The men's group I attend at St. Paul's United Methodist Church recently discussed a perhaps improbable article from The Christian Century on heavy metal music (Holloway 2024). Writer Jack Holloway discovered the music of Black Sabbath while studying apocalyptic literature at seminary. Black Sabbath, he wrote, "prophesied an end to war, an end to the reign of the politicians and generals who make war. Was it possible this evil band was reading the Bible more faithfully than the preachers I'd heard growing up?"
Geezer Butler, bass player and composer of "War Pigs"
That led us to a group project in which each of us would present a song we consider meaningful. There were various other instructions, too, which I ignored, and it would seem the others did, too. The eventual collection included songs by Carrie Newcomer, Susan Werner, the Beatles, the Eagles, and James Taylor (two), as well as Leonard Bernstein, John Williams, and Beethoven--understandable for a group of men born between 1945 and 1960 (except for one swing shift worker born in 1992, who brought us "Reach for the Sky" by Social Distortion). We played and discussed 11 songs in about an hour, which unfortunately didn't leave much time for discussion.
My contribution was "The Christians and the Pagans" by Dar Williams, from her 1996 sophomore album, Mortal City. (The title song from that album made this urbanist playlist I made in 2013.) In a light-hearted way, the song tells the story of two young women (in a romantic relationship, Williams added at a concert I attended a few years later) who celebrate the solstice in some natural locale, then pop over to one of their uncles' for Christmas. The resulting cultural clash is restrained due to politeness, but keeps popping out in amusing ways. Always, however, family and common humanity outweigh seemingly incomprehensible religious differences.
Jane and I were having solstice, now we need a place to stay...
Listening to the song yet again, but this time in the company of a dozen first-time hearers, I was struck by two things. First, there clearly is more to the story, which Williams leaves to the listeners' imaginations. Did the young women just happen to pick a spot near the uncle's house, or was it part of a plan? Why hadn't the uncle spoken to his brother in a year? How if at all was little Timmy changed by his encounter with his strange but cool cousin? Secondly, as I'm learning about phrasing from singing in the chancel choir, I was struck how Williams's breathing creates phrases of varied lengths (sometimes four measures, sometimes one or even part of one) to convey different emotional states.
Christmas is like solstice, and we miss you...
My other impressions of the song are 28 years old; thanks to local advocacy of Williams's early work by the Legion Arts organization as well as Iowa Public Radio, I was familiar with the songs on Mortal City almost as soon as it was released. 1996 was a good time for me to receive this message. For probably the first 25 years of my life, I had swum rather unreflectively in a mainline Protestant sea. It was just the world in which I lived. Only in my peripatetic 20s did I encounter devout members of other faiths, not to mention people who did Christianity very differently than I did. I occasionally found myself in faith communities whose Christianity tended to insist on itself (an allusion to I Corinthians 13:4).
Sending hope for peace on Earth to all their gods and goddesses...
By 1996, I had had enough conversations, read enough books, and found a church that helped to clarify my desire to worship and live inclusively rather than exclusively. I'm still a Christian, but I have come to see other religions as complementary rather than opposing ways of understanding God. I have come to understand a lot of non-theistic worlds as rooted in God, though not the too-narrow definition of God we are taught in the West. I think this is a good basis for community. Urbanism requires seeing commonality across differences, rather than rushing to draw lines of distinction.
Where does magic come from? I think magic's in the learning...
Dar Williams continues to record and perform around the country. In 2017 she published What I Found in a Thousand Towns (Basic Books, 2017), an urbanist's tour of places where she's performed that have succeeded in building community. It reads like one of her songs: not a word out of place, good stories about people trying their hardest, and inspiring without being saccharine. Her concept of "positive proximity" (introduced on p. xi!) derives from Jane Jacobs on the importance of causal encounters; she shows how places that enable those encounters allow for connections that lead to community building (or rebuilding). But then people in those places have to do the connecting.
Translation is the magic ingredient that makes successful towns and cities happen. Translation is how we spell ourselves out to each other and the world. A willingness to share our skills, our stories, and ourselves with each other marks the difference between towns that feel like actual places and those with people who jump in and out of cars all day... When people truly arrive at some sort of communication, putting themselves forward and welcoming others in, we have positive proximity circulating and growing. (2017: 177)
Building those places, taking advantage of the opportunities for community building they provide, begins with recognizing each other's common humanity, particularly as we look for the Divine at this darkest time of the year.
In the quarter-century of years beginning with "2," one of the biggest phenomena in America (and other areas of the West) has been the resurgence of central cities. After more than half a century of losing ground to suburbs, cities are "back" with lower crime, new commercial and residential development, and cultural cachet. This is in the main good news: cities are gardens of social diversity as well as economic innovation, and use natural resources more efficiently.
