” Jacobs responded, “You
Thanks to Jacobs’s devastating critiques, many wrongheaded presumptions about the ills of density and mixed-use buildings have been cast aside. But today’s rebuilding efforts often dis appoint (see “They’re Taking Away Your Prop erty for What ?,” Autumn 2005) as contemporary planners continue to misdiagnose the areas that require their attention and the remedies they need. Perhaps it’s because those carrying them out rarely ask why a neighborhood is suffering in the first place. The answer to that question isn’t always race. Both Boston’s North End and Baltimore’s Pop pleton were redlined—that is, rated as “hazard ous” neighborhoods for investment and colored red on the original maps produced by the fed eral Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) from 1938 to 1940. Today’s commentators often assume that these maps were motivated by, or at least reflected, racial animus; a Brookings In stitution report defined redlining as “the practice of outlining areas with sizable Black populations in red ink on maps as a warning to mortgage lenders, effectively isolating Black people in ar eas that would suffer lower levels of investment than their white counterparts.” This misreads the history. While the notes attending Poppleton’s rating did mention an “infiltration of Negroes,” the North End was en tirely white. Indeed, only 3 percent of Boston’s population at the time was black, but 25 percent of the city was redlined and another 64 percent was rated “also declining” (and colored yellow on the HOLC maps). By contrast, Baltimore’s proportion of black residents, at 19 percent, was six times that of Boston’s—yet its proportions of red (15 percent) and yellow (31 percent) were not nearly as great. Many cities with negligible black populations were heavily redlined. San Francisco, for example, was less than 1 percent black in 1940, but its map was 31 percent red and Eaddy has become a leader of efforts to preserve the historic community. Media coverage of the saga has invoked famil iar narratives about Baltimore’s history of segre gation and redlining, recalling James Baldwin’s long-ago charge that urban renewal translates roughly as Negro removal. “You’re not doing that in Federal Hill,” a mostly white neighbor hood, Eaddy pointed out at a summer rally against the program, according to a Baltimore Sun report. But city leaders’ treatment of Eaddy and her neighbors does not suggest intentional racial bias. Predominantly black Baltimore’s po litical leadership has been staunchly Democratic and determinedly progressive for decades; the city’s last five mayors have been black, as is the CEO of the development firm implementing the Poppleton plan, which itself is heavy on buzz words and stipulations about equity, inclusion, and affordability. As for Kelo, her unhappy ex perience began when a Republican governor tar geted a largely white neighborhood. These episodes are more complex—and in structive—than common narratives about race and privilege might suggest. What’s going on in Baltimore is indeed an injustice, but the mis guided policies that brought it about cut across racial and ideological lines.
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friend—as Boston’s worst slum? Why would New London’s leaders view Kelo’s neighbor hood as a candidate for rebuilding in the late 1990s? And why, more recently, has Poppleton become a target?
32 percent yellow—including Haight-Ashbury, where rents would keep falling until, a genera tion later, they became affordable to the van guard of America’s counterculture.
The cases have differences, but they share a long-term pattern: disinvestment driven by an unfriendly tax environment. In a vacuum, houses depreciate as they age and require regular in vestment to maintain their value. High property taxes act to depress property values, diminish wealth, and inhibit investment. And the conse quences of such beginlower-qualityorolderbecomenitiesasanddecay,investment—physicaldislowerrents,populationshiftsneighborhoodamedecline—firstobviousinneighborhoodsthosethathadstocktowith.
As it happened, Boston was a hostile invest ment environment for much of the twentieth century. James Michael Curley, “the mayor of the poor” for four staggered terms through 1950, was a malign force—pursuing a winning politi cal strategy by taxing the property of his city’s “haves” (well-to-do WASPs) to provide benefits to his political base (Irish immigrants). He quin tupled Boston’s property-tax rate, making it the highest of any major city in the United States. As a result, Boston suffered population and capital flight even as other northern cities grew rapidly; its many redlined areas bore the most obvious signs of decline—including the historic North End, with its older stock of physical capital. Still, physical decay and resulting lower rents will be attractive to some. That’s why the HOLC maps often noted “infiltration” by blacks or im migrants. Redlined neighborhoods drew these populations because they were depreciating physically and, therefore, cheap. But as Jacobs understood from her study of the North End and many other neighborhoods, as Kelo knew as she fought to defend Fort Trumbull, and as Eaddy and her neighbors have long understood about Poppleton, a neighborhood can look as though it “Thanks to Jacobs, many wrongheaded ideas about density and mixed-use buildings have been cast aside.”
Discrimination in mortgage lending has cer tainly been a problem, but the contemporary narrative about those famous HOLC maps is distorted. It would be unnecessary for a biased lender to check an address on a map while in the presence of a loan applicant whose class, race, ethnicity, or gender is easily determinable. Do ing so would be an imprecise tool of discrimi nation, anyway, as the redlining maps showed that geo graphic boundaries could be a poor proxy for membership in a “disfavored” group. A paper in the Journal of Urban History points out that the maps were devised after the agency had expended its resources to stabilize Depression-era mortgage markets, and finds that black borrowers received HOLC assistance roughly in proportion to their ownership rates in most locales. Evidence suggests that racial bias played only a minor role in the construction of the HOLC maps: observed concentration of black, poor white, or immigrant households in redlined zones, notes a National Bureau of Eco nomic Research study, reflected their modest means and thus their tendency to locate in areas that the New Deal technocrats would identify as declining. A paper by University of Pennsylva nia urban studies professor Amy E. Hillier offers no evidence that the grades on HOLC’s maps explain differences in lending volumes (though interest rates tended to be higher in areas col ored red). The maps told a story, but race was not its antagonist. I f race did not cause much of 1940s-era Boston to be deemed hazardous for investment, what did? What was the real root cause of the North End’s redlining and its status two decades later—at least, in the view of Jacobs’s planner
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Parcha McFadden, one of Eaddy’s neighbors and allies, remembers that “Poppleton used to be a nice neighborhood” before the plan to re new it began in 2005. This was so, despite an needs rebuilding while nonetheless serving its residents reasonably well.
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investment falls further: few property owners put money into a home or business likely to be in the bulldozers’ path. As decay accelerates and some residents give up, the area becomes, in the words of Baltimore officials discussing Popple ton, “largely vacant and desolate.”
Unfortunately, when government officials, city planners, connected developers, and the construction industry see an area suffering from disinvestment, they often respond by embracing projects that recall the days of urban renewal. They designate the area as a redevelopment zone and request proposals; the wheels of the bureaucratic process begin to turn. Accordingly, Eaddy walks past the Sarah Ann Street alley homes in Poppleton.
Much of that has been destroyed, along with those residents’ depreciating and cheap homes. What would better treat a disinvestment cri sis? The key first step is the creation of a favor able overall investment climate via competitive tax rates and secure property rights. That’s what Boston learned when Massachusetts voters passed Proposition 2½ in 1980, ending decades of damag ing tax policy and reversing its long-running flight of capital and population. Baltimore’s ongoing disinvestment crisis is largely due to its leaders’ refusal to pursue tax competitiveness: its prop erty-tax rate is more than twice that available in the surrounding county, and its services are far in ferior. Of course, voters might solve this problem themselves, and some political and faith leaders are now encouraging Baltimoreans to do so. But the problem also flows from the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision. Justice John Paul Stevens called the case “the most unpopular opinion I ever wrote, no doubt about it.” Legal scholar Ilya Somin, among others, has argued that it’s also poorly reasoned. And despite some states’ at tempts to limit the “public purposes” for which private property may be taken, Somin concludes that eminent-domain abuse won’t stop entirely until the Court reconsiders and reverses its nar row (5–4) decision in Kelo Sonia Eaddy’s case provides an excellent op portunity for that to happen. The starting point for all “rebuilding” plans is always identification of areas suffering from disinvestment. As the originators of the original HOLC maps docu mented, these areas were usually “depreciating and cheap” and therefore chiefly attractive to lower-income groups—often immigrants and blacks, though certainly not always, as we have seen. These residents’ property rights (and cor responding social capital) would seem worthy of constitutional protection from abuse by power ful officials and developers. The question now is whether taking the eminent-domain bulldozer away from local government might not only keep Sonia Eaddy and many of her neighbors in their homes but also encourage public officials to pursue more benign and effective tools of urban renewal in the future. earlier planning catastrophe that wiped out sev eral West Baltimore neighborhoods, including those on Poppleton’s northern border, in order to make way for an interstate—which, like Fort Trumbull, was never completed and thus be came infamous as Baltimore’s “highway to no where.” Those neighborhoods were once home to thousands of people who had spent years cre ating congregations, clubs, and associations em bodying tremendous accumulated social capital.
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Connor Harris One-of-a-kind regulations illustrate why it’s so hard to build anything in Gotham.
Deconstructing New York’s Building Costs ers, but gives only a few concrete prescriptions for the meaning of “proper protection.” State court decisions have molded the Scaffold Law into an open-ended obligation on contractors and building owners. Far beyond just enforcing a list of regulations, the Scaffold Law lets injured workers sue employers for almost all gravityrelated workplace injuries that some conceivable safety measure, no matter how excessive, might have stopped. In most states—including, for most classes of workers besides construction workers, New York—workers generally cannot sue employ ers for workplace injuries. Injured workers are instead compensated under workers’ compen sation, a program designed to be predictable and efficient to administer. A “no-fault” system that does not assess workers’ culpability for ac cidents, workers’ compensation makes awards based on predefined formulas and avoids the adversarial legal system. It is financed through a tightly regulated market of mandatory in surance, with premiums generally dictated by state regulators. The system’s insurance policies have two parts: the main part makes payments through workers’ compensation itself; a second “employer’s liability” part covers restricted con ditions in which employers can be sued over workers’ injuries. Formulas for determining insurance premiums include “experience modi fiers” that give discounts to employers with bet ter safety records, thereby encouraging worker safety. In New York, an association of insurance carriers, the New York Compensation Insurance Rating Board, calculates experience modifiers.
In limited circumstances, workers or re lated third parties may file lawsuits against
N ew York is a city unlike any other in many ways—one of the less distinguished being its one-of-a-kind building-con struction regulations. Though typically justified on safety grounds, these regulations provide only questionable safety benefits and, in some cases, may be counterproductive, while considerably raising the cost of new construc tion. There has never been a better time to revisit these rules, as most New Yorkers now recognize the extreme expense of housing—a problem worsened by expensive construction—as one of the city’s greatest challenges. Two aspects of this regulatory environment are particularly egregious. First, New York State liability law—above all, a law that lets injured workers sue employers for millions of dollars, even for accidents caused by their own reckless ness—makes construction far more expensive and harder to insure. Second, an onerous system of crane regulations, without parallel elsewhere in the United States, entrenches the power of a corrupt local union and forces independent building firms to resort to inefficient, dangerous construction methods. I nsurance costs for construction contractors in New York State are inflated by Section 240 of the New York State Labor Law, more commonly known as the Scaffold Law (though the law has little to do with scaffolds). The law’s text obliges builders to put up scaffolds and other safety de vices, “which shall be so constructed, placed and operated as to give proper protection” to work
SPRING 2022 91 contractors, and their agents for any breach of the statutory duty which has proximately caused in jury and, accordingly, it is to be construed as lib erally as necessary to accomplish the purpose for which it is framed.”
A trial lawyers’ website notes the Scaffold Law’s exceptional breadth: “The Scaffold Law frequently produces liability and a right of recovery where none would typically ex ist for the construction worker. This law imposes absolute liability against a property owner, ten ants, and contractors.” A 2014 report by the New York County Lawyers’ Association, a reliable defender of the Scaffold Law, notes that workers can typically be found liable for their own inju ries under the Scaffold Law only if they were “re calcitrant”—that is, if they persisted in violating safety rules despite explicit instruction—and if their own actions were the “sole proximate cause” of the accident. That’s a massive departure from the “comparative negligence” standard otherwise nearly universal in tort law, which assigns liabil ity to parties in proportion to how much their ac tions contributed to accidents. But awards from lawsuits under the Scaffold Law far exceed workers’ compensation. New York currently caps benefits from workers’ employers. For instance, if a worker injured by defective construction equipment sues the equip ment’s manufacturer, the manufacturer can file a “third-party over-action” claim against a devel oper, claiming that poor maintenance, not the equipment itself, was to blame. New York, inci dentally, is one of only two states that require unlimited employer’s liability coverage; most other states stipulate only some amount in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This condition likely contributes to the expense of workers’ compensation insurance in New York: according to data compiled by the Oregon De partment of Business and Consumer Services, premiums in New York are the nation’s second highest, behind only New Jersey, and 55 percent above those in the median state. The Scaffold Law, by contrast, allows workers injured in a fall or by a falling object—two cri teria defined loosely enough that tripping from a footstool might qualify—to sue employers for damages under general liability, not employer’s liability. Like workers’ compensation, lawsuits under the Scaffold Law are functionally no-fault: the New York Court of Appeals has stated that “the statute places absolute liability upon owners, Onerous regulations on cranes, favored by unions, make it difficult for independent construction firms to bid on projects.
Employers can be liable even for injuries of workers who knowingly violate safety rules. In one case, a nonprofit housing developer was found liable for the injuries of a worker who fell after detaching his safety harness in order to enter a construction site through a window, though a safer, intended form of entry was pro vided. The court found that the developer was nevertheless liable because it had “acquiesced” to workers’ use of unsafe window entries by not prohibiting them clearly enough. The web site scaffoldlaw.org, maintained by advocates of Scaffold Law reform, lists cases of workers who won compensation even though the injuries they suffered occurred while they were under the in fluence of alcohol or illegal drugs.
