New Geography

Author: Joel Kotkin

  • The Corbynization of the Democratic Party

    The Democratic Party’s current festival of re-examination is both necessary and justified. They have just lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in recent memory. Lockstep media support and a much larger war chest were not enough to save them from losing not only the presidency, but also in state races across the country.

    Since President Obama’s first election, Democrats have lost control of the House and Senate, as well as a dozen governors’ houses and roughly 900 state legislative seats. Republicans have control of all levels of government in 24 states, while Democrats have total control over six. Overall, the party seems incapable of reaching out to the middle part of the country, white and middle-class voters.

    This contrasts with the 1990s, when a group of party activists consciously rebuilt the party to appeal to middle-class Americans. Groups like the Democratic Leadership Council — for whose think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, I worked for several years — pushed notions of personal responsibility, welfare reform, tough crime policies and economic growth that, embraced by Bill Clinton, expanded the party’s base in the Midwest, the Appalachians and even the Southeast.

    Leftward Ho!

    Such a shift to the middle is unlikely today. Progressives generally see Hillary Clinton’s loss as largely a rejection of her husband’s neoliberal policies and want to push the party further to the left.

    This parallels developments in the United Kingdom, where, following their defeat in 2015, the Labour Party promoted a far-left figure, Jeremy Corbyn, as its leader. This was driven by grassroots progressives — deeply green, multiculturalist and openly socialist. Many, including several high up in Labour’s parliamentary party, believe the party has little chance to win under such leadership.

    Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

    Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Hillary Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0

  • Five Ideas to Make America Greater

    Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was based on the notion that he could “Make America Great Again.” But beyond the rhetoric — sometimes lurching into demagoguery — the newly elected president comes to office, as one commentator suggests, “the least policy-savvy president in history.”

    To succeed, Trump must adopt innovative policies that transcend traditional right-left divides. He needs to find ways to help his heavily white, working-class base while expanding his appeal to minorities, millennials and educated people who are now largely horrified by his ascendency.

    In the short run, his biggest problem may lie with his own Republican Party establishment, which, rather than “drain the swamp,” would simply like to create one of its own. The looming presence of corporate lobbyists, swarming around the administration like hungry flies, is not encouraging at all, nor are GOP congressional plans to re-establish “earmarks.”

    The key lies not in empowering a different set of K Street parasites, but rather in reversing income stagnation. If he cannot, his triumph may prove to be no more consequential than an absurdist, Latin American-style telenovela.

    A flatter, fairer tax

    The basic instinct among many Republicans tends toward reducing taxes on their richest donors and making life easier for the ultrarich, including some on Trump’s economic team. Trump’s imperative should, instead, be to make the tax system fairer for the middle and working classes. One way would be to make a graduated flat tax that would mean that the rich, who make most of their money from investments, pay the same rate for capital gains as the rest of us do for income.

    Democrats will, no doubt, still charge Trump with being “unfair,” but, as Ronald Reagan proved 20 years ago, Americans support incentives for work if they don’t unfairly tilt conditions to the ultrarich. Main Street business owners, the most hostile constituency to the Obama administration’s policies, pay taxes based on their income and can’t manipulate the system like Apple, Google, Wall Streeters or, for that matter, real estate developers like Trump himself.

    A middle ground for immigration

    Opposition to illegal immigration helped drive the Trump campaign early on, but, outside of the GOP base, there is little support for a mass roundup of the undocumented. The vast majority of Americans, over 70 percent, also oppose “open borders.” After all, even President Obama evicted 2 million people during his two terms in office.

    Trump also can begin reordering our immigration policies toward skilled workers who are interested in becoming citizens. At the same time, Trump could score points by undermining the H1-B visa program, which allows Silicon Valley firms, along with corporations like Disney and Southern California Edison, to lay off American workers and replace them with temporary indentured servants.

    Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Make America Great Again hat) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Here’s How Donald Trump Could End America’s New Feudalism

    One obvious, if little discussed, reason the progressive wave receded last week: The left’s increasingly unappealing economic agenda. In the past, progressives focused on improving conditions for working and middle class Americans through economic growth, home ownership and expansive infrastructure projects.

    Today, notes former Bill Clinton aide William Galston, progressives rarely promote economic growth, having developed a particular hostility to many of the industries—energy manufacturing, transportation and agriculture—that offer economic opportunity to millions of Americans. This new environmental orientation has been less than enthusiastically embraced away from the coasts, where Trump, not coincidentally, triumphed.

    In contrast to the old Democratic notions embraced by the likes of Harry Truman or the late California Governor Pat Brown, today’s progressives promote social control and the consolidation of a cognitively determined world order. Its promise amounts to forging a kind of high-tech middle ages in which the new aristocracy—techies, media grandees, financial moguls, academics, high-level bureaucrats—dominate while the middle class becomes increasingly serf-like.

    In this new neo-feudalism, property ownership, like power, is concentrated in ever fewer hands.

    Trumpism as anti-feudalism

    The Trump victory tapped into a class rebellion among middle- and working-class voters who feelthe most alienated and pessimistic about the future. The post-industrial, asset-inflated world so beneficial to the Apples, Googles, media stars and the trustifarians in glamour cities has been less kind to the middle and working class, whose incomes have dropped or stagnated over the past decade and a half.

    While some percentage of Trump’s supporters were fundamentally “deplorable,” this wasn’t the KKK triumph imagined by scriptwriter Adam Sorkin. Rather, he won with the support of many people who had previously voted for Barack Obama.

    White working class voters, endless mocked and sometimes even demonized in the media, were massively underestimated by the pollsters, as well — who used 2012 exit polls that undercounted as many as 10 million white voters over 45 to build their models for who would turn out in 2016. 

    And Trump dominated those voters, winning them by 40 percentage points — a 15 point improvement over Mitt Romney’s margin. Trump’s opponent, it should be noted, was also white.

    How feudalism could trump populism.

    It remains to be seen how Trump’s voters will feel about their choice in the years to come, but the basic incoherence of his world-view, along with the corporatist leaning of the Republican majority in Congress, could undermine any attempt to restore upward mobility

    There are fundamentally three forces driving our post-modern feudalization, all of them related. One is globalization, highlighted throughout the campaign, and clearly responsible for considerable job losses for certain classes and certain regions. As countries such as China and India move up the value-added chain, even higher-paid workers will face mounting economic competition. San Jose and Raleigh soon could feel some of  the pain that Youngstown and Flint have absorbed for decades.

    The second is immigration which, for all its many blessings, tends to depress wages for lower and middle workers. Many native-born Americans who used to enjoy steady work have joined the rapidly expanding, and economically vulnerable, precariat made up of contingent, irregularly employed workers. Both Bernie Sanders and Trump identified the problems faced by such workers by unrestricted immigration.

    Undereducated whites are not the only ones who are suffering from downward mobility. Trump trailed but still considerably outperformed previous GOP nominees among both Latinos and African Americans. Increasingly, educated workers are threatened by such things as -IB visas for skilled workers, which essentially replaces indigenous skilled workers with imported indentured servants. This has already resulted in job losses among IT workers at places like the Disney Company and Southern California Edison.

    The third driver of feudalization lies in the concentration of business and property ownership. Lenin once identified “small scale production” as what “gives birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie.” America’s small firms are in retreat while large corporations increasingly dominate everything from food to technology. For the first time in our modern history, exits from business now exceed new incorporations.

    Similarly, home ownership has dropped to its lowest level in five decades, with the decline steepestamong young people. More millennialsnow live with their parents than with a partner. And when they do move out, they are often trapped into renting, often at high rates, with little chance of ever buying a house.

