I was reading Aaron Renn’s post this morning on America’s vacant housing challenge and I was reminded of the stark contrast between what we are experiencing here in Toronto and what the US is experiencing in a lot of its coastal cities, compared to what is happening in many legacy cities in the US. The former industrial centers. In this latter case, the discussion is around neighborhoods reaching a tipping point in terms of vacant homes and then spiralling out of control. Below is an excerpt from a study that Renn cites in his post. It is from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and it’s called “The Empty House Next Door.” The above chart should also tell you a lot about the magnitude of this problem.
Hypervacancy has been rising steadily in legacy cities since the 1990s. Although only one out of sixteen census tracts in Cleveland was hypervacant in 1990, by 2010, one out of two tracts in that city had reached hypervacancy. When vacancies rise above approximately 20 percent of an area’s total properties, the number of vacant buildings and lots may continue to grow indefinitely. Although vacancies rarely reach 100 percent—because even the most distressed neighbor- hood may have a few long-term owners—the market effectively ceases to function. Houses sell, if they sell at all, only to investors at rock bottom prices while the neighborhoods become areas of concentrated poverty, unemployment, and health problems.
Writing in the Times, Edinburgh-based Kenny Farquharson expresses the respectable middle-class progressive liberal view that whoever becomes the next First Minister of Scotland, it can’t be a Bible believing Christian.
Kate Forbes
Since devolution Scotland has had people of differing faiths and none as First Minister without their religious belief being questioned. Our outgoing First Minister,…
It’s well past time for evangelicals to reevaluate their relationship with political conservatism.
Evangelicals are the largest and most loyal voting block within the Republican coalition. Yet within the intellectual or institutional leadership core of conservatism, they are second class citizens. There are few prominent evangelical thought leaders in political conservatism. There are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court, and only one evangelical leading the top conservative think tanks or publications (Rich Lowry of National Review). In terms of results, conservatives have been completely routed on the social issues that are the top concern of evangelicals, while racking up many wins in libertarian economics and foreign interventionism.
How did this state of affairs come to be? In part it is because modern American conservatism was from its origins disconnected from the Protestant demographic mainstream of America. It is also because evangelicals joined the conservative movement relatively late in its development.
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Contrary to modern myth, America was heavily British and overwhelmingly Protestant until the late 19th century. Even with mass immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century, America remained a majority Protestant country. It was institutionally dominated by a Protestant establishment as late as the 1960s. After that period of institutional domination ended, America remained heavily Protestant demographically. Even in an era of declining religious identification, as recently as 2010 a majority of Americans identified as Protestant, according to research from Pew. America is a Protestant country.
But the principal developers of modern American conservatism were non-Protestant, and often non-American as well. The first edition of Nash’s history featured pictures of 25 major conservative leaders on the cover of the dust jacket. This prompted multiple people to use that set to quantify the demographic origins of conservatism’s key founders.
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The Christian wing of modern American conservatism has thus always been Catholic dominated. As Lind indicates, the normative status of Catholicism among Christian conservative intellectuals is attested by the large number of prominent inbound conversions. At least three of the Protestants featured on the cover of Nash’s book converted to Catholicism. This trend continues to the present day with high profile figures such as Ross Douthat, R. R. Reno, Arthur Brooks, and Sohrab Ahmari all being Catholic converts. Lind also pointed to another round of foreign influence, writing, “The disparity in social origins between the conservative base and the conservative elite became even more pronounced in the 1980s, which saw a great influx of Thatcherite British journalists and policy analysts and other foreigners into the upper ranks of American conservatism.”
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Evangelicals are also comparative newcomers to conservatism and the Republican Party. Evangelicals were originally Democrats. Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter was the first evangelical President. Newsweek declared 1976 the Year of the Evangelical on account of his election. Evangelicals began to migrate towards conservatism in the 1970s as part of a movement known as the New Right, whose leaders included evangelicals such as Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, and Jerry Falwell. Not all New Right leaders were evangelicals. Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, was Catholic. But there was a new and substantial evangelical leadership presence in this movement that ultimately led evangelicalism to the right. According to Kevin Phillips, Jimmy Carter won the white Baptist vote 56-43% in 1976 but lost it 56-34% against Reagan in 1980. As late as 1983, sociologist James Davison Hunter found that a plurality of evangelicals still identified as Democrats. But by the end of that decade, evangelicalism was solidly conservative and Republican. In 1988 Pat Robertson even ran third in the popular voting in the Republican presidential primary and won status caucuses in Nevada and Washington.
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This surging influence of evangelicals was one reason Michael Lind left the conservative movement. As he wrote in Dissent, “For several decades, the chiefly Protestant and heavily southern and western mass constituency of conservatism had, as its spokesmen, Catholic and Jewish intellectuals, most of them Ivy League-educated Northeasterners… Sooner or later, it was inevitable that the conservative masses would find leaders who did not speak with funny upper class or foreign accents.” He believed this portended the intellectual degradation of conservatism and the reduction of the traditional conservative Catholic and Jewish elite to a role of “image-laundering” (creating publicly palatable euphemisms) for evangelicals and their issues.