Challenges remain. The resurgence was particularly noticeable back in the years 2005-2015, but even then was felt unevenly across American cities. In super-successful cities like San Francisco, attracting new residents sent real estate prices skyrocketing, resulting in displacement and homelessness; other cities like St. Louis have struggled to catch the wave at all. Particularly since 2020, changing work patterns have left downtown areas with swaths of unused office space at the same time they're struggling to house people.
🚄
A panel of experts convened by the Urban Land Institute (Nyren 2024) commends public-private partnerships, specifically ventures aimed at transforming downtown land use from commercial to residential. Andy DeMoss of the Chicago firm Bradford Allen began with:
They need to focus on the core issue, which is addressing the work-from-home movement. Anything else is most likely not going to be impactful enough to move the needle. Also, a number of city departments are not fully back in the office yet themselves. They need to push their workforce to be downtown, at least three to four days a week, to set an example for the private sector.
Since cities themselves can't force workers back to the office, they can try to create 24 hour areas. They can work on attracting recreational visitors (natural spaces, retail, and entertainment, along with better parking and public transit), as well as getting more housing built in mixed use projects near transit. Chicago, Cincinnati, Miami, New York, and Fayetteville, Georgia, were touted as successful examples. Sheila Ross of HKR in Atlanta summarized:
We need to find ways to activate these spaces year-round, ensuring they remain safe and enjoyable even without events. We have to plan for every day--not just game day. Additionally, the lack of affordable and market-rate housing is a significant challenge, compounded by parking minimums that restrict diverse housing development. Downtowns need equitable access. We must consider how to transform wide, car-centric roads into more human-friendly spaces that can accommodate light rail, bike paths, and spillover activities from local businesses.
🚄
Cities need to work with private entities to build financial and political support for any development, because cities aren't really in control of their own finances. Although when private firms are doing most of the driving, the projects are likely to reflect private profit more than public interest, the alternative is reliance on the national government as well as the states, some of whom are actively hostile to urban areas. In the face of Donald Trump's return to the White House, a Brookings Institution panel speculated on his administration's impact on a variety of urban issues. Trump has famously promised to punish cities that oppose his agenda, and indeed a lot of his support seems to be based on inflicting pain. Can anything move forward in these times?
The most optimistic submissions argue that local leaders can find ways to connect what they need with Trump's priorities. Adie Tomer's section on construction argues that momentum on projects begun during the Biden administration, as well as bipartisan interest in new housing, creates opportunities for federal-local cooperation: Understanding what Trump administration officials want--and persuasively making the case for local projects--could be worth millions of dollars for many communities. It's wise to make calls to newly appointed officials, listen to agency-hosted webinars, and consume any other information that can help make submissions as attractive as possible.
He likes building, doesn't he? Possibly President Trump can be sweet-talked into supporting infrastructure projects, like this reconstructed intersection in Cedar Rapids
Other pieces of a similar bent talk about policies that can help working class and nonurban constituents, including Annelies Goger on work-based learning, Joseph W. Kane on infrastructure projects, Molly Kinder on workforce issues related to artificial intelligence, and Tracy Hadden Loh on strengthening opportunity zones and access to community capital. (I'm not seeing this sort of thing at all here in Iowa, though, where for years Republicans have appealed to working class and nonurban rage without addressing their economic issues.)
Other pieces from the Brookings survey argue either that Trump's ideology will need to bend to practical local imperatives--William H. Frey on immigration, Xavier de Souza Briggs on antidiscrimination and diversity, Manann Donoghoe on climate via industrial policy disaster relief and local innovation--or that momentum behind certain policy directions is sufficient to sustain those policies in spite of Trump's opposition. Hanna Love argues that while the U.S. Department of Justice is sure to lurch towards the punitive, States can enact their own legislative reforms and investigations into police accountability, and importantly, many of the preventative investments needed to improve public safety are under the purview of local governments. Similar hopes are expressed by Mark Muro on sustaining local technology development, and Joseph Parilla on CHIPS and Science Act funds.
Derecho, August 2020: The climate won't wait for the next election
The most pessimistic pieces involve the administration's ability to act, or to choose not to act, unilaterally, in ways that impact localities. These include Farah Khan on protecting marginalized communities, Robert Maxim on connecting underrepresented workers to the digital economy, Andre Perry on sustaining the growth of the still small proportion of black-owned employer businesses, and Martha Ross on deportation and "downstream effects." Maxim, for example, argues Growing the number of underrepresented workers in the digital economy will require new [congressional] investments in digital skills development and digital infrastructure, increased access to capital, and more robust place-based investments into underrepresented communities. And Congress remains the most essential actor for investing in tribal communities because of its so-called "plenary power" over Native nations.
