Washington DC

$1.8 Trillion for Nothing

Randal OToole — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Congress sporadically handed out transit capital funds in the 1970s and 1980s, but in 1991 it made it systematic with creation of the transit capital investment grants program, also known as New Starts. Since then, federal, state, and local taxpayers have spent more than half a trillion dollars on transit capital improvements. Transit agencies have also spent nearly $1.2 trillion on transit operations, only $355 billion of which was covered by passenger fares.

These numbers are from the National Transit Database Historic Time Series, the 2024 edition of which the Federal Transit Administration released last week along with the 2024 annual transit database that was featured here yesterday. While the above figures are in nominal dollars, after adjusting for inflation to 2024 dollars using GDP deflators, taxpayers have spent more than $1.8 trillion subsidizing transit since 1991.

What have we gotten for this excessively generous subsidy? In 1991, the average urban resident rode transit more than 40 times a year. Transit ridership grew between 1991 and 2014, but so did urban populations, so trips per resident increased to just 42. Ridership fell after 2014 and by 2019 the average urban resident took only 36 transit trips per year. As of 2024, it was around 27 trips per year.

This does not seem like a great return on a $1.8 trillion investment.

Transit has not relieved congestion. It hasn’t reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It hasn’t helped many low-income people, the vast majority of whom have their own cars and don’t use transit. All this $1.8 trillion has done is enrich a few special interest groups.

The historic time series consists of five different spreadsheets. The first two, tables TS1.1 and TS1.2, focus on how much transit funding comes federal, state, or local sources. More interesting is table TS2.1, which lists operating expenses, fares, route miles, revenue miles, revenue hours, riders, and passenger-miles, all broken down by both transit agencies and modes for each agency. Table TS2.2 is the same but broken down only by transit agencies, not by modes. Table TS3.1 has capital expenses broken down by agency and mode while table TS3.2 inventories assets by agency and mode. I use mainly 2.1 and 3.1.

Previous issues have included most data back to 1991, though capital costs began in 1992 and fares in 2002. For some reason, this year the FTA began many of the time series in 2015, so I turned to the 2023 time series to get earlier years.

The American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transit Fact Book includes capital costs and fares for the years that are missing from the historical time series. Though APTA’s data aren’t broken down by mode, they add to the continuous series of national data.

Transit advocates talk endlessly about the advantages of transit over driving. Americans are paying for it but they aren’t using it.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: chart courtesy The Antiplanner.

DC and LA Failures Play Into Trump's Hands

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Donald Trump’s reviled takeover of the DC police and his earlier deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles serve as a direct challenge to the power of America’s big cities. To the Democrats who run these cities, this all seems part of an authoritarian plot. But it also may be one of Trump’s traps.

Although clearly violating America’s long-standing federalist principles, Trump’s incursions are being justified by the incompetence of most blue-city leaders. There is evident disorder in major cities, particularly those controlled by the Democrats’ progressive wing: quasi-socialist mayors in Chicago and Los Angeles may soon be joined by comrades elsewhere in the country. The explicitly socialist Zohran Mamdani is the Democratic candidate for New York mayor, while Omar Fateh and Katie Wilson could also win in Minneapolis and Seattle. All three elections take place on 4 November.

Big-city mayors see Trump’s antics as a get-out-of-jail-free card for their failures. But this won’t work. Americans know that these cities have severe problems which are driving people out. The demographer Wendell Cox notes that Americans are increasingly moving to suburban areas, despite consistent attempts from planners to encourage urbanisation. Even with a surge of illegal immigration, Chicago’s population has shrunk to its lowest level since 1920. Meanwhile, the California Department of Finance predicts a reduction of more than a million people in LA County by 2060.

Clearly, we are a long way from dense urbanity dominating the future, as the media and academics have repeatedly predicted. “Mayors should rule the world,” suggested political theorist Benjamin Barber in 2013. No one in their right mind would suggest this now. However, cities could make a decent comeback — if governed correctly.

Attempts to distract from DC’s horrendous public safety record reveal how clueless most progressives can be. To deflect Trump, Democrats need to show an ability to address urban problems. There are some promising new approaches in places such as Houston and San Francisco, where voters have embraced moderate, pro-business candidates. With their ties to sectors including energy or tech, these politicians could prove the ideal model for Democrats as they look to return to power.