In retrospect, Lind resigned from conservatism at the peak of evangelical influence within the movement. Evangelicals, far from determining the intellectual direction of conservatism, were reduced to handmaidens of the existing conservative establishment.. Evangelicals were brought into the conservative coalition through the adoption of social conservatism in place of traditionalism in the tree-legged stool, but they thereafter lost all influence. And the complete rout of the right on social issues shows that conservative intellectuals and funders largely did not, at the end of the day, support these issues. They determined, correctly, that evangelical voters would not hold them accountable for failing to deliver on them.
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The lack of evangelicals on the Supreme Court is an example of how they have largely been frozen out of the institutional leadership of conservatism. The same is evident in the major conservative think tanks. None of AEI, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Hudson Institute, or the Claremont Institute have an evangelical president, for example (though one of them has an Episcopalian president). It’s also true of major conservative magazines. Of National Review, City Journal, National Affairs, American Affairs, the American Conservative, the Claremont Review of Books, or First Things, only National Review is edited by an evangelical (though two others are edited byEpiscopalians). Catholic social conservatives may share in the losses on social issues, but at least they can console themselves with the knowledge that Catholics hold many key leadership roles within conservatism. Evangelicals can’t do this.
Undoubtedly evangelicals themselves are in part to blame for this state of affairs. They have failed to develop the intellectual or leadership capabilities needed to merit a seat at the table. Lind was not wrong in his assessment of the evangelicals in this regard. This was admitted at nearly the same time by evangelical professor Mark Noll in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The scandal being that they didn’t have one.
But that’s not the whole story. The Catholic domination and long record of conversions to Catholicism by conservative intellectuals shows that there is a normative status to Catholicism within conservatism. Catholic thought so sets the conservative agenda that evangelicals frequently defer to it and look to it for leadership. We see, for example, conservatives becoming interested in Catholic social teaching or relying on Catholics like Patrick Deneen for critiques of liberalism. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a Calvinist head of government, but his introduction to US conservative audiences has largely come through former Catholic (now Eastern Orthodox) Rod Dreher or the Episcopalian Tucker Carlson. No prominent American evangelicals, not even Reformed Evangelicals, have assessed Orban through the lens of their own tradition.
Politically, evangelicals today occupy the same role within the conservative coalition that African-Americans do on the left. They are a large and loyal voting block that’s critical to electoral victory, kept permanently aggrieved with core concerns left unaddressed in order to motivate voter turnout, with a few go-along-to-get-along leaders who prosper within the system but no real seat at the table, and no good alternatives out there.
We have talked a lot on this blog about the concentration of economic activity in global cities. Here is an old post about a paper called “winner-take-all-cities”, which documents the overrepresentation of talent, economic activity, innovation, and wealth creation in a select number of alpha cities.
But this same phenomenon is playing out in a myriad of different ways. Aaron Renn calls this the “superstar effect” and has been writing about it for years. Another more recent example is this post by Richard Kerby called: Where did you go to school?
Kerby looked at where venture capitalists in the US went to school and discovered that around 40% of them have gone to one of two schools: Stanford or Harvard. His argument is that not only is the venture capital industry lacking in gender and racial diversity, but it’s also lacking in cognitive diversity.
My point with this post, though, is one of hyper-concentration. Tech is a dominant force in today’s economy. And in 2017, nearly 45% of all venture capital investment in the US went to companies located in the Bay Area -- meaning San Francisco and San Jose.
So here is an example of a select number of schools training a select number of minds that then go on to invest in a select number of cities. Fred Wilson, who is a venture capitalist, has a good response to this problem of diversity in the VC industry.
But, of course, this is bigger than just the VC business.
OpEd-- The Meme World of Hillsong, Redeemer, and the Hassidic Jews
OpEd– The Meme World of Hillsong, Redeemer, and the Hassidic Jews
Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In Dawkins formulation, a meme was the idea analogue of a gene. In these sense of the word, the dictionary now defines a meme as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.”
Today, the word meme is more likely to refer to those (supposedly) funny captioned pictures your…
OpEd-- The Meme World of Hillsong, Redeemer, and the Hassidic Jews
OpEd– The Meme World of Hillsong, Redeemer, and the Hassidic Jews
Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In Dawkins formulation, a meme was the idea analogue of a gene. In these sense of the word, the dictionary now defines a meme as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.”
Today, the word meme is more likely to refer to those (supposedly) funny captioned pictures your…
Sunday News & OpEd-- The Meme World of Hillsong, Redeemer, and the Hassidic Jews
Sunday News & OpEd– The Meme World of Hillsong, Redeemer, and the Hassidic Jews
Redeemer’s Tim Keller, Hillsong’s Carl Lenz, Hassidic congregant in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Photos: Tony Carnes, Hillsong/A Journey through NYC religions
Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In Dawkins formulation, a meme was the idea analogue of a gene. In these sense of the word, the dictionary now defines a meme as “an idea, behavior, style, or…
Sunday News & OpEd-- The Meme World of Hillsong, Redeemer, and the Hassidic Jews
Sunday News & OpEd– The Meme World of Hillsong, Redeemer, and the Hassidic Jews
Redeemer’s Tim Keller, Hillsong’s Carl Lenz, Hassidic congregant in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Photos: Tony Carnes, Hillsong/A Journey through NYC religions Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In Dawkins formulation, a meme was the idea analogue of a gene. In these sense of the word, the dictionary now defines a meme as “an idea, behavior, style, or…