🚄
It surely will be difficult for cities to find allies in their dealings with the administration, whether their approach is cooperative or defiant. Pete Saunders (2024) argues cities always struggle in the face of American anti-urban bias. Individualism has been baked into America since the Founding, he says, beginning with how the Confederation Congress chose to organize the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River won in the War for Independence (accessible to speculators, centered around farms). As a result, America struggles with doing things that work toward the common good, and has a firm belief that improving the lives of individuals is the best way to improve the common good. Therefore:
American cities seem almost incapable of capitalizing on their assets, of routinely and easily making the case for greater investment from the federal and state levels of government. We struggle to make public transit investments. We struggle with implementing good placemaking practices. We struggle with undoing bad urban policies, and instituting good ones.
🚄
If we can't agree to fund public transit or build enough housing, we're definitely not going to get to the cities Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber imagine in their book Cities Made Differently (MIT Press, 2024). The executive version presented on the blogs Wiki Observatory and Naked Capitalism offers four visions, the most appealing of which is the City as a Family, "a city without any strangers, where everything is shared, and everyone looks after each other. There are no shops, no money, and no danger at all" (Dubrovsky and Graeber 2024). The result would be the common good, with the catches that historical communes frequently devolved into dictatorship, and while America suffers from an excess of individualism, having too little autonomy would be bad as well. Two other cities--the City of Greed, and the City of Runners, whose endless competition seems closest to our contemporary experience--are dystopian, and offer tendencies to be avoided. The fourth, Underground City, is a challenge to human physiology, as many noted in the comments.
Source: Adananette
Prediction is fraught with unknowns, but it's safe to say the city of 2029 will probably look, feel and act a lot like the city of 2025. If in the interim policies are enacted to make the rich even richer, and to reduce the problem-solving capacity of government at all levels, as seems most likely, they will be felt most immediately at the margins of society, and will only be widely impactful over time. Still, the path we are on does not seem resilient, and missed opportunities are likely to be rued later.
Since moving to Iowa in 1989, I've made regular trips to Chicago for family, pleasure, and professional reasons. I've made exactly two of those trips by train, which requires a 75 mile drive south to Mount Pleasant. The first was in July 2014, with my then-17-year-old son Eli; that train was 2 .5 hours late getting in; we passed the time agreeably at a coffee shop on Mount Pleasant's town square (See my posts "Yonder Comes the Train?" and "California 2014 (With Postscript, Chicago with Eli)." But we were fully four hours late arriving in Chicago, and had little food and no Wi-Fi en route. The return trip to Iowa also experienced considerable delays. At the time, I noted quite a fair number of passengers were willing to put up with even this level of service, and that with some effort "There could be" a future for interstate train travel in America.
The train arrives, 2014
It took more than ten years, but I tried the train again last month when I went to Chicago for one of the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Visionary Voices panels on housing. The experience was altogether better, and I'm encouraged not to let another ten years go by before I try it. The train from California was an hour or so late, and the return trip was on time. Parking is still free at the Mount Pleasant station, though due to construction in the area, it was difficult to find--impossible, in fact, in the absence of signage, but in time I was able to get directions from the station agent.
Remote parking, two blocks from the Mount Pleasant Amtrak station
The train seemed near capacity in both directions, with a surprising proportion of passengers being Amish. There was plenty of room for my backpack and small suitcase--there was no baggage check in Iowa anyhow--and plenty of legroom, unlike any airplane I've recently experienced. On the train, I cheerfully avoided the constant clot of traffic around Chicago, and spent less on tickets than I would have for two nights of parking at my hotel north of downtown. However, there still is no Wi-Fi on the California Zephyr, and the snack car closed almost as soon as we boarded.
Some of my improved experience might be random coincidence, but the administration of President Joe Biden did supply some long-overdue upgrades through a $66 million appropriation won from Congress (Hughes 2024; see also Bragg 2024). That is being used to improve tracks, purchase new cars, and add at least one route. The Floridian goes from Chicago to Miami, following a route east through Cleveland and Washington, and then down the East Coast. This neglects the cities of Tennessee, but that state's government is working on service to Chattanooga and Nashville (Gang and Mazza 2024). Meanwhile, the states of New York and Pennsylvania are confident there soon will be service from New York City to Scranton (Ionescu 2024). Those states must be less rail-hostile than Iowa's government. Or Indiana's.
All this progress is contingent on not being stopped by the incoming Trump administration appointees, many of whom (like efficiency doge Elon Musk) have ties to the auto industry. A lot depends on how much Republicans in Congress and state legislatures value the presence of Amtrak in their states, which is really difficult to predict. More ideological conservatives find trains to be an unwarranted use of government power, though of course they have no objections to the government building and maintaining highways (Russell 2024).
Eric Godwyn of the Transit Costs Project, interviewed last summer on the Strong Towns podcast, recently published, with three co-authors, a set of recommendations on how to improve rail transportation in the U.S. (Godwyn, Levy, Ensari, and Chitty 2024). Godwyn advocates a federal government commitment to intercity high-speed rail, developing minimum technical standards and testing to enable cross-country integration, stronger connections to universities and industry for labor force training, better internal project management and assessment, and better and more expedited planning (pp. 17-39). High-speed rail is defined as at least 155 miles per hour, which would get you from Mount Pleasant to Chicago in an hour and a half.