Deconstructing New York’s Building Costs ing, therefore, only “one or two” admitted car riers would be willing to issue policies at their stated rates. Use of riskier non-admitted carriers is therefore common, but even the non-admitted market is hardly competitive.
The lack of competition means still higher in surance prices: several estimates conclude that the Scaffold Law approximately doubles insur ance costs. A 2014 report from the New York Building Congress, for instance, claims that “a significant body of loss-cost data from all major insurance carriers . . . shows dramatically higher loss costs in impacted classes of construction in New York compared to all comparable and neighboring states.” It also quotes one partner at a New York insurance firm claiming that in surance costs for construction are roughly 10 percent of construction expenses in New York, versus an average of 5 percent in the rest of the United States—a difference roughly confirmed in a 2019 article from the insurance corporation CRC Group, which reports typical ranges of 7 percent to 10 percent in New York and 3 percent to 5 percent elsewhere. Does this expense at least pay off in improved construction safety? Defenders of the Scaffold Law make two principal arguments. First, they point to Illinois after the 1995 repeal of the Struc tural Work Act, a similar state law. “During the three-year period preceding the repeal of the [Structural Work Act], construction deaths con stituted on average 17 percent of the total work place deaths in Illinois,” says a 2007 report from the progressive think tank Center for Justice & Democracy. “The construction industry’s Ωshare≈ of total fatalities increased over the next ten years to an average of one out of every five fatal injuries (or 21 percent).” (Note, though, that an increase in the share of on-the-job deaths accounted for by the construction industry does not mean an in crease in the number of deaths.) Second are claims that New York’s injury rates are relatively low, compared with those of other states, for which the Scaffold Law deserves presumptive credit. The aforementioned 2014 report from the New York County Lawyers’ Association attributes New York’s putative good construction safety compensation at $1,063.05 per week of lost wages, or about $55,000 per year; awards even for severe permanent disabilities total, at most, ten years of wages. By contrast, awards under the Scaffold Law can often stretch into the mil lions. One law firm advertises numerous cases in which it won settlements of several million dollars under the Scaffold Law—including one in which even the firm’s curt description makes it hard to see employer negligence as a cause: a $3.5 million award for a stonemason “injured when another worker threw a piece of sheetrock out a window striking him on the ground below.”
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The Scaffold Law makes the New York State market for insurance far less competitive, espe cially for so-called admitted carriers. New York, like other states, distinguishes “admitted” and “non-admitted” (or “excess line”) insurance pro viders. Admitted carriers must file a range of prices with a state regulatory agency and cannot charge outside that range. In return, if an admit ted carrier goes bankrupt, the state will take over the contracts of any of its policyholders. New York State also assesses a 3.6 percent tax on nonadmitted policies, and some banks require poli cies with an admitted carrier as a condition of financing.According to one New York insurance broker, however, most insurance brokers’ admitted rates for general liability insurance are calculated from national averages and come in far below the rate needed to be profitable in New York. Even for a run-of-the-mill project such as a ten-story build
Moreover, the best comprehensive compari son of state-level construction safety data—a 2014 working paper by several authors from Cornell University—finds it difficult to attribute good points of New York’s safety record to the Scaffold Act, or any bad points of Illinois’ record to the repeal of its equivalent. First, it notes, con struction has become generally safer throughout the United States since the 1990s. Rates of fatal falls, in particular, the main type of injury that the Scaffold Law and Structural Work Act were meant to hinder, declined nationally by about one-quarter from the early 1990s to the early 2010s. In fact, Illinois saw a larger decline in fatal falls of construction workers than did New York, and fewer falls in absolute numbers by the end of this period. (My own analysis of online Bu reau of Labor Statistics data finds no detectable break after 1995 in the overall downward trend in deaths in the construction industry or deaths from workplace falls in Illinois.)
SPRING 2022 93 record to the Scaffold Law. “This current incen tive to provide a safe workplace,” it says, “is one reason why from 2000–2011, New York had the nation’s sixth-lowest construction injury rate.”
Further, the Cornell researchers find that statelevel construction safety is highly predictable from a general national trend toward greater safety over time and differences between states in the predominant type of construction: for in stance, “higher commercial construction activity . . . is associated with a lower rate of nonfatal injuries.” After controlling for these factors, New York’s safety record is about average, and acci dent rates in industries covered by the Scaffold Law are actually somewhat higher than national trends would predict. This finding does not necessarily mean that the Scaffold Law is coun terproductive—other features of New York’s regulatory environment could also contribute to New York’s excess danger—but it does suggest that the law is unlikely to have large benefits.Tom Stebbins, di rector of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York, suggests possible mechanisms by which the Scaf fold Law could actually be counterproductive. Because the law gives out large awards under no-fault processes, both good and bad contrac tors pay inflated premiums for general liability insurance to cover accidents that can’t reason ably be considered their fault—thereby attenuat ing the market advantage of lower premiums for more responsible contractors. Stebbins also notes that unscrupulous contractors in neighboring states can undercut New York–based contractors for work in border regions if they’re willing to lie to insurers by not telling them that they have projects in New York.
If the Scaffold Law is a unique presence in New York, a unique absence also plays a major role: in New York City, construction of all but the tallest buildings seldom uses cranes. In other cities (including elsewhere in New York State), cranes are commonly used even on buildings of only a few stories. Builders in New York City who do use cranes, furthermore, tend to avoid “tower cranes” embedded in the ground in favor of mobile cranes mounted on trucks or Caterpil lar tracks. Mobile cranes tend to have inferior “Several estimates conclude that the Scaffold approximatelyLawdoublesinsurancecosts.
”
The New York State Trial Lawyers’ Association, also a major advocate for the Scaffold Act, uses similar
Thesedefenses.arguments rest on a selective look at the data. New York’s construction injury rate is in deed generally low, but the rate of fatal injuries, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, is unremarkable or a bit worse than average. In 2019, New York State had 10.2 fatal acci dents per 100,000 con struction workers and New York City had 11.6, compared with a national average of 9.7. To take a few other large, mostly urbanized states as comparisons, Califor nia had 6.5 deaths per 100,000 workers, Pennsyl vania 6.3, Texas 9.9, and Florida 10.9.
Once a load is lifted by a spider crane, it still must be moved across the construction deck to the correct location, another often-dangerous waste of labor. In 2018, a construction worker was killed on the roof of a Brooklyn worksite when a forklift carrying building materials toppled over—an accident that could have been avoided with a larger crane that could set loads down at the correct spot. One contractor who doesn’t use spider cranes on his projects calls them “a solu tion to a problem 100 percent created by the DOB and the licensing.” He estimates that a quarter of accidents on New York City construction sites could be avoided with more widespread use of cranes and that many projects that use only one crane in the city would use several cranes, at much higher efficiency, anywhere else. reach and lifting capacity to tower cranes, and they occupy a larger ground footprint, making them impractical for small sites and often neces sitating closing streets. They are also less stable and prone to collapse in high winds, as in a fatal 2016 collapse of a large track-mounted “crawler” crane in Tribeca. More commonly, builders without cranes re sort to hauling heavy construction materials up construction sites by hand, exhausting laborers and wasting time while also reducing safety. The levels of a construction site, like those of a ship, are ordinarily connected by ladders through narrow openings in floors—fine if workers are transporting only themselves, but dangerous if they are carrying heavy construction materials. Safe transport of heavy loads without cranes ne cessitates expensive construction-site redesigns such as continuous stairways from the ground to the construction deck.
CITY JOURNAL94 der cranes, though, have low load limits and are prone to accidents when rushed workers over load them. In 2018, two workers were seriously injured on a construction site in Harlem when a spider crane toppled over: it was rated for 880 pounds, according to a contemporaneous report in the New York Post, but was being used to haul a 1,500-pound load. (Tower cranes, by comparison, typically have load limits of at least several tons.)
Another common solution in New York: por table “spider cranes”—consisting of a boom sev eral feet long attached to a tetrapod—which can be carried up to a construction deck by hand and then bolted down near the edge, so that the boom projects off the side of the building. Spi In New York, unlike in other states, construction workers injured on the job can sue their employers.
The National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators (NCCCO), which gives widely recognized certification exams, lists only seven U.S. cities, including New York, with city-specific operator licenses. Most of these licenses are rub ber stamps that call for, at most, passing an extra exam. Philadelphia, for instance, demands little more than that crane operators hold a valid Penn sylvania state license and certification from a rec ognized national organization, such as NCCCO. Pennsylvania, in turn, imposes only mild condi tions on state licenses—mostly that crane opera tors hold an NCCCO or similar certification and pass character and fitness tests. Chicago’s regula tions, the most demanding besides New York’s, stipulate that operators pass an additional exam and either have gone through a recognized ap prenticeship program or have worked at least 2,000 hours (a year of full-time work) in the last four years as a crane operator in another city. New York City’s rules are incomparably more stringent. New York offers three main classes of license. Class C licenses, the easiest to obtain, allow the operation only of mobile cranes with booms of up to 200 feet (divided further into three types, with a license subclass for each type), while the harder-to-get Class A and B licenses allow work on larger mobile cranes and tower cranes. An applicant for any Class C license must have done two years of supervised work within the last three years on similar crane models and have spent at least one of those years working in the New York metropolitan area or in one of six other U.S. metropolitan areas that NYC DOB considers comparable urban environments. These requirements for small mobile cranes far outstrip any other city’s rules for any sort of crane. But they pale in comparison with New York City’s own requirements for the Class A and B licenses needed to work on tower cranes. In ad dition to obtaining a certification from NCCCO, Class A and B license applicants, no matter how experienced, must spend several years in super vised work with a current New York City license The lack of cranes in New York stems from unique city regulations. First, the Cranes and Derricks unit of the New York City Depart ment of Buildings must review and approve all plans to use cranes in construction; most other cities’ bureaucracies insist that a licensed engi neer sign off on crane designs but do not review plans themselves. According to the principals of an engineering firm that works with cranes in New York and in many other cities, employees at Cranes and Derricks often lack specific expertise in cranes and are excessively technologically con servative, refusing to approve new crane models or imposing untenable conditions on their use; their main safety benefit is that the mere act of preparing crane designs to meet Cranes and Der ricks’ conditions helps engineers spot potential safety problems. (In one case, according to a 2016 report from Crain’s, NYC DOB’s imposition of prohibitive rules for a new crane model likely stemmed in part from lobbying by politicians supported by the city’s main crane operators’ union.) Department inspectors can unilaterally stop crane work if they see any conditions that they consider possibly unsafe—one contractor complained that he received a stop-work order because an inspector was simply unfamiliar with a crane model. Restarting work with cranes re quires potentially time-consuming negotiations. Two other artificial obstacles discourage the use of large cranes in New York, especially tower cranes: excessive insurance conditions; and New York City’s sui generis licensing for crane operators. The year 2008 saw two fatal col lapses of tower cranes—one caused by improper hoisting of a device for securing the crane mast to the building and the other by slapdash main tenance by the crane’s owner, who bought a safety-critical replacement part from an unau thorized manufacturer in China without desig nating appropriate specifications. In response, the city government raised general-liability in surance requirements for projects that use tower cranes from $10 million to $80 million, making tower cranes unaffordable for smaller projects. Some other cities mandate crane-specific insur ance—Chicago, for instance, demands $1 million per occurrence for property damage and bodily injury—but nowhere besides New York, to my
SPRING 2022 95 knowledge, do tower cranes trigger such an in crease in necessary general-liability coverage.
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The most counterproductive aspect of New York City’s crane regulations is its uniquely onerous regime for licensing crane operators.
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The effect of crane regulation on construction costs is likely substantial. Crain’s cites an esti mate that the construction cost of new top-end office space in New York City is about $300 per square foot, of which the direct cost of a crane is about $20 per square foot, or slightly under 7 percent of the total bill—a figure that does not include the indirect costs of using fewer cranes than optimal. Information on crane costs in other cities is hard to find, but a 2012 student project from the Technion in Israel, giving a model of construction management for a residential highrise in central Tel Aviv, estimated $294,000 in crane operation costs—only 1.6 percent of the to tal construction price of $18.49 million. The total construction cost in this model project, inciden tally, came out to only $100 per square foot, far below the New York average.
ers to entry. But Local 14’s work rules call for union wage scales for many non-operator sup port staff with basically unskilled jobs, such as “hoist car” operators who run elevators up and down crane masts. One contractor estimated that nonunion hoist-car operators in New York earn $25 to $30 per hour and that he had lured crane operators away from union work by, as he put it, appealing to their pride and offering them work operating a crane rather than a hoist car. Similarly, a New York Daily News article from 2011 mentions that Local 14’s rules called for high-rise construction at One World Trade Center to hire dozens of union workers, often for total compensation of hundreds of thou sands of dollars per year each, for almost no work—including an “oiler” whose only job was to turn the crane on each morning.