    The Religious Slant of Ecotopia

    The first feudal era was characterized by constrained class mobility, a decline of middle orders and a persistent concentration of power, first in feudal lords and later kings. But what held Medieval society together was an attachment to common articles of faith. Catholic dogma defined and justified the ascension of the aristocracy and royalty, and explained in theological terms both why the poor should accept their fate, and why middle-class aspirations were a threat to the moral order.

    Today religion is in, pardon the pun, secular decline. Particularly in the bluest states, it has been replaced by two new faiths. One is the green religion, now focused on climate change. The other new faith is technological determinism, the idea that there is a magical, disruptive solution to any problem, including those relating to nature.

    Nowhere are these two religions more commingled than in America’s Ecotopia, which extends from Northern California to the Pacific Northwest and is both the home to our leading tech companies and birthplace of modern environmentalism.

     Structural changes help explain this melding. Today Silicon Valley profits have become more centered on software and media than hardware, so the constraints associated with environmental regulations, such as high energy and water costs, have become less important to oligarchs. At the same time many Silicon Valley companies — notably Tesla/Solar City — have sought to profit from the shift to “green” energy, feeding on the beneficent federal subsidies attached to it.

    For these interests, the GOP’s great sweep represents a bit of an unexpected setback. The federal subsidies driving some of these industries are likely to be scaled back. Used to a cozy relationship with the White House, the tech elite, with the notable exception of Peter Thiel, finds itself on the outside looking in.

    Acolytes of the technocratic green ideology, hostile to Trump, geographically and ideologically removed from the rest of the nation and already functioning as a kind of wealthy, cossetted alt-nation, are now talking vaguely about succession. That conversation is driven in part by apocalyptic predictions about climate change generally accepted without skepticism in media, academic and political circles.

     Although couched in scientism, green politics should be seen as somewhat faith-based, a craving more about piety than practical reality. Both Bjorn Lomborg and NASA’s Richard Hansen, one of the earliest heralds of climate change, doubt that the measures embraced by the Paris accords will prove remotely effective in reducing temperature rise. California , a recent report demonstrates. could literally fall into the ocean with no appreciable impact on global temperature, particularly given that countries like China continue to boost their coal capacity.

    Neo-feudalism and the fate of the middle class.

    Most critically, the theology of green progressives will do as little good for today’s middle and working class people as extreme Catholic dogma did for the medieval peasantry. Overall, according to a recent Social Science Council report, California is now the most unequal state when it comes to “well being,” combining stupendous, mostly coastal wealth with the highest rate of poverty in the nation, concentrated inland.

    Neo-feudalism diminishes  the property owning middle-class. In the Bay Area, regional governments are now seeking to limit all new development to a mere fraction of the area’s land mass, all but guaranteeing the future generations will face almost impossibly high housing prices. And a new set of state regulations, including a requirement that new houses have “zero” net energy use all but guarantees that houses, over time, will continue becoming ever more expensive.

    The Bay Area’s regional plan also says goodbye to the American dream, suggesting that 82 percent of all new housing should be rental. Ultimately there will be little left for “little people” save for low end service jobs and benefit-less roles in the gig economy   created by the oligarchs  . Tech firms in the Valley employ shockingly few Latinos or African Americans, who make up barely 6 percent, for example, of Facebook’s workforce. And that’s better than the average of barely 5 percent among the leading tech firms.

    Older industries do far better on these terms. In manufacturing, 16.2% of workers are Latinos and 9.7% are African America, according to 2015 data.  In mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction, Latinos make up 16.9% of the workforce and African-Americans 4.8%, while in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, nearly a quarter of the workforce—23%—is Latino and 2.7 percent is African-American.

    As the green ideology undermines the last bastions of the middle and working class economy, some of the most extreme “ethnic cleansing” is taking place in such cities as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, where high prices, regulations ,  sometimes aided local redevelopment,  have worked to push minorities to the poorer suburbs, or out of the region entirely.