Whether this is even imaginable depends on broader agreement that the need to "decarbonize intercity travel" (p. 41) is enough of a public good to put public money behind it. If policy makers can agree on that, then they can focus on an efficient and enjoyable experience that will entice passengers. My experience last month suggests there's been some progress in that vein, but more could be done.
The California Zephyr crosses the Mississippi River, 12 November 2024
They were there for the deals at the Marion Wal-Mart
Even frigid temperatures could not deter this devotee of #BlackFridayParking, Strong Towns' annual photographic survey of excess parking. Cultural devotion to ensuring drivers have an easy (and free or cheap) time storing the cars wherever they go has created a profligate use of land. Case in point: I went to a bar with some coworkers the day before Thanksgiving. It's a small building, 1800 square feet. Do you know how many parking spaces would fit in that building? Ten. That's all. So you can just imagine how many alternative uses we're foregoing with just one single megaparking lot.
Northwest section of the lot, 9 a.m.
This year's observance of #blackfridayparking took me to the Wal-Mart at the edge of Marion, or what used to be the edge of Marion, at the intersection of US151 and SR13. Built in 2005, it is the most newest of our metro's three Super Centers. There were a lot of people shopping there, and a lot of cars parked, and yet, as busy as it was, huge swaths of the lot went unoccupied. I'd guesstimate it might have been 55 percent full.
View from McDonald's
Northeast edge
Marion has grown quickly, more than doubling its population since 1990. More recently they have reconfigured traffic to enhance their Uptown area, and are engaged in writing a comprehensive plan for the next 25 years. For thirty years, though, their growth was an explosion of suburban development, much of it along Business Route 151, which runs from this intersection through the center of town into Cedar Rapids, where it becomes 1st Avenue East. So for about two miles, it seems like the edge of town, because the edge has moved ever-outward as the town has grown.
Hy-Vee Grocery Store, 3600 10th Avenue. Maybe 75 percent full at 9:30 a.m.
Average daily traffic counts along this stretch are 16700 across 151/13, 13000 above 50th St, 11700 between 50th and 44th, and 14400 between 44th and 35th; after a roundabout routes traffic onto 6th Avenue, 7th Avenue still carries 5600 approaching 26th Street.
Auto-Zone, 1055 Linden Drive. Last picture I took before my camera rebelled.
I walked along BR 151 to a coffee appointment in Uptown. It really gives you a sense of how human scale is lost in auto-centric development, in that I could walk five minutes and feel as though I was getting nowhere. It's difficult to convey in photographs, particularly since my phone rebelled against the cold at this point--it was about 15 degrees, and windy--and refused to come out of its shell until we were safely inside the coffee shop.
Best I could do: Google Earth screenshot looking east from 31st Street
As Marion undertakes its new comprehensive plan, they may or may not try to diversify this route. There certainly is a lot of parking along the way...
Screenshot from Marion 2045 page, showing 26th to 44th Streets
Screenshot from Marion 2045 page, showing area around Wal-Mart and 151/13 intersection
...which arguably is a bigger issue than whatever's going on at Wal-Mart.
Spending land that could be productive and interesting on parking lots seems irrational to me. But so does waiting ten cars deep at a drive through, and I saw that at both Starbucks and Dunkin today. So do all the people huddled under blankets in the long line outside Da Bin consignment store. There is clearly much I don't understand, which keeps your humble blogger extra-humble.
Linn County Trails' cheery Facebook post today serves a reminder of Cedar Rapids's ever-improving trails network. Many of these projects fix connections at a specific location, but by the end of next year there will be some dramatic changes apparent to even the most casual trail user (cf. Peffer 2024).
Arguably the most dramatic will be the completion of the CEMAR Trail between Cedar Rapids and Marion, filling the gap between Mt. Cavalry Cemetery and Route 100. (See the map that accompanies LCTA President Tom Peffer's message this month.) I don't know if it will make it faster to go between the two central business districts by bicycle than by car, as someone suggested when this was still a gleam in our eyes, but it will be a game-changer--in a good way, I hasten to add, for anyone who knows how much I hate that term under normal circumstances.
Currently the Cedar Rapids portion ends at 3rd Avenue and 33rd Street Drive SE, by the Mt. Calvary Cemetery:
33rd Street Drive approaching 3rd Avenue SE
It's hard to see between the house and the cemetery, but there is a strip of public land there where the trail will continue. Looks like construction has begun across Indian Creek!
View of trail-in-process from the cemetery
Graves near the creek afford view of the trail
On the Marion side, the trail ends just north of Highway 100, in the shadow of Menard's:
There is a spur just there that connects to the west end of Grand Avenue:
The Bowling Street Trail is one of the oldest in Cedar Rapids, and it was showing its age back in 2015 when Brandon Whyte took the MPO Ride down there. It's now improved and longer, running from 20th to 33rd Avenues SW, thereby connecting Czech Village to points south, including the Wilson Avenue Hy-Vee Food and Drug Store.