F ortunately, most of New York’s bad construc tion regulations have potential straightforward fixes. A sensible reform to state liability law, preserving employers’ incentives to keep a safe workplace while reducing prohibitive insurance costs, might be to create an affirmative defense of regulatory compliance. Builders and contractors who can prove that they followed an explicit list of safety regulations, such as OSHA guidelines, would be protected against negligence lawsuits. If the state government wants to give injured holder. For a Class A license, which allows work only on immobile cranes with a boom length of under 200 feet, applicants must have spent at least three years under the supervision of a Class A or B license holder. The higher-level Class B license, which allows operation of cranes with unrestricted size, mandates two more years of su pervised work. In the recent past, these licenses were even harder to get because the city did not recognize NCCCO certifications: in addition to training under a New York City license holder, applicants had to pass a city-specific certification test. (The city government had to fight a lawsuit from the largest union of crane operators in or der to begin recognizing national certifications; it finally prevailed in 2016.) By giving crane operators control over the supply of new licensed workers, New York City massively raises the cost of crane operations. A Wall Street Journal report from 2011 states: “A re lief crane operator in New York City earns $82.15 an hour in base pay and benefits . . . well above the $66 an hour he would earn in Chicago or the $39 an hour in Washington, D.C.” Including overtime and benefits, the Journal reports, crane operators can earn more than $500,000 per year. Most crane operators with New York licenses, furthermore, belong to the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 14-14B, a union with a long history of allegations of corruption and ties to organized crime, at least until a fed eral investigation in the late 2000s. A New York Times report from 2009 notes “allegations that union officials helped unqualified organized crime figures get lower-level crane licenses,” as well as accusations that the union’s president Edwin Christian—who made almost $400,000 in total compensation in 2019, according to the website UnionFacts.com—handed out jobs to members out of favoritism. Much of the additional costs imposed by Lo cal 14 come not from crane operators’ wages but from their refusal to work for contractors who hire nonunion labor in other roles and from featherbedding of support roles. New York has some nonunion crane operators who actu ally earn as much as or more than union opera tors, though both still make far more than they would if New York had fewer regulatory barri
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Derricks: for instance, limiting its discretionary ability to approve new types of cranes and, per haps, ending DOB review of crane design plans outside dense areas such as Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. In less dense parts of New York, as in other cities, Department of Buildings staff would just check that a licensed engineer had signed off on plans to use cranes. A similar reform could be made to New York’s licensing scheme. It may be justifiable to require crane operators in New York to have some ex perience in other dense urban environments; the case for requiring work in New York specifi cally is much weaker. Regulations like Chicago’s city-specific written-exam rule could ensure that operators had any requisite New York–specific knowledge. Again, it might make sense to have laxer requirements for operating cranes in lowerrise districts than in dense central areas. We should be skeptical of arguments that New York is so special that it needs a system of construction regulations unlike anything found anywhere else. New York may be the greatest city in the world, but it is merely one of hun dreds of places with many tall buildings. The same laws of physics govern construction here as anywhere else. workers larger payouts than workers’ compen sation currently awards, it could simply make workers’ compensation more generous, thereby ensuring that more of the payouts go to workers themselves rather than to trial lawyers. New York’s crane regulations deserve more discussion. Most of the construction profession als I spoke with—including those who regularly work in other cities—believed that New York’s dense pedestrian traffic and underground infra structure could justify some unique regulations. Such opinions should be considered, but not un critically. New York might have more high-rise construction than other cities, but the densest parts of Manhattan closely resemble the central areas of Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and many other old cities in the United States and abroad. New York’s crane regulations apply not only to high-rise construction in central Manhat tan but also to less dense areas such as industrial districts in the Bronx or outer Queens. In any case, improvements in the safety of crane operations themselves must be weighed against the conse quence of forcing contractors to resort to more dangerous and labor-intensive workarounds. As a first step, New York might consider nar rowing the authority of NYC DOB Cranes and Without cranes, workers often haul heavy materials by hand.
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CITY JOURNAL98 Twilight of the Idols
L ast October, three large busts cre ated by artist Chris Carnabuci were installed in Manhattan’s Union Square. One represented the late congressman and activist John Lewis, who died in the summer of 2020, just as a new wave of protests decrying racism against African-Americans was sweeping across the nation. The other two repre sented individuals whose death at the hands of the police triggered those protests: Breonna Tay lor and George Floyd. Carnabuci uses a computerized 3-D model ing technique to produce his work. The busts are constructed from stacked plywood planks carved by programmed machine tools. Their ap pearance evokes something of the digital method that generated them: the vertical stack of thin bands that constitutes the busts lends them a flickering, screen-like aura. They look at home on Instagram—a platform that helped propel 2020’s protests. However, Carnabuci also painted the Union Square busts bronze, stating that he aimed to create a dialogue with the tradition of Throughout the summer of 2020, rioters vandalized and toppled historic monuments across the country.
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Geoff Shullenberger The new iconoclasm has deep roots.
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Twilight of the Idols nation opted to remove a range of controversial monuments from public view. Critics of these developments tend to acknowledge the flaws and misdeeds of at least some of the historic fig ures targeted but typically argue that to remove their statues is to “erase history.” If mere his torical preservation were the concern, however, surely the solution would be to move contested monuments to museums, as is happening with the Jefferson and Roosevelt statues in New York. But such moves are unlikely to placate those who objected to the removals. What they are lamenting, in fact, is not the loss of knowledge of historical events but the decline of an altogether different mode of his tory—the mode that Friedrich Nietzsche, in his essay “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” called “monumental.” Monumental his tory does not merely preserve or document the past: it memorializes great individuals and their deeds and enjoins us to follow their example. Its social function is to consolidate groups around common objects of admiration and emulation. Hence, the effect of toppling civic monuments is not to remove the figures they represent from the historical record, which is preserved elsewhere, but to demote them from their previously el evatedWritingstatus.in the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche glimpsed the waning of this sort of history, alongside the rise of what he called “critical history.” Rather than elevating the he roes of the past, critical history aims precisely to take them down from their pedestals. Perhaps its most notable popular embodiment in recent years was the New York Times ’s 1619 Project, which sought to displace the story of America’s Founders with another foundation narrative fea turing different protagonists: the first victims of the transatlantic slave trade. By memorializing two previously unknown people regarded as victims of racialized violence, Carnabuci aimed at something similar. The toppling of statues often marks moments of regime change. In ancient Egypt, both the rise and fall of the iconoclast pharaoh Akhena ton saw massive desecration of public art. The monumental statuary. In this sense, the installa tion might be seen as a constructive contribution to recent controversies around public statuary that have often taken a destructive form.
An equestrian sculpture of George Wash ington stands just behind the site of the Union Square installation. It dates back to 1856, mak ing it the oldest statue in a city park. While no one has recently attempted to remove it, other civic monuments of similar antiquity have come down in the city in the same period in which Carnabuci’s busts went up. Just before Thanks giving, an 1834 statue of Thomas Jefferson was removed from City Hall, and the removal of an other presidential tribute, the statue of Theodore Roosevelt on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History, began shortly thereafter. Demands to remove other statues, particularly those of Christopher Columbus, have thus far been unsuccessful. A vandal splattered the Floyd bust with paint shortly after its installation. The incident was investigated as a hate crime, but it also fell into a larger recent pattern. Much the same or worse befell older public statues during the pro tests the previous year, including the George Washington monument a mile to the south in Washington Square Park. Meantime, in Port land, Oregon, a George Washington statue was toppled and set on fire by protesters. Statues of figures including Francis Scott Key and Ulysses S. Grant met similar fates in San Francisco. In response, President Donald Trump issued a di rective demanding the prosecution of vandals of federal monuments and threatening to with hold funding from localities that failed to pro tect their own statues. Protesters in 2020 targeted figures outside the standard pantheon of dead white men, includ ing a women’s rights monument, a statue of an abolitionist leader, and even a statue of Freder ick Douglass. In aggregate, the wave of destruc tion that overtook the country and the world resembled historical periods of iconoclastic fer vor. It was as if statuary itself, and not simply monuments to certain historical individuals, had become offensive. In response to the vandalism, local munici palities and educational institutions across the
Before the iconoclastic outbursts of mid-2020, the public life of cities and towns had been sus pended altogether, generating stunning images of empty streets in the most bustling metropolises. With the advent of Covid-19 lockdowns, life mi grated almost entirely into the very different pub lic spaces to which it had already been relocating for some time: Internet platforms. This emptying of civic spaces was then succeeded by mass gath erings in them. Those who participated in these gatherings, over whelmingly “digital natives,” treated the stolid landmarks in these spaces not as en during and sacrosanct but as subject to dele tion, like any online post.
The iconoclasm of the Reformation also oc curred after a media revolution: the printing press, which disrupted long-standing informa tion monopolies, expanded average people’s ac cess to knowledge, and destabilized both secu lar and religious authority. Emergent strains of radical Protestantism rejected not only the rep resentation of particular figures but the modes of plastic and visual representation that they saw as idolatrous. In a similar manner, the ongo ing dematerialization of collective life into digi tal channels is one reason the objects of stone, bronze, and concrete that still punctuate our cityscapes face an uncertain future.
SPRING 2022 101 iconoclastic destruction of the Protestant Refor mation delegitimized the Catholic Church in Eng land and northern Europe. More recently, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein generated iconic media images of statues falling, thus enacting the end of the old regime. The U.S. military staged and dissemi nated one such scene—the toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, attributed to the local populace but actually performed by U.S. soldiers—because of the potency of the message it conveyed.These scenes viv idly embody the process by which an adamantine order loses the mandate of heaven. As long as a regime remains as sured in its power, statues are sites of ritual homage, or neutral backdrops of civic life. But as the historical narratives that un dergird a power structure cease to inspire con viction, aggressive outbursts against its most robust physical manifestations can make tangi ble the criticisms that have already eaten away at its ideological authority. Destruction of statues offers proof of concept for altering a political ar rangement that once seemed immutable. The current wave of demolition and removal in the United States first targeted Confederate monuments in the South during the Obama ad ministration’s second term. In this sense, the on going iconoclastic project initially appeared not as the beginning of a new process but a belated recognition of one already accomplished: the end of Jim Crow. Most of the Confederate stat ues had themselves been erected well after the Civil War, part of the stealth restoration of racial hierarchies. They memorialized a fallen order to bestow a patina of historical grandeur on a more newfangled reactionary system. The fall of mon uments to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the like thus seemed preordained. The recent target ing of a far wider array of historical monuments, including ones dedicated to those who defeated the Confederacy, was something quite different: it raised the question of whether the country can reach any consensus at all about a “usable past.” (See “Monumental Ambitions,” page 106.)
You will not find,” wrote the late French phi losopher Michel Serres, “any general philosophi cal treatise on sculpture or statues.” Ironically, he made this statement in Statues, a 1987 book that is, to my knowledge, the only exception to his as sertion. Despite wide-ranging debate and reflec tion on this subject in recent years, the book has received little attention. Serres’s determinedly unpolemical approach limits the utility of his ideas to culture warriors of any faction. He is, as the “Destruction of statues offers proof of concept for altering a arrangement.political ”
Twilight of the Idols space and our cultures so universally,” he writes, “that we no longer see their victory as the end of the crushing of the other zone, the one that’s for gotten, humiliated, left in silence and shadow.”
Serres’s body of writing is sprawling and eclectic but united by an interest in communi cation, mediation, networks, and connections. Statues pursues these same themes. Translated into English in 2015, the book argues that stat ues are humanity’s first media technology. Ac cording to Serres, the first statues are corpses, “before [which] every subject draws back: the dead body lies there, cutting out its space, larger lying down than standing, more terrifying dead than alive . . . stiff, hard, rigorous, coherent, con sistent, absolutely stable, the first stone statue.”
For Serres, just as ruptures conceal continuities, oppositions hide similarities. He makes this point in a striking way in the first chapter of Statues, by juxtaposing the sacrificial idol of Baal with the Challenger space shuttle, which exploded in 1986, immolating seven crew members. The first seems to represent the primitive and barbaric, and the second the most advanced science; and yet a se ries of resemblances, he argues, allows for a sys tematic “translation” between them.
The cadaver, both an inert object and a human subject, intermediates between the here and the beyond. Mortuary customs, culminating in one of the earliest sciences—mummification—derive from the troubling encounter with this object. The statue-fied body, according to Serres, be comes the first symbolic object by way of the “transubstantiation of life into sign.” In this way, “statues precede languages” and “produce hom inity”: that is, they make humans human. By this same process, the distinctly human notion of “place”—somewhere designated for common habitation—also emerges, “to be defined . . . by the stone or the boundary marker beneath which the dead person lies. Cemetery, the first garden, necropolis, the first city.” The corpse’s solidity, and later its sculpted representation, grounded settlement. In many cultures, bodies were buried beneath the foundations of buildings to prevent their collapse. “Substitutions, substances, institu tions,” Serres writes. “[E]verything comes out of death.” The organization of public space around statues is a reminder of these origins: the solidi fied dead still orient and stabilize a place. Yet these continuities also conceal a funda mental rupture, which Serres identifies with the series of media revolutions by which text dis placed statuary from its central role as a sym bolic medium. “The religions of writing and speech have won so completely, have invaded
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Most discussion of the recent furor against old statues pits historical preservation against the de mands of the present. Serres’s account suggests that the iconoclasts actually get something right. Statues are not merely neutral records of the past: they are containers of violence and receptacles of death. In this sense, they should disturb us. Statues begins with a story from Flaubert’s Salammbô of a giant hollow metal statue of Baal into which sacri ficial victims are placed, after which the effigy is placed on a fire and set alight. (The 1973 cult film The Wicker Man portrays a comparable ritual.) This horrifying image is representative because “every statue is . . . a black box whose secret walls envelop someone or something that they hide.” Last year’s protesters, in this sense, tore open such black boxes to reveal the bodies of victims.
“Statues precede languages,” Serres argues, but with the capacity of text to give speech per manence, “these latter have buried them, just as the religions of the world destroy, with blows of stones and letters, the idolatries that engendered them.” Statues live on at the cost of demotion to a secondary role. During the periods of icono clasm visited upon them in modern times, their archaism becomes too offensive to tolerate. But, Serres tells us, “iconoclasts’ fury against fetishes rings like a parricidal anger” because it is ulti mately directed against our origins.
