Your one thing to read this week is Amber Lapp’s beautiful, reported essay from Springfield, Ohio: An American City. Two years after it found itself at the center of the presidential election, Springfield continues to cope with its own long-term problems stemming from decades of deindustrialization. The mass influx of Haitian refugees with Temporary Protected Status is part of the story, but not the main story. From the introduction:
Michael Morris, who was born here and stayed, is driving my husband David and I around a barren area that used to be the working-class neighborhoods of Springfield, Ohio. He describes a thriving place where people could walk to work and to church, leave their doors unlocked because they knew their neighbors, get a drink with friends at the bar on the corner. “They didn’t live elaborately,” he says, “but they took care of things.” The rows of mansions on a nearby street indicate a socioeconomic integration that drove investment in a shared physical place.
Now, there are dilapidated houses, boarded-up windows, grime. The remains of bygone industry—piles of broken concrete, sagging buildings among weeds—run parallel to the railroad track in long stretches. As Michael points and narrates, there’s something about it that feels a bit like a crime scene investigation: what happened?
And later on:
There have been many signs in Springfield over the last few years: signs like those held at the prayer service I attended in February with clergy and citizens praying for an extension of TPS; the sign of the homeless man who was the first person I saw when I pulled off the exit and into Springfield; the sign at the Navistar plant covered over with a large piece of material to signify its closing. People were gathering in solidarity in response to the migrant crisis, but what about in response to the news about the homeless shelter or the factory closing? It reminds me of a post I saw a Springfield resident make on Facebook: “Where are the people holding up signs for their own friends and neighbors?”
FURTHER RECOMMENDED READING
Tanner Greer, A School of Strength and Character (Palladium). A few years old, but very much worth your time if you did not read it the first time around: “But less than a century after the Civil War, American life did become dominated by centralized and professionally managed bureaucracies. The two world wars only served to entrench this way of life in business and politics. The population, in response, became increasingly conditioned to lobbying for centralized decisions instead of self-organizing…”
Elliot Hapsel, Liberals Must Lead the War on Vice (Compact). “As a liberal, I am sympathetic to the idea that government should allow people to live their lives as they see fit. But liberals also have good reason to worry about how the vice economy damages lives, weakens families, and harms children. The right-wing response to vice can be excessively punitive. But liberals are likely to be caught between societal deterioration and resurgent interest in harsh laws unless they come up with an anti-vice politics of their own.”
Pairs well with Oren’s essay from the spring on Vice President Donald Trump (Commonplace). “Beyond the real-world damage, the president is committing a costly, unforced political error, abandoning to the Democrats an issue on which conservatives should naturally lead.” Which party will get there first?
Robot Models, Meta Glasses and A.I. Spon-Con: Fashion Cozies Up to Tech (New York Times). Note especially this line from a Vogue spokesperson defending the use of robots walking down the runway: “Robots and artificial intelligence are very much here — they are already a part of many of our lives…” This resigned thinking is pervasive, from schools to corporate brainstorming sessions. But using technology is a choice, and one to make when it is genuinely additive. When it becomes the default, or treated as irresistible, life quickly becomes worse. When literally trillions of dollars stand behind convincing institutions to adopt technology they don’t need, well, that brings us to…
WHAT TECHNOLOGY DOES TO RELATIONSHIPS, from Brad Littlejohn:
The growing movement to protect children from the harms of AI exists for good reason. But “protecting kids” is the easy case; sustaining, or perhaps restoring, our capacity as self-governing citizens will require more concern for how AI is shaping our habits as adults too. In AI Is Changing Motherhood for the Worse (Bloomberg), Abby McCloskey outlines what’s at stake. Two things in particular jumped out at me:
First, a common narrative among AI optimists holds that it will free us up from tedious tasks and hunting for answers so that we have more time to invest in the things that matter—like building human relationships. But more often than not, human relationships are built out of our mutual dependence on each other for those tedious tasks and asks. McCloskey reflects, “In the past, I would have turned to my sisters and friends, who would have shared their own experiences. But I no longer need to pick up the phone to get motherly advice,” turning instead to ChatGPT. I worry that this problem is not confined to motherhood; what will become of our workplace relationships if we no longer build up trust and camaraderie by asking colleagues for help debugging a program or finding a resource?
But at least, you might say, moms now have up-to-the-minute advice about anything and everything related to their child’s development, and that has to be a win, right? Not necessarily; McCloskey highlights in passing the pressure of “endless optimizations.” After all, there’s some truth in the maxim, “ignorance is bliss.” A world in which you don’t know the 101 things you should be doing to optimize your child’s sleep schedule is a world in which, well, you probably sleep better yourself. Already, the proliferation of digital monitoring devices has created responsibility norm ratchets that can heighten rather than diminish parental anxiety—as the Compass team discussed in a recent conversation on AI baby monitors. There’s a risk that AI raises expectations of what counts as responsible parenting faster than it can ease the burden.