    Oligarchs and Alms for the Poor

    Silicon Valley’s answer to this to this reality is hardly reassuring. At a conference on environmental economics several years back, I discussed with a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist the impact of these policies on homeownership and family formation. A low birthrate didn’t faze him because he believed “we really don’t need people now,” at least not those without special skills. Ultimately robots will do most of the basic work, he explained.

    Of course, if the largely childless hipsters on of San Francisco may accede to this view, it’s unlikely that many others, including the poor and undocumented immigrants, will embrace the post-human perspective at the heart of Silicon Valley. Of course the oligarchs have a solution to the marginalization of the masses: a pool of subsidies to help cover artificially inflated housing and energy costs. Elon Musk and other valley heavyweightssupport a government-sponsored minimum income for what they regard as an  increasingly redundant population.

    The oligarchs do not want risk a rebellion from below; the Trump victory demonstrates that potential. Yet don’t worry much about their being burdened by their call for societal generosity. Skilled at tax avoidance, they’ll pass the bill on to the remaining middle and working class residents, while the regulatory clerisy, both in government and the universities, enjoy pensions and other protections unavailable to the masses.  

    Trump and the New Feudalism

    For all the awfulness associated with Trump, his election stemmed from a disinclination among Americans to accept their place in the new technocratic order. Trump is best praised for some of the enemies he has made—movie stars and hierarchs of the environmental left, the racial grievance industry, the high-tech oligarchs, the bureaucracy and a university system that serves largely as a giant re-education camp. Not surprisingly, those enemies are having a collective fit about his victory.

    Yet for all the pleasure one can derive from this spectacle, it’s dubious that Trump, himself the licker off a silver spoon, will be effective at slowing America’s slide towards neo-feudalism. After all, his basic policy instincts tend to be wrong: cutting taxes on the rich is not what the middle and working classes need. And banning illegal immigration and engaging in trade wars may help some industries, but will certainly hurt others. By themselves, there’s no chance that those steps will restore prosperity to so many Americans.

    But Trump’s working-class-fueled victory should finally convince the operatives in both parties that restoring upward mobility constitutes our  great political challenge. There could be some common ground in policies that embrace things like expanding skills  education and economically useful infrastructure, relaxing federal regulation and reducing taxation of small enterprise.

    What Trump deserves credit for—perhaps the only thing he deserves credit for—is derailing the predictable transition of the same old insiders who would feed at the trough in a Clinton Inc. administration. Now it’s up to the rest of us—those who supported him and those, like me, who did not—to determine that making America “great again” also means standing up to the new feudalism, and chasing this regressive order back into the darkness of the past, where it belongs.

    This piece first appeared at The Daily Beast.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Donald Trump) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • California Jumps the Shark

    America may have trended toward the GOP, but California seems determined to find its own direction. The only question is, simply, how much more progressive the Golden State will become, even in the face of a far more conservative country beyond the Sierras.

    This election confirmed, if it was needed, the death spiral of the state’s Republican Party. Thanks, in part, to Donald Trump — and his magnetic anti-appeal among Latinos, women and the educated — the GOP did even worse here in the presidential race than in 2012, when it couldn’t muster 40 percent support, and has lost several legislative seats, allowing the Democrats to re-establish their coveted two-thirds supermajority in the Assembly — and possibly in the Senate as well.

    The progressives also won most of the major propositions — most critically, the extension of a high income tax rate on the state’s affluent population through 2030. We may have more freedom to smoke pot, but it won’t be so easy to start a business, buy a house or build a personal nest egg, if you are anything other than a trustifarian or a Silicon Valley mogul, or are related to one.

    Go any direction you want, as long as it’s to the left

    Since the late 1990s, California has been moving leftward, with a bit of a bump from the Schwarzenegger recall election. By morphing into a liberal Democrat, the Terminator helped terminate the GOP as a serious force. Add to that the damage done by the residue of Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187, which permanently alienated the rising Latino electorate, and the GOP seems destined to further decline.