“The idol and the rocket,” he notes, are both “in genious pieces of machinery” and are both also fiery tombs; both are projects of transcendence that seek to establish a channel of communication anthropologist and Serres admirer Bruno Latour puts it, “gun-shy.” Unlike better-known French contemporaries Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and René Girard, all of whom were his friends and colleagues at various points, Serres avoided pugi listic provocations in favor of allusive, digressive, lyrical inquiries into surprising subjects.
SPRING 2022 103 by the iconoclast is “equivalent to the thing ham mered”: “a hard and fashioned mass,” since if it were “less solid or dense . . . it would fly into pieces.” Likewise, “the stone thrown at the idol quickly becomes the idol itself.” Again, where others see contrast, Serres seeks underground connections: “In the Eternal Return of the thing to the thing and the hammer to the hammer, cri tique becomes magic, religion, fetishism; analy sis changes to unanalyzed dogma.” Because all “our ideas come from idols,” they may always revert back into them. Our species has replaced “hard sculpture” with “soft waves”: the coded information streams that with the heavens and attempts at “mastery of our surroundings,” through technical expertise or ritual appeasement. In sum, the two objects are different but inhere secretly in each other: “[R]eligion is in technology; the pagan god is in the rocket; the rocket is in the statue; the rocket on its launching pad is in the ancient idol.” Serres’s uncanny translation between archaic idolatry and advanced technoscience exemplifies the strange connections that he sought in his work. Serres likewise seeks to bridge the distance between icons and their assailants. Commenting on Nietzsche’s project of “philosophizing with a hammer,” he remarks that the “hammer” wielded Philosopher Michel Serres’s book Statues may be the only philosophical treatise on the meaning of public monuments.
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CITY JOURNAL104 Twilight of the Idols nothing but a backdrop for the countless selfies that it would predictably prompt. Yet the vast emptiness of its structure has also made it some thing else: a tomb. As of this writing, the Vessel is closed to visitors because of the persistence of suicidal jumps from its labyrinthine weave of walkways. Regardless of the aims of its architect, it has become a statue of Baal, a devourer of life. Such inadvertent reversions to archaic sacrifice explain what Serres was attempting to elucidate. He states that “a certain number of contempo rary actions, behaviors, or thoughts repeat, al most without change, extremely archaic modes of thought or behavior.” But this recurrence owes as much to the advancement of the ancients as to our own primitivism. The contemporary fantasy of the self, released from solidity and evaporated into the digital ether, inherits ancient notions of the soul. The world remade into a selfie stage be comes a portal to the underworld. The deathly weight of the statue haunts our airy digital dis pensation because the statue both anticipated its successor and persists within it. In the haunted year of 2020, disease and death circulated as digital information. The genetic code of viral RNA that rapidly traversed the globe, eluding all controls and barriers, had a simulated counterpart in the models, graphs, charts, and maps that tried to track the shifting coordinates of a suddenly unrecognizable reality. As the virus and its representations spread among us, gluing us to our screens, we were enjoined to become sedentary—statue-like, transfixed like victims of Medusa by the serpentine peregrinations of the virus. To appease this vengeful new god, we also were asked to subject ourselves to new ascetic dis cipline and purification rituals. Yet this self-denial often seemed identical to indulgence in the plea sures of the screen, to whose temptations we had already been succumbing for some time. What followed was a peculiar reversal. The abstraction of mass death by invisible infection was displaced by the singular spectacle of one man’s death, which spread virally in a sequence of grimly captivating images. The result was an astonishing mobilization that counteracted the uncanny stillness of previous months. Before dominate our media landscape. But the inter play of “hard” and “soft” media also goes back to our origins. It was figured initially, for Serres, in the opposition of statuary and music, one fixed on solid ground, the other floating across air.
Serres’s project in Statues is to explore why stat ues remain a stumbling block and an essential landmark, even as their status is eroded by the proliferation of digital information.
The convulsions of 2020 culminated in destruc tive outbursts not only against statues but also against solid structures of all sorts, which were vandalized, smashed, and burned. At times, all this felt less like a repudiation of certain out moded symbols than like a revolt against the so lidity of the “hard” built environment itself on the part of people immersed in the “soft” media of the screen. Brick-and-mortar stores had been shut tered and overtaken by e-commerce as the virus chased us inside. The hard fixity of stone, brick, concrete, and bronze likewise yielded to viral out rage generated amid the flux of two-dimensional pixelButspace.thesolid structures of the cityscape had already been succumbing to the prevalent logic of “soft waves” for some time before this. The de mands of the digital content economy have re shaped urban spaces worldwide, turning many once-anonymous locations into preferred selfie backdrops. Unlike the fixed landmarks—many of them statues—built to punctuate our com mon geography, the new global itinerary of In stagram destinations emerges out of the logic of the attention economy, refashioning the city into a reflection of a digitized simulacrum. Re cent transformations of public space explicitly respond to this demand. If all this seems to signal a further melting of all that is solid into air, of hard sculpture into soft waves, it also sometimes returns us to the origins of symbolic media. Consider another re cently installed New York monument: the Ves sel, which, like so many statues of old, stands as a central point of reference for an area of urban settlement, albeit the inorganic, simulacral one of Hudson Yards. It is an object whose physical vacuity seems like a commentary on its status as
George Floyd’s fatal encounter with police offi cer Derek Chauvin, he had fentanyl in his veins and Covid-19 in his respiratory system. Before his image became an icon worldwide, the traces of globalized biological and pharmaceutical cir culation were within his body. An emblematic figure in many ways, Floyd became ubiquitous in the makeshift public art that appeared in cit ies nationwide. The location of his death became sacrosanct, a new pilgrimage site. Thus, the event that initiated the dismantling of statues worldwide also brought us back to the origins of the statue, as traced by Serres: the trau matic spectacle of the cadaver. The resulting un rest rattled the shaky foundations of a troubled regime, many of whose monuments had lost their symbolic potency before their dismantling, partly because that potency was grounded in an increasingly obsolete medium. To both his cham
pions and their detractors, George Floyd seemed to have laid, through his death, the foundations of a new order. Much has been said about the contradictory features of this new mode of power. Critics of woke capital and luxury beliefs note that a specific kind of concern for the downtrodden, particularly racial minorities, has become a re quirement for entry into exclusive institutions and powerful corporations. The declaration of such concern increasingly legitimizes elite rule. But it is risky to regard this as merely a cynical ruse, or even as something entirely novel. Pre serving life and containing death are responsi bilities that the oldest rulers claimed. Today’s elite, too, requires its tutelary deities. As Serres would remind us, even as we are propelled for ward into an uncertain future, we are always returning to our origins.
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The new iconography: George Floyd in Union Square
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Monumental Ambitions Catesby Leigh Rodney Cook, Jr.’s Atlanta project seeks to reinvigorate American civic art. 65-year-old Cook Jr. is one of a kind—a monument impresa rio. He’s into building classical monuments that lift the spirit, not the more fashionable, antimonumental sites of mourn ing like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero, or Montgomery, Alabama’s new National Memorial for Peace and Justice, commonly known as the “lynching memo rial.” Cook took a passionate interest in architecture as a child. His interest flourished under the tutelage of another Atlantan, Philip Trammell Shutze (1890–1982), one of the finest classical architects the South has ever produced. As a teenager, Cook played a leading role in the fight to save Atlanta’s old Fox Theater (1929), a stupendous multipur pose venue featuring a movie palace designed as an Ara bian Nights fantasia, with a nod elsewhere in the complex to the pharaonic splendor of Luxor. His numerous civic ini tiatives since then include two important Atlanta monuments: the World Athletes’ Monument (1996) and the Millennium Gate (2008). Both trace their descent to ancient prototypes, the for mer to the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens; and the latter to the triumphal Arch of Titus in Rome. (The Tomochi chi column would itself derive from the columnar monuments of antiquity.) Cook’s local and international connections made these projects possible. With The Tomochichi statue in front of the Millennium Gate
Rodney Cook Sr. Park has few trees—open vistas offer more security—but boasts a well-equipped playground, complete with a splash pad, along with two multipurpose athletic courts. And what is believed to be the largest maple tree in Fulton County still reposes on the west ern slope. Not far from that tree, Rodney Mims Cook, Jr., son of the park’s namesake, wants to erect a monumental column reaching a height of 95 feet, to be crowned by a 20-foot-tall bronze of Tomochi chi, the Yamacraw chief who welcomed James Oglethorpe and his companions to what would eventually become the great state of Georgia. A statue of Cook Sr., a Repub lican businessman and politi cian who actively supported the civil rights movement when it counted, would stand on the column’s pedestal, a 10,000-square-foot building housing collections including King’s library. Numerous stat ues of civil rights luminaries are to be situated elsewhere around the park. E ndowed with Southern charm, chiseled good looks, and a distinguished pedigree, the A tlanta’s Vine City, a black neighborhood with a notable history but with many impov erished residents, has a new 16-acre park, situated in a floodplain where a calamitous 2002 storm ravaged dozens of houses that are now gone. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his family lived nearby, on Sunset Avenue. So did the civil rights activist Julian Bond and Atlan ta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson. Sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois also lived in the area. A cluster of historically black institutions of higher education is located a short distance to the south. Even so, the park is named for a dead white male. More on thatTheshortly.park’s centerpiece is an elaborately landscaped pond and wetland that will provide stormwater retention. This nucleus includes fountains, one with a waterfall, and a stony channel resembling a creek bed. Pedestrian bridges loop this way and that, and paved paths cross the park, which rises gently up a grassy slope. Not far away, the gigan tic, faceted roof panels of the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons, loom like a surreal origami set-piece.
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good reason, former president Donald Trump appointed him to the Commission of Fine Arts prior to leaving office in Janu ary 2021. Since 1910, the sev en-member CFA has reviewed architectural and commemo rative designs for Washing ton’s monumental core. In late March, however, Cook became the fifth Trump appointee to be summarily dismissed by the Biden White House; no previ ous administration has taken suchDuringaction.a visit to the park last August, I found a bronze figure of the late congressman John Lewis, the first statue that Cook’s National Monuments Foundation (NMF) installed there, waving as he looked east over the pond toward At lanta’s skyscraper skyline. The civil rights crusader sports the Presidential Medal of Freedom that he received from Presi dent Obama. Weeks later, the bronze statue of Tomochichi that is intended to crown the park’s monumental column was unveiled at its temporary site in front of the Millenni um Gate. And on March 10, a statue of Andrew Young, the King confidant and former At lanta mayor, congressman, and diplomat, was unveiled in the park in conjunction with the celebration of Young’s 90th birthday.Eventually, Cook plans to transform a wooded slope at the park’s southwestern cor ner into an acropolis harbor ing a “peace pantheon” and a peace institute. The former, a two-story, $10 million classical structure, would offer “thinktank incubation space” for in ternational peace initiatives. It would be surmounted by an open-air circular shrine har boring statues of Nobel Peace Prize winners with Georgia ties: King, former president Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wil son (who grew up in Augus ta), and Theodore Roosevelt, whose wife, Martha, was a Georgian—as well as the Dalai Lama and the late South Afri can bishop Desmond Tutu, on account of their professorships at Atlanta’s Emory University. Behind it a much larger, $60 million building would house an institute for the pursuit of international peace named for Young, along with a noted collection of African-American art. Cook envisions the park as both anchoring a civil rights–themed historic district and rebranding Atlanta as a global center for peace. The National Park Service acquired the King family home, located a block from the park, in 2019 and is expected to open it to the pub lic before long. Many doubt that Cook can pull off his grand plan. And some don’t want him to pull it off. “Statues in a park?” the head of the local NAACP chap ter remarked a few years ago. “Birds poop all over statues.” Though the city council unani mously approved his park plan in 2020, Cook has yet to secure a ground lease agreement from cityThathall.problem appears sur mountable. Still, Cook Park is a far bigger project than any that the NMF has previously undertaken. The foundation’s fund-raising efforts are running years behind schedule, and it’s waging the campaign at a time when the generation that van quished Jim Crow is fading away. Young, for whom the peace institute is to be named, defeated the senior Cook in a 1972 race for a House of Rep resentatives seat. The “Atlanta Way” that Cook and Young epitomized and that Cook Jr. espouses—the hashing out of consensus on sensitive matters by the city’s white and black leaders—may have spared the city the race riots that ravaged cities like Los Angeles half a century ago; but in today’s racially polarized climate, it doesn’t get the respect that it once did. During the 1960s, the senior Cook, who died in 2013, served concurrently as an Atlanta councilman (or al derman, as the position was then known) and member of the Georgia legislature, an arrangement no longer per mitted. His civil rights ad vocacy earned him a KKK cross-burning on his front lawn. For that, fortunately, his memory still commands respect in an overwhelmingly blue city like latter-day Atlanta—and de spite his pivotal role in shaping Georgia’s latter-day Republican Party in mentoring key figures such as the late U.S. senator Paul Coverdell and former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Another challenge that the junior Cook faces is that woke politics—as demonstrated by Montgomery’s Peace and Justice memorial, whose cen terpiece is a pavilion featur ing hundreds of identical, Urbanities
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Cook subsequently attempt ed to sell Washington, D.C., on the idea of erecting a tri umphal arch at Barney Circle, where Pennsylvania Avenue approaches the Anacostia River in the city’s southeast quadrant, to celebrate the new millennium. It was an excel lent idea because Washington lacks such an arch, and Barney Circle is a grassy nullity. The ambitious plan that Cook of fered included the monument; roofed colonnades flanking the circle; a new, appropriately formal, entrance to the historic Congressional Cemetery im mediately to the north; and el egant bastions on each side of the avenue where it meets the John Philip Sousa Bridge over the river, with fountain terraces and steps down to the river front. Cook says that the plan had the support of Senators Coverdell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan but that it was con signed to oblivion as a result of So9/11.he took his idea home. The timing was propitious. On bank to erect the $11 million column for which the statue was created. Whether that statue wins acceptance or not, a statue-crowned column at Cook Park will likely get built. The odds on his acropo lis plan—the peace pantheon and institute—appear longer. But Cook’s vision amounts to a remarkably salutary alterna tive to the destructive “urban renewal” schemes of yesteryear. It would add new cultural and economic value to Vine City, where public-private initiatives will seek to limit displacement of current residents as a result of anticipated gentrification. A quarter-century ago, Cook instigated and oversaw the design competition for the athletes’ monument—also known, thanks to its sponsor, as the Prince of Wales Monu ment. Cook has known Prince Charles, a longtime advocate of traditional architecture, for decades. Commemorating the 1996 Olympics, which took place in Atlanta, the monu ment is situated at a difficult site, a triangular spit of park land formed by the junction of two major avenues, with an expressway verging off from one of them. The circular monument, based on the win ning design by Russian-born architect Anton Glikin, is only 55 feet tall. It consists of a high base with heavily rusticated bands of limestone surmount ed by five columns (represent ing five continents) enclosing a cauldron, all crowned by five bronze Atlas figures hold six-foot-tall rectangular blocks of rust-tinted steel hanging from the ceiling—is apt to re inforce anti-monumental trends in commemorative design, and not just in the South. The im pact isn’t limited to what gets built, of course; it also holds for what gets vandalized or removed. Cook’s focus on cul tural continuity in public art and architecture is decidedly countercultural.Onepoliticalthreat to Cook’s park plan at this juncture is Native American hostility to the Tomochichi statue, which the NMF commissioned at a cost of well over $400,000. To mochichi has traditionally been regarded as a benevolent fig ure—Georgia’s answer to the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims’ loyal friend Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem. Young has referred to Tomochichi as a forerunner of King and other Georgia civil rights leaders. But Tomochichi broke away from his ancestral Muscogee (Creek) tribe before entering into a pact with Oglethorpe, and Musco gee advocates have denounced him as a sellout who contract ed to return escaped slaves to the colonists. Objections have also been raised to the youth ful, muscular Tomochichi fig ure’s seminudity, as though it were a degradation rather than a heroic attribute. Michael Ju lian Bond, a city council mem ber and son of the civil rights leader, declared in February that the statue’s inclusion in the park would have to be “re considered.”Cooksays that he has “al most” enough money in the
Urbanities ing aloft an openwork bronze globe. The base is articulated with elegant aedicules—styl ized window motifs—facing north and south. They contain black granite panels inscribed with the names of supporters of the project. Akin to the larg er, similarly circular Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1902) in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, the athletes’ monument per forms the vital civic function of endowing an otherwise amor phous, visually cluttered but important, urban intersection with a redeeming artistic focus.