Bowling Street Trail pothole, 2015
2024: New year, new surface!
Several pedestrian crossing signals were added as well
The trail continues on the old macadam surface south to 50th Avenue, becoming an eight-foot sidewalk over U.S. 30 before it diminishes to six-feet approaching Kirkwood Community College.
Other trails updates for commuters:
The Cherokee Trail will get another 1.7 miles longer, extending east as far as 13th Street NW, so getting people about a mile or so from downtown on what could become a key east-west artery.
The Edgewood Trail will add 1.1 miles north from the Cedar River to Town Center Drive. It has the potential to be a key north-south artery, particularly once the new west side library opens.
The Cedar Valley Nature Trail will add a 1.7 mile loop from 7th Avenue SE (where the current trail goes onto the street) to the Lightline Bridge project south of Czech Village.
I don't see anything about connecting the Lindale Trail to the CVNT, though; is that still in the works? [LCTA responds: Hopefully construction will begin in 2025 but... the City is awaiting a response on a final appeal to the Railroad for [the preferred alignment along the railroad right of way between Center Point Road and Council Street]. Should the Railroad consent, the project can proceed. If not, the alternative alignment along Council Street and 51st Street... will need to be developed. As such, the timeline is currently indefinite.]
The LCTA newsletter also includes plans for a capital campaign for future trails, including building the Interurban Trail to Mt. Vernon.
Why This Matters
All this trail development is enough to make an urbanist giddy, so it's good for our mental balance that Pete Saunders's Substack today references a pandemic-era post by Alissa Walker, who found much of urbanism, even at the height of COVID, to be blithely indifferent to the social inequality that mars our cities (and our whole country, really):
If the coronavirus has made anything clear, it's that cities cannot be fixed if we do not insist on dismantling the racial, economic, and environmental inequities that have made the pandemic deadlier for low-income and nonwhite residents. Yet many prominent urbanists have simply tweaked the language from their January 2020 tweets and fed them back into the propaganda machine to crank out COVID-tagged content, perpetuating the delusion that all cities need are denser neighborhoods, more parks, and open streets to magically become "fairer." (Walker 2020, citing Wigglesworth 2020 for COVID data)
Maybe in 2020, we should replace Walker's reference to "pandemic" with "road deaths," "housing instability," "deaths of despair," or "trouble with the law," but the concern remains a valid one. An Urban Institute study found 52 percent of Americans living below the "true cost of economic security," with 12 percent living below 75 percent of that threshold (Acs, Dehry, Giannarelli, and Todd 2024). Will better bicycle infrastructure significantly assist with such widespread struggling? We simply don't know. A couple years someone around here--I can't remember if it was the City of Cedar Rapids or somebody else--surveyed trail users. It was a convenience sample, and it skewed heavily male and upper income. (It's difficult in Iowa to oversample whites, but it managed to do that, too.) So when it comes to making our cities more equitable, we are literally groping in the dark.
That having been said, and with the understanding that even the best trails aren't going to magically fix social injustice, I think a lot of this trail development will improve equity, simply because the trails are becoming as functional as they are fun. We are gradually building a network that facilitates safe, inexpensive commuting to work, school and shopping all over town. And that's definitely worth celebrating!
Chicago's 606 trail serves bicycle commuters and school children, as well as recreational walkers and joggers
In Cahokia Heights (formerly Centreville), Illinois, there is a crisis that illustrates the gaps in the silos that inform our local policy discussions. As discussed by the "Housing, Water and Flooding" panel at the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago this week, there is an ongoing problem there with houses flooding during and after any measurable rain, including overflowing sewers. It's a multidimensional catastrophe that defies neat assignment of responsibility:
As an ongoing situation, it's not a big storm that would call in the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency
it's exacerbated by climate change that brings more severe weather events, but it predates the current emergency
the Clean Water Act of 1972 is focused on water quality, not the quality of life of people nearb
addressing its impact on the community is complicated by our characteristic view of housing as an individual concern
the situation was exacerbated or at least complicated by the 1980 routing of I-255 through town
the low property values (FEMA could offer $20,000 per house) as well as the perilous finances of both town and sanitary district (neither of which can afford the $70 million cost of sewer repairs) are a legacy of decades of racial discrimination.
Flooded area in Centreville IL (Flickr photo by Anstr Davidson)
The panel included representatives of agencies focused on housing or climate change: Kennedy Moehrs Gardner is an attorney for Equity Legal Services in southern Illinois; Meleah Geertsma is a policy analyst-advocate for the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance; and Sheila Sutton, formerly with the Natural Resources Defense Council, is an attorney for Alliance for the Great Lakes. The panel was moderated by Cyatherine Alias for CNT, ably so in what she said was her first moderating experience.
