10. Big Skies, Big Cities 🔗

1/ This long piece by @JamesFallows is a brave and partly successful attempt at a positive reading of the zeitgeist. Some comments James Fallows on the Reinvention of America - The Atlantic

2/ I'm going to call Fallows' thesis the "Little Sky Country" optimist narrative, I think that label says more than the title of his upcoming book, "Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America"

3/ Fallows' thesis is one part Tocqueville (energetic travel criss-crossing America to get the "real America" story) and one part "Our Town" in a Thornton Wilder sense.

4/ The headline "finding" as it were, is that the zeitgeist is much more positive at a local resolution than global. People are being more resourceful, agent-y, and pragmatic locally, on every subject from education and economic revitalization to race relations and immigration.

5/ You get the sense that Fallows is trying to play Tocqueville to Trump's Andrew Jackson (it is interesting that Tocqueville visited and wrote (1831-35) during Jackson's tenure (1829-1837).

6/ It appears to be an attempt at an oblique counter-programming of Trumpism. But I'm not sure it entirely works, and the problem is the fact that this is a "Little Sky Country" thesis.

America is "Big Sky Country" and 100,000 Little Skies don't add up to a Big Sky.

7/ While Fallows doesn't deny the reality of the toxicity of national level discourse, he appears to think it either doesn't matter too much, or that Little Sky Country thriving will defeat it.

8/ Just two examples: venture capital and reverse migration trends, which Fallows treats as evidence for the potential of Little Sky Country.

9/ Unfortunately, VC has not shown much potential for thriving at smaller-than-SV scales. It is a model that relies on scaled concentration of capital. Almost all attempts to replicate SV at smaller scale fail badly.

10/ Similarly, reverse migration may be driven by high cost of living in coastal cities, but the fact that it is occurring due to economic pressure, doesn't mean that it is a good thing. In fact, I think it is not. Big cities need fixing.

11/ A strong case could be made that big, dense, urban cores are going to remain economic (and increasingly, climate-response) engines. Reverse migration driven by big-city problems actually delay the return of economic vitality and climate sustainability.

12/ The deeper problem with Little Sky Country optimism is that it has Jeffersonian axioms, while the economy still has Hamiltonian axioms. Ie, the "Real America" today is NOT Little Sky Country at all, but the Big Sky part.

13/ The Big Sky part is not just a bunch of toxic conversations and partisan discourses in DC and the media. It is not ephemera on top of the sum-of-little-towns populated by self-absorbed WHCD attendees.

14/ This is where the analogy to 1831 breaks down. Trump = Jackson, Fallows = Tocqueville, but 1831 economy != 2018 economy.

1831 was peak Jefferson, trough Hamilton. 2018 is the exact opposite.

15/ I laid out this thesis in my 2015 Aeon article, American Cloud. America still has a heartland, it’s just an artificial one | Aeon Essays

16/ This means a) that the problems at Big Sky Country level are FAR more consequential than just some discourse toxicity, and b) Little Sky Country ain't gonna save us.

17/ The core issue here is where you think American strength truly lies: in the romanticized Tocqueville small-town yeomanry with its storied highlight moments like the homesteading movement? (Jeffersonianism)

Or the talent for scale? (Hamiltonianism)

18/ I think the evidence of history is unequivocal. The average mediocre gold-rushing, land-grabbing, manifest-destinying American contributed far less to America's greatness than the Hamiltonian types who dreamed Big Sky dreams.

19/ From the mass manufacturing revolution at Springfield and Harper's Ferry, through the wartime mobilization, to the Internet and Apollo, America's great contributions have been, well, Big things involving massively large-scale collaboration.

Not narcissistic homesteading.

20/ And perhaps no greater Big Sky project exists in America than the great coastal cities. The Interstate system of the human soul, if I may be forgiven a bit poetry.

21/ I mean, I'm sympathetic to the plight of the little guy, seeking his (and it's mostly men) little homestead-scale American dream, and wish him all the best in carving out a little place to call his own in the emerging economic landscape...

22/ And certainly, as it always has in history, Little Sky country will serve as the source of Big Sky dreamers (like Robert Noyce from Iowa to SV), who have always left the "heartland" to migrate to places where Big Sky thinking is appreciated, enabled, and rewarded.

23/ But I think it is dangerous to let this instinct of kindness towards small dreams lead us towards overstating the importance or history-shaping potential of that cultural force.

America has simply never worked that way. It's just a comforting myth for a lot of Americans.

24/ Obviously, I haven't read Fallows' book since it isn't out yet, and I'm totally behind the attempt to provide a healing, positive narrative of local agency and empowerment to a forgotten/ignored demographic.

25/ But bottomline: America isn't Little Sky country. 100,000 locally flourishing little Thornton Wilder tales don't add up to a new kind of American mass flourishing.

The problem is with Big Sky country, and the solution needs to be found there.