The Millennium Gate Museum includes a high-tech interactive gallery that lets visitors timetravel around Georgia—stop ping, for example, at one of Savannah’s historic squares to see it as it looks now and as it looked 200 years ago. The mu seum also offers thematically wide-ranging temporary exhi bitions. Pre-pandemic, it drew as many as 200,000 visitors an nually. N ot long after the Mil lennium Gate opened, Cook turned his attention to Vine City, where a great-great-uncle and onetime Atlanta mayor, Livingston Mims, had com missioned Frederick Law Olm sted’s office to design a park extending over a full city block. Cook says that the park, which opened in 1899, was Atlanta’s first racially integrated play ground. Mims Park, located a few blocks from the Cook Park site, was replaced during the 1950s by a school. It was his father, Cook adds, who got the idea of re-creating it, though the original plan to name the new park after Mims was peace since the birth of Jesus Christ.” In front of each of the arch’s broad piers, a pedestal is surmounted by a black steel tripod. Cook works out of the penthouse, though it is avail able for special events. The views that it offers, day and night, are spectacular. Just before the 17th Street lanes’ parting and fronting the pylons on each side of the street, Scottish sculptor Alexan der Stoddart’s seated, hieratic female figures of Justice and Peace, each accompanied by a more animated male youth, face due east, marking the en trance to the Millennium Gate precinct. On the other side of the arch, the pavement extends back to a balustrade, with steps to either side leading down to an oval-shaped, sunken terrace lawn flanked by colonnades and, outside them, clusters of fir trees. The trees provide a screen for private gatherings. The lawn opens onto a park nestled between the east- and westbound 17th Street lanes. This park, likewise ovalshaped, features a man-made lake with a few fountain jets. It is another locus of stormwa ter retention, and it is girded by maples and Japanese cherry trees, with low-rise, hipsterpostmodern apartment build ings framing it on each side. At the park’s far end, the street’s east- and westbound lanes re unite. The Millennium Gate thus crowns an extraordinarily cohesive and successful com position involving architec ture, sculpture, and landscape design that vastly enriches its urban setting. a brownfield site formerly oc cupied by a huge steel found ry, a tightly woven, 138-acre mixed-use complex of offices, shopping outlets, houses, and apartments was under con struction in Atlanta’s Midtown. The main artery through the Atlantic Station development is 17th Street, a six-lane ave nue running east–west. Cook got his 101-foot-tall arch, the Millennium Gate, built just where the street swerves to the southwest, with eastbound and westbound lanes parting at the point where Tomochichi now stands. The arch’s design originated with a Barney Cir cle competition in Washington and was refined by a British architect, Hugh Petter. As you approach the structure from the high-rise business district to the east, it presents itself at a cranked angle that makes its mass much more visible— much more monumental—than if you were approaching it dead-on.Atthe top, a handsome penthouse in the form of a low-slung, temple-like pavil ion of bronze and glass runs athwart the arch. The pavilion, with its slender Corinthian pi lasters, is a subtle but hand some touch, partially screened by the limestone arch’s para pet. The attic panel below is carved in relief with two large, crossed palm branches (a variation on the familiar crossed-swords motif). Far ther down, the arch’s Latin frieze inscription reads: “In the year 2000 the American people celebrate with this monument all that has been achieved in
One end of the sunken ter race’s oval lawn abuts a mas sive stone arcade, leading to the foyer level beneath the arch. This level features an en filade of galleries, designed by Cook himself, devoted to the history of Georgia and its capi tal city, with display cases con taining historical artifacts and memorabilia. Scroll-like canvas drops on the walls provide a historical narrative, commenc ing with the settlement period.
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Urbanities of steel blocks, the wood-plank floor under your feet gradually descends while the blocks, all suspended on poles from the ceiling, gradually rise from the floor and eventually hang above you. A long inscription on a concrete wall at the bot tom with a thin film of water cascading down its surface pays tribute to the unknown victims. Long rows of bleacherlike seating face it. In a plaza outside the pavilion, dupli cates of the blocks are neatly stacked. EJI wants communities where lynchings occurred to claim them for public display, but the Montgomery Advertiser reported in late February that not a single one had moved.
The idea of descent to some kind of moment of reckoning became an anti-monumental mented. (Its findings appeared in a 2015 report that makes for disturbing reading.) EJI also has identified 400 other cases of lynchings of blacks in other states during that period and more than 2,000 cases that took place during Reconstruction. Each of the memorial pavilion’s more than 800 blocks of rusting COR-TEN steel corresponds to a U.S. county where one or more lynchings occurred. Names of the counties and the victims and the dates when they were murdered are inscribed on each block.The square, open-air pa vilion rings a grassy, sloping courtyard and is itself situat ed within a grassy landscape. As you walk through its four galleries (one on each side of the pavilion) with their rows eventually scrapped because he served as a Confederate army officer. In 2012, the NMF got the goahead from the city to build the park to its designs. But the foundation’s fund-raising ef forts lagged. Four years later, the nonprofit Trust for Public Land was charged with over seeing, and raising some of the money for, the $45 million park project, which wound up being funded mainly by the city. The design was produced by a cor porate firm, HDR, which had previously planned a some what similar park in another part of town. With its curlicued pond and wetlands layout and modernistic bridges and rail ings, Cook Park as built is a far cry from the more formal, traditional landscape that the NMF envisioned. What Cook is proposing amounts to a monu mental overlay. T he antithesis of Cook’s monumental sensibility can be seen at the Peace and Justice memorial, perched on a low hill overlooking downtown Mont gomery. Designed by Boston’s MASS Design Group, it opened in 2018. The memorial is the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard-educated AfricanAmerican attorney whose Equal Justice Initiative and its staff of lawyers are credited with saving scores of Alabama prisoners from execution. EJI has exhaustively researched the history of lynching, identifying some 4,000 cases in the South between 1877 and 1950, a quar ter of them previously undocu Steel blocks commemorate lynching victims at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
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As Gates continued: “The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and Europe an traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been The Berlin Holocaust memo rial’s influence on the lynching memorial, with its minimalist plethora of hanging blocks, is obvious. Both are guilt me morials. And in both venues, quantity winds up trade,themestivelandscapeersabysseswaterwithmorialmutandis,anti-monumentalniumletes’monumentsonancehighlywords,quality—displacing,displacinginotherthespatiallycompact,resolvedsymbolicresthatmakesclassicallikeAtlanta’sathmonumentandMillenGatetick.It’sthesamedeal,mutatiswiththe9/11meinlowerManhattan,thetitanicquantitiesoffallingintothegiganticwheretheTwinTowoncestood.Thelynchingmemorial’sincludesfigurasculpturesaddressingtheoftheAfricanslavethemid-centurystruggle meme, thanks to Maya Lin’s chevron-shaped Vietnam Vet erans Memorial (1982). You descend along its wings to the vertex, where the walls reach a height of 11 feet. It is here that the quantity of names of the dead and the magnitude of loss inflicted by the war are in tended to register most power fully. At the deconstructionist architect Peter Eisenman’s Me morial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, 2,711 gray concrete blocks, arranged in a grid, sprawl over five and a half acres. The uneven cobble stone pavement slopes down ward as the visitor ventures into the grid. The blocks rise just a few inches from the ground on the memorial’s pe rimeter but gradually morph into ominously tilting slabs as tall as 15 feet. Cook’s civic initiatives include the World Athletes’ Monument (1996).
CITY JOURNAL112 for civil rights in Montgom ery, and the criminal-justice system’s mistreatment of Af rican-Americans. The memo rial’s many textual panels give the white-guilt theme quite a workout. Panels near the en trance to the memorial grounds say that Africans were “kid napped” for enslavement—like Kunta Kinte in Alex Haley’s famous epic, Roots —without mentioning that the over whelming majority were, as Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. noted in a 2010 New York Times commentary, “en slaved by Africans and then sold to European traders.”
Urbanities removal. But the obscenityriddled pedestal remained in place until year’s end, an open sore to delight the woke and distress many families living on or near the avenue. Only after Governor Ralph Northam agreed to transfer the entire state-owned monument to the city of Richmond was the ped estal finally dismantled and hauled away. Lee Circle, once the crown jewel of one of the nation’s finest streets, is now desolate.