As they discussed this case, and examples from Chicago, East St. Louis, Zanesville Ohio, and other places, it became clear that housing issues are inextricably connected to climate change, transportation planning, and even political dysfunction. All are "variations of the same (structural) problems" (Geertsma). The Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance, Geertsma's organization, published a report, entitled A City Fragmented, that found City Council member prerogatives in Chicago decreased land available for multifamily housing between 1970 and 2016; when only 20 percent of land is available for multifamily housing, it drives up rents and reinforces historic inequities that began with redlining. Affordable housing tends to be in areas that are environmentally vulnerable (cf. Keenan and Bautista 2019).
Climate change is already driving up the cost of homeowners insurance, which is an additional obstacle to affordability (Sutton). The South Side of Chicago has seen more house flooding since the reconstruction of the Dan Ryan Expressway in 2006. Housing issues themselves include both "historic destruction of black homeowner wealth" and housing supply and construction. Since disaster aid is based on property values, it tends to make white communities whole while leaving black communities worse off (Geertsma).
The key to addressing complex problems is complex conversations. Moehrs Gardner noted that "the law can only do so much," but that "getting everyone to the table could drive solutions and funding" for repairing affected neighborhoods. These conversations could be supported by the national government, which funded remedial sewer projects across the country in 1986 (Geertsma), but need to be locally-driven; as Pete Saunders points out, housing needs differ across cities and metros, and so certainly do environmental issues and racial histories.
Dr. William Barber is one of the premier prophetic voices in America today (Source: breachrepairers.org)
Having said my peace on this year's elections, I was anticipating a return to issues affecting our local communities. But a disturbing trend has emerged in the frustrated post-election expressions by Democrats and their liberal allies that I think needs addressing.
To start with, the 2024 election results were, despite all the weirdness of the campaign, rather "normal," in the sense that a typical electoral response to stressful times is to vote the other party in. It happened after World War II in a number of countries including the United States and Britain, and happened again this year after worldwide struggles with the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant economic dislocation. As in 1945-46, Britain and the United States changed legislative majorities, with the British going from right to left, and the Americans going from left to right. Go figure.
That said, many on the left criticize the Biden administration and the Harris campaign for ignoring the economic concerns of working people. There's a lot to be said for that argument, given that the decades-long trend towards greater concentration of wealth continues to gallop along. On the other hand, Biden proved adept as a crisis manager, and his deficiencies certainly don't explain why the answer was to turn the government over to a self-absorbed chaos agent with an actual policy record that promotes that greater concentration of wealth. Again, go figure. Maybe the explanations tentatively offered in my last post can help explain that.
Two commentators I greatly respect, Nicholas Kristof and Fareed Zakaria, take that critique farther to argue that Democrats in the Biden years lost working class support because they prioritized other issues. Kristof, who has written movingly of the struggles of his small Oregon town, has trouble explaining what could have been done to reverse its condition:
I think Democrats have far better policies for working class Americans than Republicans do. It was Democrats who backed labor unions, who raised minimum wages, and who under President Biden crafted a strategy to create manufacturing jobs and slash child poverty. Trump talks a good game about manufacturing, bui... Biden so far has seen an increase of 700,000 manufacturing jobs. (Kristof 2024)
So what's the problem? "Democrats increasingly are the party of university-educated elites, and they have an unfortunate knack for coming across as remote and patronizing scolds" (Ibid). What?!? This barely qualifies as analysis. (I scolded.)
Zakaria goes farther to blame the administration's failures on immigration, and a penchant for identity politics. This too is unsatisfying. Immigration is hard, and Trump was different less on outcomes than on the retributive excess of his approach. Zakaria's examples of identity politics are use of the term "Latinx"--by the administration? I'm not remember that)--and support for the transgendered. "One of Trump's most effective ads," he notes, "on trans issues, ended with the tagline: Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you" (Zakaria 2024). Aside from the fact that the ad itself is a flagrant example of identity politics, Zakaria is suggesting that transgendered people, like Mexican immigrants, are too unsympathetic to merit attention from a campaign that wants to win an election. (And has Zakaria forgotten that Biden lost a bipartisan immigration bill in Congress this year when Trump told Republicans to nix it?)
Look, I know plenty of people who agree with me on issues, but are so insufferable about their politics that I almost wish they didn't. And I find quarrels over terminology to be baffling and distracting. But that's no reason to treat anyone as less than fully human. We can't let everyone in the country who wants to come, and we can't give everyone everything they want, but we can treat everyone with human dignity. Kristof dings liberals for disdaining religion, but fundamental to the major religions of the Western world is the idea that we are all children of God. I'm not seeing that in the Trump immigration-mass expulsion policy.
