We should treat big cities like trusts — break them up
Ross Douthat
The age of Trump has inspired soul-searching within our overclass — long nights reading “Hillbilly Elegy,” mostly — but also a wave of cosmopolitan pride. During the presidential campaign, when Trump talked about making America great again, Hillary Clinton countered that “America is already great” — meaning, of course, dynamic and diverse and tolerant and future-oriented, all the things that Trump seems to dismiss and his voters seem to fear.
This great-already sentiment has been reproduced in many elite quarters, and recently the Niskanen Center’s Will Wilkinson, writing in The Washington Post, brought it to a particularly sharp point: What’s really great about America is its big, booming, liberal cities.
Trump loves to talk down America’s great metropolises, Wilkinson points out, portraying them as nightmares out of “Death Wish” or “Dog Day Afternoon.” Wilkinson says in reality our cities are, yes, already great — safer than ever, culturally rich, rife with policy innovation, and driving our economic future. They’re places where immigrants flock and college graduates cluster, generating new ideas and innovations while the Trumpish hinterland languishes in resentment and nostalgia.
I respectfully dissent. Yes, for many of their inhabitants, particularly the young and the wealthy, our liberal cities are pleasant places in which to work and play. But if they are diverse in certain ways, they are segregated in others, from “whiteopias” like Portland to balkanized cities like D.C. or Chicago. If they are fast-growing it’s often a growth intertwined with subsidies; if they are innovation capitals it’s a form of innovation that generates fewer jobs than past advances. If they produce some intellectual ferment they have actually weakened liberalism politically by concentrating its votes.
So has the heyday of these meritocratic agglomerations made America greater? I think not.
Thus this installment in my series of implausible proposals: We should treat liberal cities as trusts that concentrate wealth and power and conspire against the public good. And instead of trying to make them a little more egalitarian, we should try to break them up.
First, the easy part: Let’s take the offices of our federal government, now concentrated in Greater Washington, D.C., and spread them around, in poorer states and smaller cities that need revitalization.
We’ll go further, starting with the elite universities clustered around our bloated megalopolises. We’ll tax their endowments heavily, but offer exemptions for schools that expand with satellite campuses in areas with well-below-the-median average incomes.
New business tax credits would encourage regional diversification. And the FTC’s mandate would be creatively rewritten to include an industry’s geographic concentration as a monopolistic indicator, letting it approve mergers and acquisitions and trustbust with an eye toward more dispersed jobs.
Finally, because we can’t forget the media: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s funding for flyover-country stations would be expanded, not cut, and a new Corporation for Local News would fund newspapers in smaller cities and rural areas. And this would be paid for by a special surtax on media corporations (print, digital and television) based in New York and Washington, D.C.