According to Ross Douthat, our formerly thriving metropolitan areas are actually dystopias characterized by a disappearing middle class, a wealthy, but insulated professional class, and a huge number of essential, but invisible service workers on whom the system is completely reliant. The package is held together by the police, not bonds of community between the winners and the losers. The events of the last few months have shown us how vulnerable and unjust the system is. Is he right?
There is a grain of truth to this. Today’s successful metropolitan areas are dependent on information-based industries, finance, entertainment, and tourism. Manufacturing has moved to the suburbs in order to avoid soaring real estate values, which means fewer middle class jobs. American cities, which used to be a counterpoint to European cities, now resemble them; the poor live in outlying areas with poor transportation links, not in slums close to the city center. These cities are bright, shiny things, but they are not utopias.
That said, these changes are the result of a worldwide economic shift to value based on knowledge. They were caused by unseen forces, not the considered decisions of an uncaring professional class. They don’t conform to the GOP view of a class war between salt of the earth high school graduates with lousy jobs and a thriving, voracious, insular intellectual elite. They weren’t willed into existence by anyone in particular. They happened outside the control of any individual or group, like most things.
Can this state of affairs be reversed? It would probably take a very lengthy pandemic or an economic crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen yet to reverse the polarity between rising cities and declining rural areas. And what is Douthat’s solution to the problem? To convert the elite to a conservative brand of Catholicism, set up Benedict as a theocrat, and ban abortion and pornography? Does anyone seriously believe that the success of land use planning ultimately depends on morality, not economics?