Sadly, most of America’s big cities seem determined to prove Trump correct. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson epitomises progressive failure, having managed to turn “the city that works” into a dystopian failure with high crime rates, a severe budget deficit, exiting companies, and failing schools. Johnson’s ally, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, wants to be president, but he will have to carry Chicago’s decline with him.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Virginia Guard Public Affairs via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Fascism Has Not Yet Come to America

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:43:35 -0400

Endless jeremiads from the mainstream media, academia and a large chunk of the political class warn that Americans are on the precipice of a fascist hell, presided over by our own orange-haired Il Duce. Some prominent progressive scholars, like Yale’s Timothy Snyder, a historian of fascism, claim to have read the Weimar-like tea leaves and have now relocated to Canada.

Trump’s vengeful actions against his well-entrenched enemies certainly invite parallels to the kind of behaviour exhibited by fascist leaders, as well as their Communist analogues like Stalin or Mao Zedong. But we are far from a Fourth Reich. Somewhere between 3.3million and 5.6million protesters attended the anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ protests last month and were met with no pushback from the authorities. This clearly would not happen in a truly fascist country. Nor would Trump’s political enemies still control most of the media, academia and the vast non-profit world. In Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, they would have been supplanted, jailed or even executed.

Critically, MAGA is hardly the Nazi Party or Mussolini’s Fascists or, for that matter, the Bolsheviks. It represents, rather, an ad hoc and fundamentally unstable alliance. It spans career GOP political hacks, rogue billionaire executives, rabid Evangelicals, radical populists and media screamers – including some who espouse racist themes, as well as the equally awful Tucker Carlson.

As the fallout over the so-called Epstein files suggests, MAGA’s prime chatterers are less focussed on coherent policy than on conspiratorial hysteria. It is hardly a mass movement across a broad spectrum of the population, but essentially a rebellion of the middle orders and mostly older voters – 60 per cent of the Trump base was aged over 50 in 2024. Trump himself is a blimpish 79-year-old who seems ready for serious decline, while Mussolini and Hitler were in their late 30s and early 40s respectively when they took power.

Furthermore, both Hitler and Mussolini expressed a horrific, but coherent worldview with broad appeal. Italian fascism ‘drew in all class levels, from workers to the aristocracy’, notes art historian Martina Caruso, who is writing a book about her grandfather, Pietro Caruso, who was executed for crimes committed as Rome’s chief of police under Mussolini.

Indeed, Mussolini’s rise during the 1920s was widely hailed even in democratic countries. It was fuelled by media skills acquired as editor of a prominent daily, and by a vision that many people found alluring and inspiring. ‘It stirred people with a contemporary culture including the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage (and by extension of violence), the sense of belonging to a community’, Caruso suggests. ‘That’s how he gained hegemony – through symbols, mass rituals, the media and modernist architecture.’ If that sounds far removed from the MAGA movement, then that’s because it was. Architects, artists and college students are not exactly flocking en masse to Donald Trump, much less donning uniforms.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Trumpism and fascism is that Trump stands, first and foremost, for Trump. He has no true ideological lodestone, which makes the fevered attempts to discern one just silly. His appeal lies not in the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1930s but in seemingly commonsense alternatives to the truly insane policies of the increasingly left-leaning Democrats – on issues from the border and transgender ‘rights’ to the protection of the criminal class. Economically, MAGA is more reactionary than visionary, pointing, as it does, towards a return to the torpid 1950s.

Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.

Photo: Official White House Photo by Molly Riley via Flickr, Public Domain, Government Work.

The Midwest Climate Critique is Bogus

Pete Saunders — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Every so often I see that someone makes the claim that people are leaving the Midwest because the weather sucks. That claim is bogus.

X poster Hunter (@StatisticUrban) made this claim in a tweet sent Monday:

“Nobody wants to hear this but one of the reasons the midwest is struggling is that the weather just sucks.

It's freezing cold, dark, and snowy in the winter, and hot and humid in the summer. The truly "nice" parts of the year are limited to a few weeks in the spring/fall.”

One parenthetic note, here: the OP’s location on X is given as the United Kingdom. Assuming they are from London, perhaps the best climate in an otherwise climate-challenged nation, I find it odd that someone from a place so cloudy, misty and perpetually cool would make this point. Nonetheless, London’s weather has not kept it from becoming one of the world’s premier global cities.