    The only hope for sanity has been an alliance of the Republican rump with moderate Democrats, many of them backed by what’s left of traditional California business. But, increasingly, inside the party, it’s been the furthest Left candidates that win. In the Democrat-only Sanchez vs. Harris race for the U.S. Senate, the more progressive candidate triumphed easily, with a more moderate Latina from Southern California decimated by the better funded lock-step, glamorous tool of the San Francisco gentry Left.

    Gradually, the key swing group — the “business Democrats” — are being decimated, hounded by ultra-green San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer and his minions. No restraint is being imposed on Gov. Brown’s increasingly obsessive climate change agenda, or on the public employee unions, whose pensions could sink the state’s finances, particularly in a downturn.

    Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

  • Trumping the Elites

    She had it all—the pliant media, the tech oligarchs, Wall Street, the property moguls, the academics, and the all-around “smart people.” What Hillary Clinton didn’t have was flyover country, the economic “leftovers,” the small towns, the unhipstered suburbs, and other unfashionable places. As Thomas Frank has noted, Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.” No surprise, then, that working- and middle-class voters went for Donald Trump and helped him break through in states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa—that have usually gone blue in recent presidential elections.

    Trump seized on the widespread sense that American life was destined to get worse from generation to generation. Americans wanted opportunity for the next generation, not a managed decline. Democrats—and I was one for over 40 years—once offered this to the working and middle classes that have now deserted the party.

    More than anything, the Trump vote says “no” to oligarchies and ruling classes that not only hoard their wealth but also are convinced that they are morally superior. Trump may be as ostentatious as anyone in flaunting his own wealth, but compared with his garishness, the hypocrisy of the elites is infinitely worse. It’s one thing to be told that decline and future stagnation are your lot by, say, selfless monks wearing hair shirts or tough party cadres who live, like the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks, with the common people. It’s quite another, when the message comes from trustafarians writing for the New York Times or people who fly their own planes and own numerous homes.

    Concern about climate change galvanized the elites—Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley—but left Main Street cold. Wall Street placed its bets on Trump and, like many blocs within the new “progressive” constituency, reacted with shock that the American people hadn’t bought in to their investment.

    The map tells all. Clinton won by large margins in the Northeast and on the West Coast, and in states—Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada—where Trump’s intemperate comments roused Latino voters. But outside of Illinois, a whole swath of the country, from the hills of Appalachia to the fringes of the Rockies, went solidly for Trump.

    Why would that be? Start with basic economics. The economy in the nation’s interior relies on producing things—an endeavor that the coasts have largely abandoned. Energy, manufacturing, and agriculture still define these economies, and employ many white-collar as well as blue-collar workers. If you live in Texas and Oklahoma, “decarbonization” is a much less attractive concept than it might seem in Manhattan or San Francisco. Trump swept the areas that keep the lights on and the motors turning—Ohio, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, Wyoming, Idaho, Louisiana, and especially West Virginia, where he won by a remarkable 68 to 27 margin. 

    Among other things, the media missed the fact that the middle of the country and the South continue to gain population. The “blue” model, for the most part, expels people, while, in contrast, the “red” one appeals, particularly to middle- and working-class families. Texas and Florida are now our second and third most-populous states. Once the pacesetter, New York is a mere shadow of itself as a determiner of elections, and California, no longer growing quicker than the rest of the country, has perched itself on the Left fringe, with obvious bad ramifications—high housing and energy bills, depressed blue-collar sectors—for middle-aged, middle-class families.

    In contrast, Trump’s America presents an alternative model, which honors small enterprise, allows housing to meet demand, and does not see the United States as part of a global system to be managed. That there are xenophobic, and even racist, elements in the Trumpian ranks is undeniable—but for most Americans, the true “deplorables” have been the self-appointed regulators and financial masters who seem determined to halt their upward progress, and that of their children. If our governing elites want to know how Trump happened, they need only look in the mirror.