Thankfully, we have with us one of the most passionate and cogent advocates of common life, the Rev. William Barber, who among many other things is co-director of the Poor People's Campaign. Barber too argues that Democrats in the administration and presidential campaign failed to address fundamental injustices in the American economy, and attributes the election loss precisely to that (cf. Goodman 2024). Yet he also sees a unity across issues, as he told a class he teaches at Yale University:
When people sit down across the lines that have tended to divide us – race, geography, sexuality – and then take an honest look at the politics of extremism,” he says, “they figure out that the same people who are voting against people because they are gay are also blocking living wages. ("Meet the Religious Leaders" 2024)
He concludes:
What are the major tenets of religion as it relates to the public square?” he asks. His answer is a litany his repeats often: “Love, truth, justice, mercy, grace, the least of these, the poor, the sick, the imprisoned. Look at this piece of legislation. How are these policies affecting people? How is it affecting their living and their dying? (Ibid.)
We don't have to dump the imprisoned in order to help the sick. Common life is not easily arranged, and Democrats have a diverse and fractious coalition, whose members compete for scarce resources and issue space. But as we push forward, or in the direction we hope is forward, we should remember the quotation attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "We must hang together, or assuredly we will hang separately."
Don’t
make me waste a whole damn half a day here, OK? Look, I came here. We
can be nice to each other, or we can talk turkey. I’m here
for one simple reason: I like you very much, and it’s good for my
credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community. You know, on the East
Coast, they like being called Hispanics, you know this? On the West
Coast, they like being called Latinos. They
said, ‘Sir, please use the term Latino when you’re in New Mexico,’ and I
said ‘I’ve always heard Hispanic.’ … I take a poll, and it’s 97
percent. I was right. A free poll. As I was saying, I love the
Hispanics.--DONALD TRUMP, 10/31/2024
Ten years ago, in the mid-term elections of 2014, the Republicans gained a majority in the Senate and thereby unified control of Congress. Along the way they flipped the Iowa U.S. Senate seat that had been held for 30 years by Democrat Tom Harkin, and has been held ever since by Republican Joni Ernst. Ernst came to prominence with a hog-filled primary commercial in which she promised to "Make 'em squeal" in Washington. That vividly captured the Republicans' victorious message, which was directed at voter dissatisfaction while being vague about how they would make it go away.
My 2014 post-election post was full of mystification about the Republicans' content-free success, as well as Ernst's easy victory in Iowa. Rereading it seems like finding a letter from a previous civilization, as 2014 proved to be a turning point in Iowa politics. Beginning that year, the Hawkeye State has swung sharply towards the Republicans. Democratic presidential candidates had won Iowa every election but one from 1988-2012, but Donald Trump won by 10 percentage points in 2016 and eight in 2020 (uselectionatlas.org), and he is expected to win easily again this year. Republicans now hold more than two-thirds of seats in both houses of the legislature, and all statewide offices but one (which they lost by less than a percentage point.) Iowa is a good example of politics fueled by grievances that never get solved, while politicians that play to them become more popular. Turning red, indeed.
As different as 2014 seemed to be from 2012, it's easily recognizable in the political environment of 2024. Economic data indicate we have mostly recovered from a recent blow, but many people are not feeling it. The right track/wrong track average was 28-66 then, 27-65 now (Real Clear Politics). Economic inequality in America continues to rise, which surely contributes to that apparent discrepancy: the GINI Index was 41.5 in 2014, highest on record and highest in the developed world, and was 41.3 in 2022, the last year for which there are data (FRED). That definitely affects people's worldview, including political trust, efficacy, and engagement, though of course not all in the same way (Garon and Stacy 2024). It's a dry statistic that reflects the reality that a lot of people are feeling and expressing in all sorts of ways, viz. an apparent rise in road rage.
Another dry statistic is the number of degrees (1.9 F) the climate has warmed since the pre-industrial era, which is reflected in an increasing incidence and severity of natural disasters, including (this year) major hurricanes in the southeast, severe flooding in North Carolina and Spain, and weeks without rain in the Midwest as well as an admittedly gorgeous but abnormally warm fall. (On how climate politics contributes to lack of emergency preparedness, see University of Michigan 2024.) Natural disasters too impact people's lives in ways that aren't easily coped with, starting with increasing insurance rates.
So, it may seem strange for our national reaction to frightening change to be support for a party that plans to repeal the federal health insurance program, and a presidential candidate who has called global warming a hoax. (For projected impacts of Trump's climate policies after 2025, see "Analysis" 2024.) This same candidate, Donald Trump, held a grotesque rally in New York last weekend with warm up speakers spewing hate to a cheering crowd, followed by Trump's own rambling narcissistic rage. This is how Trump has rolled since he began his political career nine years ago, so comes as no surprise, and outside of some especially inflammatory comments barely qualifies as news (Koul 2024). There may be solid arguments for Republican policies, but instead we get name calling, and lies about Ohioans eating cats and dogs, gangs taking over cities, FEMA hurricane aid being diverted to undocumented immigrants, and the 2020 election. Always the election.