Let me say I don’t completely disagree with this person. The Midwest’s weather is not, uh, optimal. There are better places climate-wise. And that’s fine. However, it’s not the principal reason people leave the Midwest.

I’ve always maintained that there’s little difference in climate between Midwestern and Northeastern cities. I looked at climate data listed on the Wikipedia page of several cities, and here’s what I found. A quick one-on-one comparison between cities at similar latitudes makes the point. Here in this data comparison of the climates of Boston and Chicago, they’re essentially the same:

The climates of New York City and Indianapolis? The same:

Guess what? Comparing Washington, DC and St. Louis, they’re the same:

In every comparison, there’s virtually no difference in annual precipitation, annual snowfall, record high and record low temperatures, average annual relative humidity, or the amount of annual sunlight and cloudiness. Midwestern cities have slightly higher maximum temperatures and slightly lower minimum temperatures, due to their inland locations. Otherwise, at similar latitudes, the cities are quite comparable.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo source: Snow on Boston Common Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

The Changing Politics of Oligarchy

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 09 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In American politics, the main beneficiaries of “dark money” have in recent years tended to be Democrats. Google representatives were reported to have visited the White House at least 427 times during Barack Obama’s two terms. And in 2024, big spenders like Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Alex Soros, James Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, and various donors from Wall Street helped Kamala Harris raise over US$1.5 billion for her campaign, the highest figure in history. This may be starting to change, as a number of powerful Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have shifted their money to the populist Republican Party.

However, political shifts like these are less important than the unprecedented degree of control that a handful of people and institutions enjoy over our communications, finances, consumer choices, and culture. In recent decades, the influence of billionaires on both of America’s two main political parties has grown. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which essentially ended any meaningful control over campaign spending, only accelerated this trend. In 2024, election spending, in real dollars, is estimated to have been more than twice what it was two decades ago.

Political shifts...are less important than the unprecedented degree of control that a handful of people and institutions enjoy over our communications, finances, consumer choices, and culture.

According to Pew Research, eighty percent of Americans now believe that wealthy donors have too much power, and they are right. Google and Apple account for nearly ninety percent of all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft, Android (Google), and iOS (Apple) account for roughly the same share of all operating-system software. Three tech firms now account for two-thirds of all online advertising revenue, which in turn accounts for the vast majority of all ad sales. To find historic parallels for this kind of dominance, you have to go back to the Gilded Age, an era of money men and monopolists that lasted from about 1870 until the early 1900s.

The rise of very wealthy liberal tech entrepreneurs caused many commentators on the Right to worry that American politics would soon be dominated by an alliance of the Democratic Party and major tech firms such Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. That convergence of interests, they feared, would impose a radical progressive agenda on much of America and close down dissent across the internet and social media. Even the ex-wives, siblings, and children of tech oligarchs were now accruing enough money to become reliable funders of the Left’s agenda.

Read the rest of this piece at: Quillette.

Photo: screenshot of front row at 2025 Trump inauguration, via YouTube.

France and America's Cold War

Gary Girod — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

French president Emmanuel Macron had an unusually good relationship with US president Donald Trump during the latter’s first term. There are numerous photos of them smiling and laughing together as the businessmen-turned-presidents coordinate global policy. During a visit to Paris, Mr. Trump watched a Bastille Day military parade and later decided he wanted a similar event at home.

The ‘bromance’ did not last. Mr. Trump increasingly acted without, and even against, European interests in his economic and foreign policy dealings. In late 2019 the US president supported the Turkish military’s operations against the Kurds in Syria; a move which frustrated other NATO members as the Kurds were a crucial ally in the fight against ISIS. Mr. Trump’s decision led Mr. Macron to say that NATO was suffering “brain death.” While the French president did not mention the United States, everyone knew what he meant, given the US’ traditional role as leader of the military alliance. The next time the two met in London Trump quipped that he would give ISIS fighters to European countries to deal with, prompting Macron to respond, “Let’s be serious,” and urge the US not to abandon the fight in Syria.

In hindsight the two look practically chummy compared to their current relationship. The returned president has entered the White House with fire and fury, launching (and quickly abandoning) trade wars against multiple countries and even threatening to annex some of America’s allies.