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R odney Cook’s monumen tal initiatives are particularly valuable at a time when Ameri can civic art is being dumbed down—or worse—by reductive aesthetics and political fanati cism. Whether Tomochichi or another historical figure winds up crowning his column, Cook Park’s western slope is well suited to a monument of this scale, and placing an obser vation deck at the foot of the crowning statue should make the column, as well as the park, a very attractive destination, perhaps providing leverage for the development of the acrop olis complex that Cook envi sions.Working within a demanding tradition that imposes objective standards of achievement is a tall order. Cook has met the challenge with remarkable suc cess. With the Tomochichi col umn’s realization, he will have accomplished a monumental trifecta in his hometown—and that would represent a signifi cant feat in the annals of Amer ican civic art. tice throughout the nation, not just the South—jibes to perfec tion with Black Lives Matter propaganda.Acynicmight say that the Millennium Gate’s exhibit of Georgia history amounts to propaganda. It includes dark incidents like Atlanta’s hor rific race riot of 1906 and the lynching a few years later of Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew un justly accused of murder, but it unquestionably emphasizes the positive. That’s not the same thing, however, as indoc trination, and the interlocked themes of black victimhood and white guilt are so relent lessly woven into EJI’s com memorative program that in doctrination appears to be the aim. And that program has been a success. Hundreds of thousands of people have vis ited the memorial and muse um—a huge development for a city with a population of about 200,000.Yes, simplistic narratives concerning white supremacy and systemic racism can have much uglier ramifications than a minimalist guilt memo rial. A fitting synecdoche for 2020’s plague, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, of statuary defacement by mobs of BLM and antifa enragés and statuary removals by spineless public officials pleading “pub lic safety” might have been the once-majestic granite pedes tal of the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. A legally dubious state supreme court decision issued in September cleared the way for the statue’s impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.” A nearby panel states that the nearly 6 million blacks who migrated to the North between 1910 and 1970 “fle[d] racial terror as trauma tized refugees” without men tioning economic motivations that were surely more impor tant, especially after the mecha nization of agriculture got un der way in the 1930s. The memorial, in short, is the centerpiece of EJI’s larger commemorative agenda of drawing a line from slavery to lynching to systemic racism in law enforcement. The title of EJI’s multimedia Legacy Mu seum exhibition in downtown Montgomery is From Slavery to Mass Incarceration. (The memo rial and the original museum, which moved last fall into more spacious quarters—al lowing for a larger, more elab orate, exhibition—reportedly cost some $20 million, about the same as the NMF’s Atlanta arch and museum.) No doubt the treatment that young black offenders receive at the hands of the criminal-justice sys tem deserves serious scrutiny. But when you read about 104 people being shot in Chicago over last summer’s long July 4 weekend alone—almost all the incidents taking place in black or Hispanic neighborhoods, with none of the victims shot by police (though two police men were shot)—you get to thinking that the Legacy Mu seum is missing something where the abuses suffered by today’s blacks are concerned. The museum’s overarching nar rative—addressing racial injus
CITY JOURNAL114 times even taking issue with PessoaPessoa’shimself.unstable identity reflected the upheaval of his time, as well as the disruptions of his own early life. He was born in 1888 in Lisbon, the capital of a decadent, declin ing power whose ruling fam ily had sat on the throne since 1640. Even for left-wingers, colonialism was synonymous with national pride: Portugal’s economy depended on wealth extracted from Brazil, and its monarchy, at the time of Pes soa’s birth, laid claim to a vast swath of lightly occupied, poorly administered colonial territory stretching the entire breadth of the African conti nent, from what is now Angola in the west to Mozambique in the east. This was the decay ing empire, the glory days of which Luís de Camões, Por tugal’s national poet—whom Pessoa aimed to outdo—had extolled in his Virgilian epic The Lusiads. By the time he died, in 1935, Pessoa had lived through a dictatorship, a republican revolution, the end of the Por tuguese monarchy, the Great War, and the first several years of the Salazar regime. Despite F ernando Pessoa, the Por tuguese modernist who, in many respects—and in many aspects—is a fitting poet for our identity-obsessed age, was at least four poets. His best verse, and much of his prose, entered the world variously under the sign of the pastoral ist Alberto Caeiro, the classicist Ricardo Reis, and the world traveler Álvaro de Campos, as well as that of Pessoa himself, the progenitor of this powerful triad that he dubbed “hetero nyms.” Too complexly realized to be mere pseudonyms, too individual in their tastes, tem peraments, philosophies, and flashings-forth of genius, they were the high triumvirate among the more than 100 lit erary alter egos that Pessoa invented in his lifetime, many coming to light only after his death. “Be plural like the uni verse!” he commanded him self. Walt Whitman—one of his largest influences—may have contained multitudes, but Pes soa sent his panoply of inner selves flocking out into the world, where they unfolded rich psychologies, personal convictions, and private obses sions. The heteronyms argued with one another in print, at Plural Like the Universe Brian Patrick Eha Brilliant, restive, alternately depressed and exhilarated, Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa had second thoughts about everything. writing at length on imperi alism, decadence, and other cultural topics, he remained allergic to the “vocabulary of social responsibility.” Even his close friends had trouble pin ning down his views. As the critic Harold Bloom remarked, “Pessoa can be read as a politi cal poet only if you start with the good morning’s conviction that everything is political, in cluding a good morning.” But he wasn’t insensitive to the world around him. His three major heteronyms emerged in 1914, the dawning of World War I, as though welling up from the fissures of a fractured way of life. More than any of his contemporaries, Pessoa personalized the upheaval of his time. Each disruption oc casioned a seismic shift of self, as Ricardo Reis—“a Greek Hor ace who writes in Portuguese,” according to Pessoa—tells us: Fate frightens me, Lyd ia. Nothing is certain. At any moment some thing could happen To change all that we Brilliant,are. restive, alternately depressed and exhilarated, Pessoa had second thoughts about everything—and third and fourth thoughts, too. Af ter dropping out of college, he cadged money from rela tives and friends, borrowed against his mother and step father’s investment bonds, and supported himself by writing Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935): even his close friends had trouble pinning down his views.
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CITY JOURNAL116 letters in English and French for Portuguese business men, while pursuing a dizzy ing array of literary projects and business schemes, most of which never got off the ground. His life in Lisbon was hectic—he made the rounds of literary cafés—but largely uneventful. Having diagnosed himself with “a mild sexual inversion,” he never married, and likely remained a virgin. He was besotted not with men or women but with language, enamored of his own alchemi cal creative powers. Endlessly fecund, he seemed to be at times a spectator of himself, “the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me.”They belong to the world now, Pessoa’s invented selves. In the dramatis personae that opens Pessoa, Richard Zenith’s mammoth new biography of the poet, we learn, charmingly, that Reis “immigrated to Brazil in 1919, and was still living in the Americas, perhaps in Peru, when Pessoa died in 1935”— the heteronym surviving his maker. Pessoa’s first biogra pher, the Portuguese author João Gaspar Simões, believed that the “exotic” appeal of the heteronyms would fade—but, in fact, it has only grown stronger with time, the poet’s self-partitioning a more apt al legory for the obsessive and self-obsessed way in which so many of us craft our digital personae, personal brands, and public-facing lives. Pessoa’s inventions, sprung from their captivity in the large wooden trunk he left behind, stuffed with more than 25,000 papers, have unquestionably outlived him.But for every “full-fledged soul” and perfect piece of writ ing he produced, there are dozens of fragmentary works and pseudo-authors who exist in little more than name. These cast-off limbs—“rubble [from] a kind of literary Pompeii,” Zenith calls them—put me in mind of those wonderfully ex pressive hands by Rodin on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: radiant with genius, but incomplete. Even Pessoa’s greatest prose work is a tumulus of shards. Early on, in November 1914, he told a friend, despairingly, “My state of mind compels me to work hard, against my will, on The Book of Disquiet. But it’s all fragments, fragments, frag ments.” Like his contemporary T. S. Eliot, Pessoa went on to the end of his life shoring up fragments, though not exactly against his ruins. B orn to a romantic, liter ary mother and a civil servant father who moonlighted as a prolific music and theater critic while slowly dying of tuberculosis, Pessoa grew up a sensitive, withdrawn, yet inde pendent child. Words were his playthings, though he still “enjoyed the good health of understanding nothing,” as he later wrote. One thing he may have struggled to understand during those early Lisbon years was the disruptive presence of his paternal grandmother, the half-demented Dionísia. Prone like her namesake, the Greek god, to fits of madness, she furnished the future creator of so many alternate selves with early evidence, according to Zenith, “that multiple person alities can dwell in one and the same human body.”
At age five, Pessoa suf fered the deaths, six months apart, of his father and his infant brother, Jorge. Then he watched, bewildered, as his mother whipsawed from grief to giddy elation. Just days af ter losing her son, she met a charming Portuguese navy captain: the attraction was electric, and they soon mar ried. Here was another les son for the budding Pessoa. “Grief doesn’t last because grief doesn’t last,” the hetero nym Álvaro de Campos tells us in a poem about a newly bereaved mother. The mother who loses her son is a recur ring figure in Pessoa’s mature writings, along with an aware ness of how quickly the loss can lose its sting. Personalities, emotions, marriage, widow hood—it seemed that nothing was stable or endured for long. In Pessoa’s childish imagi nation, reality itself grew un stable: daydreams supplanted the waking world. Egged on by a doting uncle with a weakness for make-believe, the future poet began to peo ple his solitude with fictitious individuals—at least two of whom, Captain Thibeaut and the Chevalier de Pas, he re membered for the rest of his life as having been utterly real to him, “fathomed to the depths of their souls.” This Urbanities
Starting over was what the chameleon-like boy and his mother did in Durban, South Africa, where her new hus band assumed the post of Por tuguese consul. The largest city in the British colony of Natal, Durban boasted efficient public transportation, a public library, a botanical garden, literary so cieties, and other trappings of civilization, including the rig orous convent school where Pessoa was promptly enrolled. Forced to start the five-year primary school curriculum over from the beginning, and in a new language, he finished in just three years, receiving First Prize in both English and Latin as well as the award for all-around academic excellence. In high school, he devoured the prose of Thomas Carlyle and wrote verses emulating Milton and the English Roman tics. Pessoa returned to Lisbon for good in 1905, but his expo
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Urbanities cian poet declares himself an “Argonaut of genuine sensa tions” were not the everyday world but some imagined highland of the sun, where things dwell in accurate light and cast clean shadows on the eye. Caeiro is more cerebral than Whitman, who had like wise wondered at the material world and refused to offer fi nal answers:Achild said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands. How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. Pessoa dreamed of launching himself as an English poet in his own right. He wrote doz ens of sonnets, publishing 35 of them as a chapbook, and sent poems to the Poetry Society in London. (They were ignored.) Often, he attributed his Eng lish works to one of his other selves. Incredibly, Pessoa’s last name means “person” in Por tuguese, as well as “persona.” Seemingly taking the hint, he punned with the names of his English alter egos, too—each had a distinct signature and notebooks of his own. First came Charles Rob ert Anon, who published a poem in a Durban newspaper in 1904. He was superseded, around 1906, by Alexander Search, who claimed author ship of more than 100 poems, a short story, and various essays. Zenith characterizes Search as “a Platonic or transcendent ver sion of Pessoa”—a Shelleyan idealist quest ing after truth, sure to Anglo-American litera ture proved decisive. The most crucial influence was Whitman. The American poet, Zenith writes, taught Pessoa “how to open up, feel everything, be everything, and sing.” The experience of read ing Song of Myself made pos sible the sudden emergence, on March 8, 1914, of his first true heteronym, a pastoral yet unsentimental poet named Al berto Caeiro: I am a keeper of sheep. The sheep are my thoughtsAndmy thoughts are all sensations. I think with my eyes and my ears And with my hands andAndfeetwith my nose and Amouth.rush of poems poured from Pessoa’s pen in this as tonishing new voice. Ostensi bly lacking in formal educa tion, Caeiro was nonetheless a keen observer, “newborn with every moment / To the com plete newness of the world.” It was as though he had distilled the antidote to his own over wrought intellectualism: I lie down in the grass And forget all I was However,taught. as Thomas Mer ton, Caeiro’s first major Eng lish translator, noted, these poems have a touch of selfconsciousness. It is as though the world in which the Gali dreamy habit only augment ed in adolescence. The lonely boy’s desire to surround him self “with friends and acquain tances who never existed” prefigured the grand fakery of a literary career in which he would conduct interviews with himself, one heteronym picking another’s brain. Years later, Pessoa would play with his own selfhood as he had once played with imaginary friends: “I unwind myself like a multicoloured skein, or I make string figures of myself, like those woven on spread fingers and passed from child to child. . . . Then I turn over my hand and the figure changes. And I start over.”
Let’s be simple and calm,Like the trees and streams,AndGod will love us, making us Us even as the trees are Religion,trees for Pessoa, was an illusion without which “we live by dreaming, which is the illusion of those who can’t have illusions.” His dreams were, first and foremost, about self-invention, ityself-multiplication.self-division,HisinabiltobelieveinthetriuneGod thing to spend thousands of words on the pedigree and life history of the subject’s tai lor and on the labor practices of the mills that produced the cloth out of which said gar ments were made. The essential self lies else where, and what is best in Pessoa transcends politics. Yet Zenith devotes a whole chap ter to Gandhi on the thin pre text that the older man was a practicing lawyer and budding civil rights activist in Durban while Pessoa was a student in primary school. It’s true that Pessoa admired Gandhi later in life—mainly for his asceti cism—but Zenith doesn’t stop there. He closes a disquisition on the British treatment of In dians as second-class citizens this way: “All of which no doubt seemed to Fernando, the stepson of a European diplo mat, like the natural order of things.” Rare indeed is the bi ographer who would feel com pelled to round out his portrait of the artist as an eight-yearold by depicting that child as a representative of white su premacy.“Ifthere’s one thing I hate, it’s a reformer,” writes Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, defining this type as “a man who sees the world’s superficial ills and sets out to cure them by ag gravating the more basic ills.” Call him a reactionary, if you like; one searches his oeuvre in vain for a social program. Ro man Catholic by birth, he was a spiritual seeker and dabbler in the occult, obsessed with astrology, and a thoroughgo ing skeptic—part of a genera with a head full of philosophy and enlightened humanism. In other words, Pessoa’s most fer vent spiritual or metaphysical inquiries in English were con ducted by an alter ego named A. Search. Years later, Caeiro, again as if reacting to his mak er’s native bent, declared this search pointless: “Things have no meaning: they have exis tence. / Things are the only hidden meaning of things.” Z enith’s biography takes flight whenever it immerses us in the Pessoan imagina tion and tends to flag when it turns political or sociologi cal. The Durban section gets bogged down in passages about the living conditions of native Africans and Indian immigrants in Natal, as well as asides about the “racist divi sion of labor” that they were part of. The index has a twopage entry for “blackface.”
Religious curiosity and meta physical concerns crop up fre quently in his work, whether attributed to a heteronym or not. Even Caeiro, whom Pes soa dubbed an “atheist St. Francis of Assisi” and who de nies any reality beyond materi al things, invokes God—if only to say that the deity is largely beside the point: To think about God is to disobey God, Since God wanted us not to know him, Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us. . . .
Zenith’s book having been published in 2021, it was per haps inevitable that some of its 937 pages (not including the prologue and back mat ter) would be devoted to con victing Pessoa of racism and misogyny wherever possible— though Zenith in the role of judge and jury has clemency enough to acknowledge that such attitudes, never central to Pessoa’s genius, had “shal low roots” and were eventual ly outgrown as he matured. A biographer, having promised us a portrait of the man, can be forgiven for describing his outer garments as a clue to the essential self, but it’s another
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Urbanities tion “that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and cre ated in itself a disbelief in all other faiths,” which presum ably would include most of the secular dogmas in which our media and universities today catechize the faithful. In one of his English poems, Pessoa lo cates God “Between our silence and our speech, between / Us and the consciousness of us.”