THE WELFARE STATE CANNOT SURVIVE THE COLLAPSE OF CITIZENSHIP, from Abby Ball:
This Wall Street Journal piece on the UK’s welfare system is an absolutely wild tour through what happens when a safety net is stretched to its breaking point. Rather than treat these benefits as a backstop for those who truly need it, a shocking percentage of the British public has seemingly embraced the idea that they’d be suckers not to grab what they can, public fisc be damned. Their leaders, meanwhile, tiptoe toward reform and are quickly scared off by public backlash.
The details of the UK situation give the illusory “welfare queen” a run for her money: A benefit designed to increase mobility for Britons with disabilities by providing free car leases now accounts for one in seven new car sales in the UK. The company that provides those leases is now the biggest car-leasing company in the country. Another program aimed at providing funds to cover the higher living costs associated with a disability (e.g., wheelchair ramps) is now being claimed by one in 12 UK residents. It has ballooned to cover people with not only physical disabilities but “anxiety, ADHD, depression and even acne.”
The Journal reports that the UK is now spending more than £100 billion annually on welfare benefits, not including health care. The bill has grown by a quarter in just the last four years and shows no signs of slowing. This is not a rich country simply choosing to be unusually generous—it is spending far beyond its means. Its borrowing costs are the highest in the G7. Just this year, their bond yields have risen from 4.5% to 5.5%.
Thinking of citizenship only in its shallow sense as an entitlement to live in a place, people often make the case that a welfare state cannot survive open borders. A communal commitment to those in need requires some boundary on who those people might be. That’s necessary but, as the UK is demonstrating, not nearly sufficient. A welfare state of citizens each trying simply to take what they get will collapse as surely as one with open borders. Caring for those in need requires a sense of mutual obligation, a commitment to duties and obligations alongside privileges and rights, and a willingness to impose harsh consequences on those who violate such expectations.
NOR SHOULD WE PRETEND THE WELFARE STATE IS FREE, from Oren Cass:
I spoke with a reporter earlier this week about the recent polling that showed strong support for “Medicare-for-All,” including 84% of Democrats and 72% of Independents. Wasn’t that striking? What did it say about the direction of our politics? What it says, I replied, is that we need to stop polling benefits and start polling trade-offs. Of course large majorities of people will respond “yes” to being asked whether they would like something for free. The funniest recent example is polling from the Economic Innovation Group that found Democrats had a +31 favorability rating for “socialism” (vs. -9 for “capitalism”) and also 84% of them say “taxes in America are too high.”
Nor is this myopic thinking limited to voters. We see it also in the social scientists who think we can usefully test a “universal basic income” by using philanthropic funds to experiment sending monthly checks to a small group of people for a small period of time. Do people like, and even benefit from, free money? Generally, yes. One obvious problem with this is the small group and small period. The corrosive effect of UBI is not the access to additional resources, it’s the degradation of the wider culture if the expectation becomes universal, and the change in incentives if it can be received indefinitely. But there’s a second obvious problem, which is that the resources have to come from somewhere. A UBI does not conjure new goods and services for people out of thin air (that might be nice!), it reallocates them from elsewhere, likely including sharp cuts to other programs and sharp increases in middle-class taxes. You’re not testing the effect of UBI, or support for it, unless you’re testing that as well.
Unfortunately, a politics of free stuff does not deliver on the free stuff, which ordinary Americans understand. The continued promises, which everyone knows are unkeepable, contribute to the well-deserved collapse of trust in our institutions and leaders. Reporters who credulously encourage free-stuff thinking quite obviously make matters worse. The same EIG survey found that support has declined for “the Trump administration’s policy of placing tariffs on imports from other nations,” but one suspects support remains quite low for an alternative “policy of letting other countries reward companies for shutting down American factories and moving production overseas.” There’s no question that free trade with China led to lots of cheap stuff from China. The very important question is whether Americans consider that a good deal.
YOUR CONCLUDING THOUGHT FROM RECLAIMING AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP:
What happened to our citizenship? The American elites responsible for setting the nation’s course corrupted the communal, economic, and national life on which it depends. And we willingly shirked our obligations, devolving from citizens into mere consumers—passive subjects of an empire that promised safety and comfort while draining away liberty, dignity, and prosperity.
The glimpse this column offers of present-day Britain, where, under a Labour administration, a quarter of working-age adults are unemployed and on some form of public assistance, is extremely disturbing.
Also disturbing--in, thank God, a very minor way--is the Springfield article's grammar: "Michael Morris, who was born here and stayed, is driving my husband David and I..." And that's the opening sentence!
Springfield didn't "find itself at the center of the presidential election". It was viciously attacked by the leaders of the "new" right, two craven demagogues, in a blatant act of racism. A quest for votes and power trumped human decency, honor, integrity, and character.
It tells us all we need to know about the character of Don, JD, and the "new" right elites who predictably rally to rationalize, defend, or even ignore the bigotry.
Shame on them all.