Even before Mr. Trump returned to power Mr. Macron had originally called for a pan-European army in September 2017, to muted response. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 eleven countries joined the French-led European Intervention Initiative, a military organization meant to coordinate European forces. On 28 February 2025 the French president used some of his strongest language yet, saying that Europeans cannot accept a “happy vassalage” from Washington. This statement was in reference to the longstanding Cold War order wherein Washington dictated world policy and Europeans nodded along as the US defended Western Europe from the USSR. Furthermore, America’s high military spending allowed Europeans to allocate their money to infrastructure and generous welfare states, ensuring that they enjoyed the highest living standards in the world.

Mr. Trump’s isolationist policies, combined with Russian threats to European security, have finally woken sleeping Europeans to the reality of their situation. A poll taken in March found that three-quarters of Germans do not believe the United States is a trustworthy partner (an all-time low). A similar poll found that 73% of French citizens no longer consider the United States an ally. There is widespread sentiment across Europe that America is at best an untrustworthy partner, possibly a rival, and potentially an enemy.

How abysmal are relations between America and Europe? One shocking (and under-reported) incident tells a dramatic story. In a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on 7 January, Mr. Trump refused to rule out using military forces to annex Greenland. In response, the French government quietly began negotiations with Denmark, asking if the European country would allow French troops to station themselves on the island to deter an American invasion. The Danish government ultimately rejected the idea. However, the fact that French officials seriously believe the United States may invade their allies and fellow NATO members demonstrates that Europeans have lost all faith in the US as a partner.

After spending roughly eighty years under the American aegis Europeans may finally have the will to defend themselves from foreign threats. Defense spending across European Union member states remained level between 2005-2014 at around €150 billion. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea that spending more than doubled to €326 billion and is expected to increase another €100 billion by 2027. This alone is not enough in the face of a nuclear threat. Russia currently possesses an estimated 5,889 nuclear weapons, something which President Vladimir Putin has regularly reminded his adversaries.

This is where France takes center-stage, as Mr. Macron jockeys to replace the United States with France as the shield of Europe. In a speech given on 5 March the French president declared that “France has maintained a nuclear deterrence since 1964,” and “that deterrence needs to apply to all our European allies.”

Since taking office Mr. Macron has adopted a similar stance to foreign policy as Charles de Gaulle, the legendary leader of Free France during World War 2 and president of the republic from 1959-1969. De Gaulle famously urged the French nation to pursue its own independent foreign policy. He famously vetoed Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community because he believed the island nation was too dependent on the US. The old general did not oppose the United States but firmly believed that France could not be subject to another country’s power. Under de Gaulle France developed an independent strike force for its nuclear weapons, something which US President John F. Kennedy openly mocked (when France lent the Mona Lisa to the United States, Mr. Kennedy quipped that the US would address its woeful gap in culture by developing an ‘independent artistic force’).

De Gaulle’s foresight seems more prescient than ever. With the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, France has the ability to rattle any other power and has clearly done so, given Putin’s icy response to Macron’s proposal to create a nuclear shield for Europe. What separates France from Britain, the other non-Russian European country with nuclear weapons, is that France has a fully-independent military whose Rafale jets, Triomphant-Class submarines, missiles and detection technology are all manufactured within the country.

While Britain builds its own nuclear warheads, the Trident II D5 missile bodies are leased from the US and maintained at Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia. Britain’s dependence on US defense manufacturing is currently a major cause for concern in London given how much of its military capacity relies on a currently unreliable partner.

Given its military strength, France is a natural choice for leader of Europe as Russia threatens the east and the US retreats from the world. While many French voters will tell you Mr. Macron is no de Gaulle, the president is currently attempting to draw upon Gaullism to create a new order. The former general dogmatically asserted that a united Europe was the only defense against dominance by the United States and the Soviet Union. His calls to arm and oppose greater cooperation with the US were often met with derision from a younger generation tired of the old man stuck in a World War 2 mindset. Now his cryptic words appear prophetic: “No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.”

In an increasingly divided world, France aims to become the military leader of a strong Europe. Though Europeans themselves might wish to live under ‘happy vassalage,’ the threats posed by the United States under president Trump and Russia under President Putin are forcing a continent to remake itself. It is Mr. Macron’s aim to make France the preeminent leader of this emerging Europe.

Dr. Gary Girod is an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma Panhandle State University. He is the author of Domestic Surveillance and Social Control in Britain and France during World War I (Routledge: 2024) and host of The French History Podcast, a large-scale digital and public history project with over 200,000 followers on social media.

Photo: White House Archive via Flickr in Public Domain.

