By Michael F. Duggan
Crisis is the mother of prophecy.
Predictions abound among the Cassandras and Jeremiahs of the chattering classes about the economic meltdown that may follow in the wake of the pandemic. A common theme is that not only will a greater-than-the-Great-Depression depression result, but that the Keynesian machinery is no longer in place to effectively deal with it when it does. Others have observed that even if a leader with the political skills and economic sensibilities to deal with such a crisis suddenly emerged—and there is no one like this on the horizon—this latter-day Franklin Roosevelt would not be able to unify a nation so badly divided toward an effective approach.1 Do “red” states have a right to impose their values on “blue” states, or vice-versa? If the answer is “no,” then one possibility is that the nation could eventually break up into smaller sovereign or semi-sovereign regions in the not-too-distant future. Where unity is not possible, separation becomes inevitable.
The idea of the United States finding a more effective arrangement than its traditional federalism is not a new one. George F. Kennan and others have suggested the reconfiguration of the nation into provinces or “constituent republics.”2 These might be based on Canadian provinces, the lines of time zones, or cultural-geographical regions. One justification for this view is the observation that the most successful countries are homogenous, medium-sized nations with diversified economies. By contrast the Federal Government—at least in its present state of dysfunction—is too unwieldy to deal with local problems, and the states are too uneven in their abilities and approaches. The implication is that big is bad when it comes to a rapidly-evolving national crisis with multifarious local manifestations. On the other hand, delegating the equivalent of a national war effort to the discretion of more than 50 smaller jurisdictions with varying levels of wisdom, honesty, and competency is even more problematic.
Most people familiar with Jane Jacobs know her as the author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities and from her famous preservation efforts in New York City (she helped save Washington Square from a Fifth Avenue extension project and was instrumental in stopping Robert Moses’s dream of a Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have destroyed Greenwich Village).3 Jacobs was a natural-born, intuitive genius—an observer of the first order—and her career is the stuff of legend. Her writing is fresh, her ideas striking and original.
In the late 1950s and 60s, she stood up to the acolytes of Le Corbusier at Harvard, M.I.T., and the Port Authority. She warned that the Title 1 projects—the soulless apartment buildings set among superblocks and “[p]romenades that go from no place to nowhere”—would become high-rise hellholes, and was pilloried for it.4 But Jacobs was right and the true believers of the mid-century urban orthodoxy were wrong: cities are living things, and neighborhoods must be reclaimed and not torn down under a misled ideology of the “doctrine of the salvation of brick” and related myths.
In 1984 Jacobs wrote Cities and the Wealth of Nations, a book that is every bit as important as her first.5 The earlier book depicts cities as living systems centered on the human interactions and transactions of street life; the latter work depicts the role of cities in a larger organic context as the basis for regional economies. Jacobs believed that naturalistic production regions were a better and more sustainable basis for an economy than the artificial structures of the nation-state. The two books are therefore linked by a concept of economic localism primarily based on small and medium-sized businesses.
Jacobs argues that in a healthy economy, each region is centered on an import-replacing city. The region depends on the city and the city depends on the region in close and necessary symbiosis. By contrast, top-down economies based on military spending or permanent government work projects—although useful as temporary measures to pull a nation out of an economic crisis—ultimately undermine an otherwise healthy economy.6 Likewise, an overly-internationalized economy based on comparative advantage, labor arbitrage, multilateral trade agreements, and Big Finance, undermines naturalistic economies both at home and in developing nations. A neoliberal economics based on efficiency all but destroys the potential of an economy based on regionally-produced durable goods and local employment. Globalization is therefore bad for both rich and poor nations alike.
One can imagine a world of several hundred small nations all based on economic production regions and with a sufficient degree of economic diversity to prevent the dangers of over-specialization and “one-trick-pony” economies. With no hegemons or monster nations, there would be little practical reason for nations to fight each other, although human irrationality and aggression would obviously remain. Such an arrangement could be the closest thing to an optimal world economic order.
The basis for what constitutes a nation is an imprecise calculus of many things: shared aesthetic and cultural traditions, geographical considerations, historical and legal commonality, ethnicity, language, religion, and sometimes formal founding principles. But in terms of economics, Jacobs appears to be on to something. In this nation, localism construed as “states rights” was used as a smokescreen for segregation, provincial bullies, and urban political machines, but Jacob’s version of the local is different. The question—as with all big ideas—is: how do you get there from here? Aye, there’s the rub.
Do Americans on either side of the cultural divide have a right to impose their values on their counterparts? Perhaps not. But then what is the means to a more rational configuration and what would be the basis for opposing it? Lincoln succeeded in holding the country together under a transcendent vision of Union, and an estimated 750,000 Americans died as a result.7 By contrast, Norway/Sweden and the Czech Republic/Slovakia chose amicable divorces and the results have been good. The question is whether both sides of today’s culture wars have the ability and political maturity to cooperate toward such an end. Does the nation have the capacity to transform into more coherent regionally-based autonomous sections along the lines of Jacob’s model? At this point, Americans can’t even handle merge zones with grace, much less charity.
Crises are also drivers of innovation. Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose campaign of 1912 dangled social democracy before the electorate, but it took the Great Depression and another Roosevelt to implement it. With the proper political leadership, the current moment could also be one of change. But with the discussion shifting to issues of reopening and a return to “normalcy”—presumably without taking advantage of a rare historical opportunity to address climate issues or structural flaws in the economy—the chances of something like Jacob’s model coming to the fruition seem as remote as ever. If the economy tanks, as some economists it expect it to do, the possibility of a national breakup may force itself on decision-makers over the coming years or decades. If so, a more likely outcome in a nation with hundreds of millions of guns could be a violent social ungluing rather than a cooperative transformation of the Union into regions. If the United States does come apart at the seams, there is no telling what the result would be or whether it will be violent or controlled.
It is noteworthy that Jacobs’s last book, the uncharacteristically pessimistic Dark Age Ahead, predicts a downward spiral for the United States into a new Dark Age. Here she casts the nation in the early twenty-first century as a latter-day Roman Empire prior to its collapse.8
Notes
- This idea was suggested to me by David Isenbergh.
- George F. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), 149-151. Gore Vidal also suggested that the United States adopt a more wieldy arrangement of provinces.
- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 6.
- Cities and the Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, 1984).
- Cities and the Wealth of Nations, 183.
- See Guy Gugliotta, “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,” The New York Times, April 2, 2012.
- Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (New York: Random House, 2004), 198-199.
I thank Joe Musumeci for editing this article.