Just so, Pessoa’s detachment from society gives rise to the impulse to invent his own so ciety. In his static drama The Mariner, a character tells of a shipwrecked man, who, find ing it too painful to recall his former life, invents an imagined past, a fictitious homeland, the made-up people and geography and events of which gradually seems wedded somehow to his endless unfolding of new personae. Álvaro de Campos sets intellectual uncertainty be side the wish to be someone else: Every day I have differ entSometimesbeliefs— in the same day I have different be liefs—And I wish I were the child now crossing As though welling up from a broken world, Pessoa’s three major heteronyms emerged in 1914, the dawning of World War I.
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SPRING 2022 119 Urbanities supplant his actual memories. Pessoa, in The Book of Disquiet, longs to create in himself a nation with its own politics, parties and revo lutions, and to be all of it, everything, to be God in the real pantheism of this people—I, to be the substance and movement of their bodies and their souls, of the very ground they tread and the acts The view from my win dow of the street below.
The Book’s heteronymic author ship changed over time; but ultimately, Pessoa laid it at the feet of his invention Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who lives in a rented room on the Rua dos Douradores and writes in his spare time. Soares espous es a philosophy of inaction, lives in his imagination, and, at times, can view his fellow Portuguese only as “an alien tide of living things that don’t concern me.” Less individuated than Caeiro, Reis, and de Cam pos, Soares is a sort of pareddown Pessoa, possessing his irony but not his humor. His semifictional diary is a kind of library in utero; many of the roughly 500 passages feel like the seeds of unwritten books, sorties where a more stolid writer might have launched entireWrittencampaigns.overhalf a lifetime, The Book discloses an unwieldy they perform! To be ev erything, to be them and not them! An infinite expansion and elevation of the self, so that it would exist as both deus and demos, bringing about a solip sistic kingdom of heaven on earth, though this nation—with its “parties and revolutions”— would be fractious, disputative, rabble-rousing. Among friends, Pessoa had a “fondness for ar dently defending a certain idea one day and then attacking it the next, with equally impas sioned arguments,” Zenith writes. While the more ro mantic modernists sought an “unfractioned idiom” (as the American poet Hart Crane put it) with which to mount their raids on the inarticulate, Pes soa’s own idiom was endlessly fractionated, full of tricks and evasions, enriched by philoso phies and ways of seeing that he practiced for the length of a poem and no longer. Rather than try to integrate his dis parate drives into a cohesive whole, he heightened the con tradictions. He produced new selves as if by cellular mitosis and gave them independent life. Among these selves was the “semi-heteronym” Bernardo Soares, the supposed author of Pessoa’s unclassifiable prose masterpiece The Book of Disquiet This “factless autobiography,” as Pessoa/Soares calls it, was first published in 1982 (47 years after Pessoa’s death), but subsequent editions have enlarged and reor Urbanities
CITY JOURNAL120 profusion of styles and genres, from ethereal dream scenes and prose poems to clear-eyed con fessions and cultural observa tions, sociological speculations, aesthetic maxims, and apho risms worthy of Kafka. Even if you aren’t as dreamy or pas sive as Soares, you know what he means when he says that he is “suffering from a headache and the universe.” Paradise, for Soares, is eternal stasis, every thing in abeyance: a world in which “the same moment of twilight forever paint[s] the curve of the hills,” a life that re sembles “an eternal standing by the window”—because, even in paradise, he imagines himself as alienated, an observer at one remove from the scene. “ The Book of Disquiet never ceased being an experiment in how far a man can be psychologically and affectively self-sufficient, living only off of his dreams and imagination,” Zenith tells us. “It was an extreme, mono maniacal version of Pessoa’s own, essentially imaginative way of living life.” It was probably also a cop ing mechanism. The world of daydreams is one where moth ers don’t plunge suddenly into obsessional love affairs and where little brothers don’t ex pire in infancy. Tedium besets Soares, but tedium is a small price to pay. “The fictions of my imagination . . . may wea ry me, but they don’t hurt or humiliate,” he says. “They nev er forsake [me], and they don’t die or Twenty-first-centurydisappear.”
The Book of Disquiet puts you midway along the journey of another man’s life, lost in the dark wood of his interiority. But whose interiority, exactly?
Amer ica, with its cult of action and positive thinking, would dered its contents, about which editors and scholars disagree. A nonbook of which no origi nal exists, begun in 1913 and consisting of irregularly dated entries composed intermittently over the course of 20-odd years, some handwritten, some typed, with no definite order or over arching schema, The Book was nonetheless an astonishing dis covery. Few posthumous works have caused such a dramatic reevaluation of their author’s achievement.“Imakelandscapes out of what I feel,” Soares writes.
Pessoa’s strongest poems, “The Tobacco Shop,” begins: I’m nothing. I’ll always be nothing. I can’t want to be some thing.But I have in me all the dreams of the world. In Borges’s story, Shake speare at the end of his life, having “been so many men in vain,” asks God to give him at last a singular identity to call his own. From a whirlwind, the voice of the Lord an swers: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who, like myself, are many and no Wantingone.” to be everyone while fearing that he was no one, Pessoa was nonetheless, in his fiercest moments, in touch with an unshakable core at the center of his kaleidoscope of selves. Refusing either to suppress or falsify his internal conflicts, he displayed a kind of radical authenticity. “Even if what we pretend to be (be cause we coexist with others) crumbles around us, we should remain undaunted,” he exhorts readers in The Book of Disquiet, “because we’re ourselves, and to be ourselves means having nothing to do with external things that crumble, even if they crumble right on top of what for them we are.” Nearly 90 years after his death, the best of this invet erate pretender’s poetry and prose has not crumbled. provably unique and the own ership of which can be pub licly verified on a blockchain. NFTs represent a new frontier of art and collectibles, gaming and pop culture, where even some of the biggest-name art ists and collectors don’t use their real names. Instead of self-portraits, they employ NFT avatars as visual identi ties. In this scene, “anon”—Pes soa’s first major English het eronym—is a common form of address for a compatriot whose real-world identity you may never know. To participate, I needed a suitable persona. So I cre ated a pseudonymous Twitter account, registered domain names to match, and launched my alter self into that hothouse ecosystem. More gregarious than usual, I found it easy in that guise to make friends and forge bonds. The real me, such as he was (shades of Whit man again), took a backseat. And it worked: inside of three months, I had gained 1,000 fol lowers and a reputation as a serious collector. We are what we dream ourselves to be, Pes soa says. Through his eyes, I have come to see the Internet increasingly as a place where heteronyms abound, casting large shadows and printing their own legends. From Bit coin creator Satoshi Nakamoto to the master conspiracist Q, these identities shape the lives of Who,millions.then, is the real Pes soa? A dream dreamed by no one, he sometimes thought—as Borges imagined Shakespeare in one of his Ficciones. One of hardly know what to make of the dreamy, ineffectual Soares, were it not that the narcissistic sublime (or a degraded facsim ile) has become our dominant cultural mode. Then, too, at a time when some individuals claim to be incapable of set tling on a single gender, much less any other unambiguous identity, we are primed to accept what Zenith calls Pes soa’s “poetics of fragmented selfhood.” There are moments in The Book of Disquiet when Pessoa breaks through the au thorial mask, if only to affirm his lifelong masquerade: “To create, I’ve destroyed myself. I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t ex ist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.”
Urbanities
The triumph of his heteronym ic enterprise is like that aimed at by those who today practice “manifesting”: the triumph of an idea transcended into life. T he Pessoan spirit —albeit lacking his genius—is alive and well. It lives on in Reddit forums, Twitch chats, Twitter feeds, and other venues where anonymity, or pseudonym ity, is common and where even members of the blue-checkmark class, who use their real names, put up a front. The once-singu lar self divides or turns into a heteronym. Online spaces are loud with the personae we have unleashed.Iknow this firsthand. In the summer of 2021, I delved into the world of non-fungible tokens—digital items that are
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A bout 30 miles from my home in England, deep in the Shropshire countryside, is the small and picturesque, but not very prosperous, town of Wem, where William Hazlitt, the great essayist, spent much of his early life, though I am told that the locals are not par ticularly proud of him, as few these days have heard of, let alone read, him. On the night of October 6 last year, a terrible fire erupted in Wem, consuming the whole premises and stock of a busi ness, Cosmo Books, owned by Robert Downie, with whom I had had some dealings in the past. Cosmo was an unusual bookseller, entirely online, spe cializing in articles taken from eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen tury periodicals. Some 170,000 items were lost in the fire—un doubtedly caused by arson, not by lightning or electrical fault. The bookseller was not the target of the arson. Behind his main premises—essentially a warehouse with an office at tached—was another small unit, sublet not long before the fire to a group of people who turned out to be drug dealers. On the night of the fire, a person or persons drilled a hole in the door of the sublet and poured a fire-accelerant through it. The gangs. They often posted look outs on the industrial estate to warn them of the approach of the police or their rivals. Nat urally, they had more to fear from their rivals than from the police; and the tenants have now disappeared without a trace. At any rate, no one has yet been caught or charged, and no one is holding his breath until someone is. My guess is that the intended victims and the culprit gang may indeed be caught one day, but more by luck than by judgment or detec tive work. If either group had done something really serious— utter a misogynistic remark, say—they would by now have found themselves, as prison ar got puts it, “banged to rights.” As it is, they will probably con tinue their activities unmolested by police for some time. After the fire had ruined Downie’s stock almost entire ly (by a kind of miracle that reminded me of the famous photograph of the survival of St. Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz, an exquisitely bound copy of a small book, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin , remained unharmed, though the padded envelope that stored it was thor oughly charred), he informed his customers via e-mail of the disaster and received in return many messages of condolence and offers of help. I decided to pay him a visit. A ged 60, with a resilience and good humor that I do not think I should have been capable of in such circumstances, Downie had almost immediately started fire ripped through a part of the industrial estate, but it was Cosmo Books that suffered the worst devastation: other areas suffered only smoke damage. It took the fire department three days to extinguish the blaze completely.Probably, though not certain ly, a rival gang of drug dealers set the fire in revenge for some past violence, as a battle in a turf war, or as a way of remind ing the occupants to pay a debt. Though small, poky, and with permanently boarded-up win dows, the location had served as a venue for parties, perhaps tending to orgy, complete with a bar and beds and couches. A few days later, after a dis play of inertia that we now expect of our police, a search turned up weapons at the site: coshes, knives, and a sword. Also found was a box contain ing about $250,000 worth of co caine. Theft seems not to have been among the arsonists’ mo tives, unless so much cocaine was already stored there (and taken) that they simply over looked so trifling a quantity. It subsequently emerged, at least in rumor, that the new ten ants of the small property had set up security cameras, not to protect them from crime but from agents of the law or other
The Bookseller’s Tale Theodore Dalrymple Lessons in amidresiliencecalamity (2)BOOKSCOSMOOFCOURTESY
Robert Downie’s Cosmo Books, in Wem, England, a provider of rare and scholarly manuscripts
SPRING 2022 123 to trade again from a temporary office near his old location. His stock had taken him decades to collect, collate, and catalog. One could not simply reconstitute it by sending one or two orders to suppliers. It was more like a life’s work, and 60 is not usu ally an age when one begins again.But Downie said something that struck me as wiser than anything that an army of ther apists might have managed to articulate. Yes, he was a vic tim, he said (and none more innocent), but he was not go ing to victimize himself a sec ond time by brooding end lessly on his calamity, and thereby turning himself into a bitter old man. Moreover— though, in a sense, he had to start again from scratch—he knew his business thoroughly, He was angry on several fronts: at the actual fire-setters, naturally, though they were unknown to him; at the drugdealing tenants of the adjoining unit, but also at the person who sublet to them, probably ille gally; at the owner’s agent, who did not supervise the property for which he had responsibility; at the distant owners of the site, who were indifferent to what had happened; and, finally, at the police, who had not both ered to interview him. As read ers of detective novels know, and common sense dictates, he who is most directly affected by a crime should be questioned as soon as possible. After all, the arson might have been target ing him; he might have known something about the subten ants of the premises in which the fire had started; he might and the fire had not cost him hisOfknowledge.course,so wise an attitude did not preclude anger at what had happened, or rather—as he soon discovered—at what had been done. He recalled his arrival at his business the fol lowing morning—someone had informed him by telephone that a fire had broken out on the in dustrial estate, but he did not believe that it was at his premis es—to see the blaze still raging, and he knew at once that his work of decades was lost. An articulate man, he was at a loss for words to describe his emo tions at that moment. To adapt Wordsworth slightly: To him the local fire that burns can Thoughtsgivethat do often lie too deep for tears.