Blue States Could Be Biggest Beneficiaries of Trump’s Policies

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 20:28:39 -0400

Donald Trump is unlikely to win a popularity contest or an election in America’s deepest blue states. But, ironically, his administration could prove a long term boon to these places, where self-imposed policies are turning them into the caboose of American progress.

To be sure, politicians in declining states like New York, California and Illinois will lament anything Trump does, including many needlessly stupid and cruel acts. But on many levels the Trump regime offers the blue states a way out of their own destructive approach which has chased away businesses and individuals at a staggering rate. No wonder, then, that even some blue state Democrats are questioning their own party’s #Resistance tactics.

Even DOGE and Trump’s assault on the feds is less a problem for blue states than many red ones. Local and state governments in New York, California, Massachusetts and Colorado are far less dependent on transfers from Washington than deep red Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Alaska. The pain may be greater in the Appalachian hollows than in the urban centres.

Perhaps the biggest Trump influence, though, will be on issues like climate change — a major factor in blue state decline. Wherever Net Zero has been adopted, it has raised energy, housing and building costs. We already see some backtracking in California, where nuclear and natural gas plants are being kept past their supposed termination. At the same time, Trump’s removal of EPA regulations may also help relieve cost pressures too.

There are some potential opportunities for Massachusetts, New York and particularly California in the space and high-tech defence sector, where the Trump administration has encouraged investment. California retains the strongest array of space, aerospace, missile, and drone companies, which should thrive under Trump. Meanwhile, the “defence bros” may be powerful in Texas, but leading edge firms, such as Anduril in Orange County and Palantir in blueish Colorado, also could be big beneficiaries of a shift to tech-based warfare.

Another key Trump break could come in housing. Trump officials are looking at allowing leases for housing on federal lands. The federal government is the nation’s biggest landowner, holding a third of all property — an area six times that of California. In Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and other metro areas, federal lands brush up against the suburban periphery. In California, the federal government owns roughly half of all state land, including properties on flat land near cities. Considering that urbanisation covers only 5.3% of the state’s land, Newsom could make inroads here — with federal assistance.

Read the rest of this piece: UnHerd.

Photo: California Governor's office, Public Domain.

America First Can't Be America Alone

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Like others, Canadians now know there’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s neither polite nor gentle. The question is how to co-exist with a raging bully whose economy absorbs nearly three-quarters of Canada’s exports and one trillion in two-way trade.

What his fans call Donald Trump’s drive for “muscular pax Americana” is not exactly warming hearts around the world. In December, Britain sent an ambassador with a well-expressed disdain for the new president to Washington. The Guardian predictably calls for Europeans and Brits to fight to preserve the continent’s disastrous welfare and climate regime. Trump’s alienated not just Canada’s New Democrats, but also Conservatives who share something of a common agenda with Trumpism.

Ironically, this is occurring when many citizens in Europe are already voting for anti-migrant, nationalism and culturally conservative candidates, producing leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni who already has an amicable relationship with Trump. Canadians and other foreigners need to understand that, for Trump, everything is about making a deal, starting with outrageous demands and threats.

In the end, Trump will make the best deal he can strike, and, under the Conservatives at least, there’s hope that some common ground can be struck. Ignore the imbecilic statements about taking over Canada, Greenland or the Panama Canal, and look to strike a deal that makes sense.

But let’s be honest here: you can’t blame Trump for the current chaotic state of the world. The world “rules-based” system was falling apart — as seen in the Red Sea, Palestine, Ukraine, and throughout Africa — when the supposed “adults in the room” were in charge.

What Trump lacks, at least so far, is a strategic sense of how to build an alliance against the China-Russia-Iran-Venezuela-North Korea axis. Recently, Doug Ford proposed such an “Am-Can” alliance that would leverage the power of our huge continent’s huge resource base.

The cultural fit is not perfect, but our binational ties make us, as the Chinese would say, as close as teeth and lips. We share a huge border, similar resource bases — much of our cross-border trade consists of oil, lumber as well as some cars — and for the most part, a common language as Canada does with Britain and our fellow commonwealth countries, Australia, and New Zealand.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Photo: C.P. Swire, under CC 2.0 License.

The Democrats Need to Get Over Their Delusions

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 20:28:58 -0500

Since the election conservatives have assumed that the results represent a “mandate” for their political agenda, as well as a confirmation of their version of national identity. Yet in reality, the election was actually quite close, as Trump’s win margin in the popular vote is the smallest since Jimmy Carter’s in 1976.