    This piece first appeared at The City Journal.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo: “US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Meets Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara in Hawaii 101027-F-LX971-088” by Master Sgt. Cohen Young – https://www.dvidshub.net/image/1317097. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

  • The Improbable Demographics Behind Donald Trump’s Shocking Presidential Victory

    n an election so ugly and so close, one is reluctant to proclaim winners. But it’s clear that there’s a loser — the very notion of the United States of America.

    Instead we have populations and geographies that barely seem to belong in the same country, if not on the same planet. The electorate is so divided that many states went for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton by lopsided margins. The Northeast was solidly Democratic, with Clinton winning New York, Massachusetts and Vermont with three-fifths of the vote or more. Washington, D.C., heavily black and the seat of the bureaucracy and pundit class, delivered an almost Soviet-style 93% to 4% margin.

    On the other side were a series of states where Trump won just as easily, including Tennessee and Kentucky, with three-fifths of the vote, and West Virginia, by a margin of two-to-one  – higher than those attained by 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

    Much of the rest of the map has followed the usual patterns: Democratic domination of Illinois and the West Coast, while Republicans held the South. Where the election was decided was in previous battleground states: Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.

    The Revolt of Middle America

    America is a nation of many economies, but those that produce real, tangible things — food, fiber, energy and manufactured goods — went overwhelmingly for Trump. He won virtually every state from Appalachia to the Rockies, with the exceptions of heavily Hispanic Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, and President Obama’s home base of Illinois.

    Some of his biggest margins were in energy states — Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Wyoming, North Dakota — where the fracking revolution created a burst of prosperity. Generally speaking, the more carbon-intensive the economy, the better the Republicans did. Many of his biggest wins took place across the energy-producing regions of the country, including Ohio, Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, Idaho, and especially West Virginia, where he won by a remarkable margin of 68% to 27%. The energy industry could well be the biggest financial winner in the election.

    The Green Trap

    Clinton’s support for climate change legislation, a lower priority among the electorate than other concerns, was seen as necessary to shore up support from greens threatening to attack her from the left. Yet the issue never caught on the heartland, which tends to see climate change mitigation as injurious to them.

    This may have proven a major miscalculation, as the energy economy is also tied closely to manufacturing. Besides climate change, the heartland had many reasons to fear a continuation of Obama policies, particularly related to regulation and global trade, which seems to have been a big factor in Trump’s upset win in normally moderate to liberal Wisconsin.

    Trump either won, or closely contested all the traditional manufacturing states — Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa and even Michigan, where union voters did not support Clinton as they had Obama and where trade was also a big issue. Trump did consistently better than Romney in all these states, even though Romney was a native of Michigan. Perhaps the most significant turnaround was in Ohio, which Obama won with barely 51%  of the vote in 2012. This year Trump reversed this loss and won by over seven points.

    Agricultural states, reeling from the decline of commodity prices, not surprisingly, also went for the New Yorker.

    Premature Epitaphs For The White Voter

    Race, as is often the case, played a major role in the election. For much of the election, commentators, particularly in the dominant Eastern media, seemed to be openly celebrating what CNN heralded as “the decline of the white voter.” The “new America,” they suggested, would be a coalition of minorities, educated workers and millennials.

    To be sure, the minority share of the electorate is only going to grow — from less than 30% today to over 40% in 2032 — as more white Americans continue to die than be born. Just between 2012 and 2016, the Latino and Asian electorate grew 17% and 16%, respectively; the white electorate expanded barely 2%.

    In Colorado the new minority math was seen, with a strong showing among Latinos, the educated suburbs around Denver and millennials.

    That may be the future, but now is now. Exit polling nationwide showed Trump won two-to-one among people without a college degree, matched Clinton among college graduates, losing only those with graduate degrees, a group that has voted for the Democrats since 1988.