As President, Trump benefited from coming to office at a time of peace and prosperity. For four years, he was an agent of chaos and cruelty, managing to break a great deal of china in the shop even before the pandemic. His campaign is full of more of this (see links at Bruni 2024), salted with self-praise and the vaguest promises of good outcomes. So how is this guy standing at the brink of returning to the Oval Office? Why is he even above 20 percent in the polls, much less the 46.8 percent in today's 538 average?
In my capacity as political scientist, I have struggled for nine years to explain Trump's support. I feel less and less confident in my ability to assess national politics the longer this goes on. Just asking people about their political stances is often fruitless; often you get an echo of what campaigns are saying. (Why, for example, is immigration the "most important problem" facing Montana voters, and I think #2 in Iowa, two red states that are experiencing very little population influx of any kind?) So what follows is admittedly tentative.
I think there are three broad reasons why many people find Trump continually appealing. These are unscientific impressions, based on conversations with Trump supporters I know. They aren't mutually exclusive; in other words, some Trump supporters may share more than one of these perspectives.
1. Preference for Republican policy options(Trump is awful/embarrassing, but he's our only chance to get what we need/want). Trump's own policy expressions have been characteristically erratic, but if you strongly prefer, say, lower taxes, or an end to health insurance subsidies, or a ban on abortion, you're not going to get those from the Democratic Party. You'd have to discount Trump promising to jack up tariffs or deport millions of undocumented workers or bring the Federal Reserve Board under his thumb, not to mention sic the army on protestors, and all the other undemocratic things, but he says so many weird things that probably you can hope it's all just talk and you'll get some measure of traditional Republican policies under a Trump administration. "I don't like Donald Trump," billionaire Nelson Peltz reportedly told a fundraising dinner. "He's a terrible human being, but our country's in a bad place and we can't afford Joe Biden" (Glasser 2024: 46). Nikki Haley made a similar argument in The Wall Street Journal right before Election Day (Haley 2024). I'd hope there could be a better conservative messenger; as I said about abortion a few years ago, the more these ideas are tied to Trump, the more vulnerable they are to rejection when he is finally repudiated.
2. Low information(Trump is cool. And strong.)
If you've read this far, you probably pay more attention to politics than most people, and it's hard to remember that a lot of people are going off vague impressions. They may not know all the wacky things Trump says or does, or how many of his former staff are begging us please not to reelect this guy, because they're not paying close attention. A lot of them remember the pre-pandemic years as relatively placid, and assume Trump must have had something to do with that. Or they may hear something that Biden or Harris said and assume the hate is flowing both ways. Their support is less about a package of policies than an idea of Trump as folk hero standing against the elites--a latter day Jesse James, if you will, or a modern day Cyrus. Hence all those exaggerated images...
Source: amazon.com
...of a man who in real life is 78 years old, very overweight, and has difficulty climbing into the cab of a truck. But, as Glasser's long article in the New Yorker (cited below) documents, there are plenty of elites putting their fortunes behind Trump's return to office, and they're fine with you buying whatever it is he's selling.
3. Frustrated entitlement (Trump is fighting for me. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. He's coming for you, and I'm glad!)
On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out. We will get critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our school. Kamala Harris is a train wreck who has destroyed everything in her path.--DONALD TRUMP, 10/27/2024
As many people out there are understandably anxious about their futures, so for some reason is Donald Trump, based on his constant bragging, insults, and lying. He also has a very comprehensive sense of grievance, with which he's managed through considerable rhetorical skill to inspire millions of people to identify. If he, and we, aren't getting what we deserve, it must be someone's fault (cf. Nussbaum 2018)! Anything that goes wrong--the pandemic, inflation, Trump himself getting shot at a rally--must be the fault of some nefarious actors who must be crushed. Trump and his allies have effectively directed the blame for economic and social anxiety towards immigrants (always from Latin America), gays and lesbians and transgendered people, feminists, protestors, city residents, political opponents, reporters, poll workers, and anyone else they find inconvenient. This is the logic of replacement theory, the idea that difference is intrinsically threatening. Those seeds have certainly found fertile ground. Thousands cheered Tony Hinchcliffe's hateful comments at Madison Square Garden last weekend, while hundreds more were outside chanting "Kamala is a whore!"
Here politics is being used as revenge fantasy (Remember "Lock her up!") rather than as a means of deciding solutions to common problems. But none of the pro-Trump rationales, frankly, is good for our common life. No policy victory is worth what Trump is putting the country through. In the real-world communities in which we variously live, we have a lot to work through, and we have to make room for a lot of people who aren't us. These were challenging even before Trump galumphed onto the scene, and will continue to be so when he finally goes away. I only wish more people could join us in building community, and be better at critical thinking instead of joining Trump in punching down.
I think the answer, for now, is not to let our national political disease run our lives. I take heart in the people in my life and my town who continue to work for better community. "Where there's life, there's hope," as Tolkien's character Sam Gamgee says, and while we're hoping, we can hope for a more loving and more practical world.
"How did you know the world was waiting just for you?"
Posts