This is remarkable given the inadequacy of the Democratic candidates, as well as the well-deserved disdain many Americans feel toward the Biden Administration. Indeed, the case can be made that the November vote was less an endorsement of Trump, who remained widely disliked all the way to the election, than a rejection of the current cocktail of progressive policies. These include unpalatable positions from draconian climate policies to the embrace of transgender ideology, open borders, race quotas, and censorship. As Nate Silver suggests, voters were “giving the middle figure” to the “expert class” of Harvard and Yale credentialed types whose genius brought the country rising crime, inflation, and a generally unstable planet.

Yet conservatives are making a mistake in supposing that the Democrats will be down for the long-term. Gallup notes that Kamala Harris was detested for many positions, but was still favored on such things as “preserving the American dream for young people” and “strengthening the middle class.” Similarly, most Americans favor increasing taxes on the wealthy, a position anathema to most Republicans but usually embraced by Democrats.

On top of this, Democrats can count on Trump finding ways to alienate voters with his myriad personal faults, which will make it unlikely there’s a repeat of Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Trump also will inherit Biden’s awful legacy, including a bloated budget deficit, a weakened military, inflation that hits hardest among the least affluent, and an economy that has failed to lift up the bulk of the working and middle class. Overall, one in four Americans fear losing their job over the next year, and roughly half now think the vaunted “American Dream” of homeownership has become unattainable, particularly in coastal cities.

The traditional Democratic focus on class mobility would be far more effective than their current approach, which is largely shaped by their own ideological and sociological bubbles rather than the concerns of regular Americans. As long-time Democratic operative Van Jones has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

Democrats are already sharpening knives to keep anyone from thinning out the bloated bureaucracy, which, as Rep. Ro Khanna suggests, also places them out of touch with the majority of voters.

As they kowtow to progressive non-profits and public employee unions, Democrats reflect the values of the progressive culture dominant in classrooms, the media, Hollywood, and indeed the government bureaucracy itself. Doing this has led the Democrats to lose even the most basic sense of what is happening on Main Street.

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Photo: Senate Democrats via X.

Midwestern Provincialism Is A Thing

Pete Saunders — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:28:58 -0500

Yesterday, I conducted a poll on X to ask people what would have to change in large Midwestern metros for non-Midwesterners to consider moving here. The poll was revealing.

I introduced three options to vote for – a strong economic climate; better weather, and lower crime – and a fourth catch-all option for other positions. I went into this thinking the “better economy” option would win, and it did. Complaints about the Midwest’s cold and snow frequently show up as reasons to avoid the Midwest, and that view finished in a strong second. Based on the negative press coverage that cities like Chicago receive on violent crime, I thought “much lower crime” would rank highly, but it did not.

The “all/other” option, however, had a surprise, to me. It largely had two types of responses. One was a significant number of people who said better public transit, less auto dependency and more walkable neighborhoods would make them consider Midwestern living. Nice, but that comes across to me as virtue signaling; that can be said for every metro except the five in America that have actual transit systems and/or walkable neighborhoods. But the other was the Midwest’s lack of openness – its unwillingness to welcome newcomers, or adapt its culture to bring in outsiders.

It’s a bigger problem than many Midwesterners would admit. Yet it’s also a perception problem that outsiders need to get over.

Without a doubt, the region has earned this reputation. It usually comes up quickly in first conversations with people – “where’d you grow up? What high school did you go to?” Many Midwesterners try to make an immediate regional connection with someone, in a way that’s off-putting to someone who isn’t originally from here.

As the region that’s exported more people to other parts of the nation than any other, Midwestern provincialism has likely deepened over the last half century or so. Why? I think it’s become a marker for residents, a source of pride – a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

But it’s not as if other regions in America are actually less insular. They’ve actually seen more influx of outsiders and had greater diversity and heterogeneity thrust on them.

Let’s start with the East Coast, specifically the Northeast. One could argue that Boston and New York City specifically, and New England and the mid-Atlantic more broadly, both developed very early on with visions of superiority related to education (Boston and Ivy League locales) and business (New York, Washington, DC, to a lesser extent Philadelphia). The East Coast became America’s proving grounds for any American who was ambitious. They built on that legacy and it continues to feed their growth – and feelings of superiority – today.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.