    But there’s simply more high school graduates then those with graduate degrees. And for now there are a lot more whites than minorities. As we look into the future, these groups will fade somewhat but right now they can still determine elections. Nowhere is this clearer than in Trump’s decisive win in Florida, a state that is home to many white retirees, including from the old industrial states.

    Latinos may be the one group in the “new America” that made a difference for Clinton, not only in Colorado, but also in Nevada. Republicans paid a price for Trump’s intemperate comments on immigration and about Mexico.

    They also made states like Texas and North Carolina closer, and may have helped secure Clinton’s win in Virginia. In contrast, neither African-Americans or millennials seem to have turned out as heavily, both in numbers and percentage terms, as they did for President Obama. Trump appears to have made some modest gains with both groups, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

    Class Warrior

    Class has been a bigger factor in this election than in any election since the New Deal era. Trump’s insurgency rode largely on middle- and working-class fears about globalization, immigration and the cultural arrogance of the “progressive” cultural elite. This is something Bill Clinton understandsbetter than his wife.

    Trump owes his election to what one writer has called “the leftover people.” These may be “deplorables” to the pundits but their grievances are real – their incomes and their lifespans have been decreasing. They have noticed, as Thomas Frank has written, that the Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.”

    Many of these voters were once Democrats, and feel they have been betrayed. And they include a large swath of the middle class, whose fury explains much of what happened tonight. Trump has connected better with these voters than Romney, who won those making between $50,000 and $90,000 by a narrow 52 percent margin. Early analysis of this year’s election shows Trump doing better among these kind of voters.

    At the same time, however, affluent voters — those making $100,000 and above — seem to have tilted over to the Democrats this year. This is the first time the “rich” have gone against the GOP since the 1964 Goldwater debacle. Obama did better among the wealthy, winning eight of the 10 richest counties in 2012. In virtually all these counties, Clinton did even better.

    What does this mean for America’s traditional middle class, whose numbers have been fading for a generation? Long the majority, notes Pew, they are no longer, outnumbered by the lower and upper classes combined. Yet like the Anglo population, in this election what’s left of America’s middle class has shown itself not ready to face the sunset.

    Now What?

    Given the unpredictable nature of Trump, it’s hard to see what he will do. Although himself a businessman, he was opposed overwhelmingly by his own class. Clinton won more support from big business and the business elite. If you had a billionaire primary, Clinton would have won by as much as 20 to 1.

    Initially many of those business interests closest to both Obama and Clinton — Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood — will be on the outside looking in. Their advantages from tax avoidance could be lessened. Merger-mania, yet another form of asset inflation, will continue unabated, particularly in the tech and media space.

    The clear challenge for (I can’t believe I am writing these words) President Trump will not be so much to punish these enemies, but to embrace those people — largely middle class, suburban, small town and white — who are not part of his world, but made him President. If he embraces his role as a radical reformer, he could do much good, for example with a flatter tax system, restoring federalism, seizing the advantage of the energy revolution and reviving military preparedness.

    The question is whether he will, or is capable, of doing these things. A Hillary Clinton administration would have been safer, and predictable, but it would not have addressed the very things that made Americans turn to this bizarre political poseur. Now it’s up to Trump to live up to his promise to restore the country’s self-confidence, and, for the rest of us, to make sure he does it in accordance with the Constitution and basic decency.

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo by Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Can Working Class, Elite Form Alliance?

    Can the party of oligarchy also be the party of the people? Besides fending off the never-ending taint of corruption, which could weaken the extent of her “mandate,” this may prove the central challenge of a Hillary Clinton regime.

    No candidate in recent memory — at least, not since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 — has enjoyed more universal support from the rich, powerful and well-connected. They have provided her with “a towering cash advantage,” as a recent Bloomberg column described it, over her opponent. By one estimate, she is getting funds from 20 times as many billionaires as Trump.