I asked whether he ever had any qualms about separating old volumes of journals and magazines, and he replied with what, to me, came as a surpris ingly unequivocal negative. He would not break up a beauti ful, precious, or rare book, he said (in fact, many such books have been wrecked for their il lustrative plates by avaricious booksellers), but he was mak ing available to the public what it might otherwise not know existed and would otherwise molder on shelves for another 100 or 200 years. And people who might otherwise search fruitlessly for material on what ever was their interest, but who The ground was a black, tarlike mass of carbon mud. On the shelves that remained were carbonized books, completely irrecoverable and many irre placeable, glued together by wa ter from the firefighters’ hoses. More than half a mile of books and papers, carefully cataloged at the expense of thousands of hours of work, were no more. The roof had caved in; the wooden beams were charcoal. A glance was enough to make one despair. Downie started as a booksell er when he was a teenager. His father, a successful car salesman, did not want him to continue his education, and Downie was too young to oppose his father’s wishes. His mother ran two small secondhand bookshops in provincial towns, and the young Downie worked in them dur ing his school holidays. Then, when he was 16 and had left school, his father drove him to one of them, dropped him off, and said, “There, you manage it.” And he did, until he was 18, when he bought it from his mother with a bank loan that his father guaranteed. He ran it for another decade, before sell ingByit. then, Downie had grown tired of direct contact with the general public. People entering his bookshop would treat him as if he worked for a tourist infor mation office or ask him wheth er he had any cigarettes for sale. He decided thenceforward to do only mail-order selling of real antiquarian books from catalogs. In any case, traditional booksell even have contracted for the fire himself, for what is known in arsonists’ circles as an insurance job. The fact that the police had asked him nothing removed any confidence that they were try ing to find the culprits of what was a serious crime, and which might even have ended in fa talities. They fiddled while Wem burned.Downie said that he might have a legal claim against the tenant, or the managing agent of the premises, or the manag ers of the whole site and the owners—but even if he did, he would probably not pursue it far. It would cost much and yield little, even if legal liabil ity could be fixed on any of the parties. I gave him the benefit of my experience of civil actions in a medical context—admittedly, only as a witness; but I have observed that such processes continue for years and come to obsess the plaintiffs until they can think of nothing else. And finally, when the case settles, the plaintiffs still feel that justice has not been done, that the wrong verdict was reached or the com pensation was insufficient, that the defendants got off lightly, and that the whole legal system was corruptly biased against such as they. I have never met a happy plaintiff, except those who won and whose claim was fraudulent.Yetwhen I visited the burned-out warehouse in Down ie’s company, my first thought, after the shock and pity of it, was of vengeance upon those who did such a thing: and it was not even my life’s work that was so wantonly destroyed.
CITY JOURNAL124 Oh, to be in E ngland ing from small shops was soon almost to die out. He had an illumination one day while looking through a large volume of old Acts of Par liament. Who would want such a volume? On the other hand, people with a particular inter est in a subject might want a single Act for their collection or research. (By the time of the fire, Downie had amassed what was probably the world’s largest private collection of Acts of Par liament, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.) The idea came to him to break each volume into its component parts and sell each item individually. A natural extension of this idea, which proved successful, was to split up the many journals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which contained nu merous essays of historical and intellectual importance, and sell them article by article. The com ing of the Internet expanded the reach of his business immensely.
SPRING 2022 125 Oh, to be in E ngland was that prohibiting any drug that people might want to take created a black market that pro moted and gave opportunity to criminality.Ihavesometimes flirted with this thought myself. But does opportunity create criminals, or do criminals create oppor tunity? Suppose that cocaine were not a trafficked commod ity, but instead on sale legally, “A perfect illustration,” said Downie. T he Wem fire was illustra tive in more than one respect. The day before I went to see Downie, I was involved in a debate about drug legalization. One of the arguments in favor of such legalization, put for ward by a reasonable person, did not want large volumes of mostly extraneous matter clut tering up their homes, could now find it with a few touches of a Hekeyboard.wasright:
I had once bought from him a two-page paper by Charles Loudon, in whom I happened to be in terested. Loudon was a Scot tish doctor who practiced in Leamington Spa, a town about 50 miles from where I live, in another direction from Wem. Leamington Spa’s spring wa ters were believed in the nine teenth century to be curative, and the town soon became an elegant and aristocratic resort. Loudon wrote a book about those supposedly curative wa ters, which went through three editions, taking the unfashion able, and probably not locally well-received, view that they were no panacea. He was ap pointed to the Royal Commis sion on the use of child labor in factories in 1833 and quoted by Friedrich Engels in his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845. In 1841, Loudon re tired to Paris, where he wrote (in French) a book trying to re fute the population theories of Thomas Malthus—an interesting career. His first publication was about an obscure ear disease, published in an equally obscure Glasgow medical journal of the 1820s, and it was this that I bought, more for the sake of its author than its subject mat ter. Without Downie’s business, I would never have known of its existence, nor would I have bought the complete volume of the journal that contained it if I had ever found it. A portion of Downie’s ruined shelves after the arson
The fire was a powerful re minder of the baleful effect of crime upon its victims—an ef fect that I confronted practically every day of my professional life, though I found that many educated middle-class people were reluctant to hear about it, so anxious were they to display their theoretical compassion to ward the perpetrators and never grasping the point that it was the poor, not the rich, who were the principal victims of crime. I t takes no great imagination to apprehend the emotions of a man whose life’s work has been casually destroyed by a vicious gang, thousands of hours of labor set at naught, and what effect it might have had were he a lesser person. But Downie understood something that is like alcohol. Would the destroy ers of Downie’s stock have then become decent, upstanding citizens, or would they, rather, have turned their attention to some other illegal activity?
CITY JOURNAL126 Oh, to be in E ngland seldom understood, or at least not much emphasized, in our current climate of opinion, in which vulnerability and fragil ity are what is admired and encouraged: that while emo tion is important, and without it nothing would matter, it is not all-important, not the only guide to action. Emotion must be tempered by thought and rational reflection, which, by confronting the situation con structively, helps limit its de structive effects. Of course, many factors aided Downie’s admirable response: intelligence not the least of them, but also the fact that he was sufficiently insured to tide him over, and the fact of his indestructible knowledge of his endlessly in teresting business. He claimed no great merit for his resilience, since, he said, he had little choice but to be resilient. You do not enter a business such as his to make a great fortune, and he was too young to retire. He still had his livelihood to make. But many people in his circumstances would have been crushed or sought other ways of rising from the ashes, such as psychotherapy or legal action— both damaging, in such instanc es, to the human personality.
How we respond to circum stances is generally a choice, ad mirable or otherwise. I admired this bibliographical phoenix rising from the flames, and re cently bought a few more items from his swiftly resuscitating business: one an essay from 1797 on women’s depravity caused by reading novels, the other an engraving of Protestant martyrs burned at the stake. know themselves to be, part of an elaborate charade, in which they bully the innocent and ig nore the guilty—especially the dangerous.Theinefficacy of the police is not merely an inconvenience, though it is certainly that, as well. It indicates that the gov ernment and its associated administration, which have for decades mandated, and presided over, a depressing degeneration of law enforcement, are unaware that the maintenance of order is not merely one of their tasks among others—such as ensuring that people are protected from the way others might happen to address them—but the very justification of their existence. Criminal disorder saps their le gitimacy, which, in turn, leads to further disorder.
The fire and its aftermath also exemplified what every one already knows: the almostprogrammed incompetence of the police. No one to whom I related the failure of the police even to question Downie was surprised: years of criticism and reform have left the police de moralized and intellectually and morally corrupted. They hardly know what they exist for these days, or if they do know, they nevertheless choose to concen trate on safer and less taxing trivialities, such as the investi gation of so-called hate speech rather than the detection of real crime. The formalization of all their procedures, the constant resort to pen-pushing and formfilling, discourages flexibility and powers of discretion and has ruined even their individ ual intelligence, for what is not used habitually withers and de cays. Even their appearance has changed, from that of a citizen in an unthreatening uniform to that of a paramilitary wing of a violent fascist movement. Only the fact that so many of them are patently unfit and could hardly chase an old lady with a walker very far prevents them from being truly fearful, fes tooned as they now are around the waist with the encumbering apparatus of repression—trun cheon, handcuffs, gas canisters, and sprays of various descrip tions. They are, and probably at some level of their psyche
Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and a professor at New York University. Guy Sorman, a City Jour nal contributing editor and a French public intellectual, is the author of many books, including Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twen ty-First Century and The Genius of India .
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal , a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of many books, includ ing Out into the Beautiful World and Grief and Other Stories
Stephen J. K. Walters is the author of Boom Towns: Restor ing the Urban American Dream; a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Uni versity’s Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise; and chief economist at the Mary land Public Policy Institute.
TayfunArtists: Coskun is an inter national photojournalist with the Anadolu Agency. Alberto Mena is a graphic artist living in New York. For cover artist Jessica Dalrymple, see page 2.
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Connor Harris is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Kay S. Hymowitz is a City Journal contributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys .
Malcom Kyeyune is a writer based in Uppsala, Sweden, and sits on the steering com mittee of Oikos, a conservative think tank in Sweden. Catesby Leigh writes about public art and architecture and lives in Washington, D.C. Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Matt DeLisi is coordinator of criminal-justice studies, profes sor in the Department of Sociol ogy, and faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University. Brian Patrick Eha is a writer in New York. Nicole Gelinas is a City Jour nal contributing editor, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Insti tute, and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington
John O. McGinnis is a con tributing editor of City Journal and the George C. Dix Profes sor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University. Lance Morrow, a contribut ing editor of City Journal and the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was an essayist at Time for many years. His lat est book is God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money
Judge Glock is the chief pol icy officer at the Cicero Insti tute, a contributing editor of City Journal , and the author of The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913–1939
John Tierney is a contribut ing editor of City Journal and coauthor of The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It .
Theodore Kupfer is an asso ciate editor of City Journal
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John Paul Wright is a pro fessor at the School of Crimi nal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.
SethSoundings:Barron is managing editor of The American Mind and author of The Last Days of New York . Jim Fitzgerald is a retired special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investiga tion who specialized in terror ism investigations, including infiltration of terrorist orga nizations. Stanley Goldfarb is a professor of medicine and former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the au thor of the forthcoming book Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns Thomas Hogan has served as a federal pros ecutor, local prosecutor, and elected district attorney. He is currently in private practice.
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127 C ontributors SPRING 2022
Dan’s father had been mur dered in one of Stalin’s purges. His mother must have been an extraordinary woman—fore bear of the Ukrainian mothers we now see trying to shield their young from Putin’s bombs and rockets. With little Danylo in tow, she fled to the West, making her way across many borders, through the Russian armies and the German armies, until at last she made it to the safety of the American lines.
CITY JOURNAL128 Columbia County, NY D iarist
Repetition, with Variations Lance Morrow T he images out of Kiev and Lviv—especially of young Ukrai nian mothers fleeing with their children or hiding in shelters underground—take me back a long way, to Matthews Hall in Harvard Yard in September 1959, when I arrived as a fresh man and met my roommates. One was Ukrainian and the other was Hungarian, and both had come to America as refugees from Stalin or Stalin’s heirs. My Ukrainian roommate, Danylo Struk, was a dashing young man with a certain Cos sack swagger that would make him popular at Wellesley and Radcliffe mixers. Dan had two great loves: Ukraine and Ukrai nian literature. We became best of friends and collaborated in translating Ukrainian fiction and poetry—Dan doing a rough draft of the translation and me polishing up the English.
Dan died too soon, more than 20 years ago, of a heart attack while he was attending an aca demic conference. Derick and I remain in touch, and he prom ises to visit us on our farm in upstate New York in June. We’ll talk a lot about Danylo. In old age, you see the patterns of repetition—with variations. These are history’s morphic resonances, as the bi ologist Rupert Sheldrake calls them: “In its most general for mulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.”
So it is in Russia now. Putin— the tiger hunter, the bare-chest ed centaur, the man at the end of the long, silly table—recapit ulates (with variations) Joseph Stalin—Koba the Dread. Or, across centuries, he conjures Peter the Great—Russia’s En lightenment modernizer, a Dr. Jekyll with more than a touch of Mr. Hyde. Or Ivan the Ter rible. Or even, deep in the nos talgia of the id, Genghis Khan, who united the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia in the twelfth century by summoning the ancient ferocities with which Putin seeks, in the twenty-first century, to reunite tribes of the old Soviet empire—his Planet Krypton.
Dan and his mother were dis placed persons. They wound up among the Ukrainians of the di aspora in northern New Jersey, around Metuchen, where Dan grew up. He earned a scholar ship to Rutgers Prep and then another to Harvard. After we graduated, many of us trooped down to New Jersey, to the large Ukrainian immigrant community there, for Dan’s marriage to Roma, a Ukrainian beauty from Al berta, Canada. The wedding, a tremendous affair with heroic drinking and dancing, went on for four days. Alas, the marriage did not last. My other roommate, Derick, was in his teens when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956. His family escaped by night, often on foot, until they reached Austria. “We walked across the border around 1 am, not far from the bridge at An dau,” Derick remembered. “We were housed in a monastery in Styria, from where we got to Salzburg and eventually on a U.S. aircraft out of Munich. We arrived in the U.S. in a snow storm around 10 pm on Decem ber 24, 1956. It is still the best Christmas present I ever had.”
Among the few things they brought out of Hungary was his father’s valuable stamp collec tion, which helped support the family after they settled in New York. Derick found his way to a New York private school, and then to Harvard. He attended Harvard Medical School and be came a successful internist and hospitalDanyloadministrator.wouldbecome a dis tinguished professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Toronto. The great project of his life, causa pi etatis, was Ukraine. He founded and edited the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, a vastly ambitious proj ect. After 30 years of labor, said one description, it became the “most comprehensive work in English on Ukraine: its history, people, geography, economy, and cultural heritage, both in Ukraine and in the diaspora.”
WWW.MANHATTAN INSTITUTE.ORG/MILLS-CLOUD-REVOLUTION BY EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF HOMELESSNESS WITH POLICY AREAS SUCH AS EDUCATION , URBAN DEVELOPMENT , CRIMINAL-JUSTICE REFORM , AND MENTAL HEALTH , STEPHEN EIDE PROVIDES A COMPREHENSIVE ACCOUNT OF THE CHALLENGE. COMING MAY 17 AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD
WWW.MANHATTAN-INSTITUTE.ORG/RILEY-BLACK-BOOM “[Jason Riley] writes with a combination of grace and force that may change some minds while opening many more.” Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason Riley makes a data-driven case that the economic fortunes of blackAmericans improved under the policies of Donald Trump.Riley argues that we should continue these policies because they work, notwithstanding the divisive figure who started them.
Michael Medved , nationally syndicated radio host and author of God’s Hand on America