    Yet, at the same time, Clinton faces a challenge from strident, and often anti-business, populists who now control much of the party base. The presidency may soon belong to Hillary, but its heart belongs to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

    These trends will pose a difficult, but not necessarily insurmountable, challenge. The Peronist Kirschners, Nestor and Christina, ruinously dominated Argentina’s politics for 12 years by providing lavish favors for business supporters while they expanded the country’s welfare state.

    Perhaps a more uplifting model could be gleaned from late 19th-century Britain, where “Tory Democracy” sought to forge an alliance between the struggling working class and the traditional landed gentry. This strategy was largely designed by Benjamin Disraeli, who served two terms as prime minister.

    This piece first appeared at The Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Hillary Clinton, CC BY-SA 2.0

  • The Cities Where Your Salary Will Stretch The Furthest 2016

    When Americans consider a move to another part of the country, they sometimes are forced to make a tough choice: should they go to a city with the best job opportunities, or a less economically vital area that offers a better standard of living, particularly more affordable housing? However,  there are still plenty of metropolitan areas in the U.S. where you can get the best of both worlds.

    Center for Opportunity Urbanism senior fellow Wendell Cox has developed a set of rankings that identify metropolitan areas where salaries are relatively high relative to costs, and you get more for your paycheck. Our list is geographically and demographically diverse, both in terms of the top 20 and the places closest to the bottom.

    The COU Standard of Living Index takes the 2015 mean pay per job in the 106 metropolitan statistical areas with more than 500,000 population and adjusts it by cost of living. Metro areas that have a large proportion of high-wage jobs tend to do best, such as San Jose, Calif., and Houston. The biggest differences in terms of cost of living generally have to do with housing; costs for goods varied by 23 percent and for services by 35 percent in 2014 across the metropolitan data, but for rents the differential between the most and least expensive metro areas is 194 percent and, for housing purchased in 2014, a remarkable 775 percent. The composite cost of living index underlying the COU Standard of Living Index is developed from a blend of annual rent as well as home ownership costs for prospective home buyers.

    I have divided the top and bottom rankings into four basic groups: expensive but worth it; moderately priced but still high income; expensive but so costly as to  be economically barely worth it; and, finally, areas that are cheap, but not for the right reasons.

    Expensive, But Worth It

    There are several high-cost areas that do very well in this ranking, largely because they offer high incomes to match. The metro area with the highest annual wage when adjusted for cost of living is San Jose, the center of Silicon Valley. The cost of living there is 63 percent higher than the national average, the highest in the nation, but with the highest nominal pay per job at $112,300 ($27,000 above the next best), the metro area still ends up with the highest adjusted paycheck of $68,850.

    Four other high-cost areas also make our top 10. Two are in Connecticut: No. 4 Bridgeport-Stamford, where the cost of living is 45 percent above the national average, and No. 5 Hartford, where costs are 15 percent above the national average. But higher wages — $85,400 for Bridgeport and $62,600 for Hartford — give residents the buying power to absorb those costs, and places these metros areas high on the list.The other two are No. 6 Boston and 10th-ranked Seattle.

    One common thread that helps these metro areas overcome high costs is a high concentration of jobs in better paying fields such as technology and business and professional services.

    Opportunity Cities: Less Expensive And Economically Vital

    The other five top cities in our Standard of Living index fit a very different mold. These are what may be seen “opportunity cities,” where there are relatively high wages and somewhat low costs. If the successful blue cities can be seen as something of “gated communities” for well-educated, largely white and Asian residents, these cities offer a higher standard for a broader and often more diverse population.

    The epitome of opportunity cities, Houston, takes second place. Like San Jose, Houston has a strong concentration of engineering talent and STEM jobs, many of them related to the energy industry. The average annual paycheck in America’s Energy Capital is $65,000, well above the national average, and with a cost of living barely 5 percent above the usual, it’s only eroded slightly to an adjusted worth of $62,300.

    The other cities in our top 10 tend to feature high growth in STEM employment but moderate to low costs. They include No. 3 Durham, N.C., located in the tech-rich Research Triangle area, No. 7 Atlanta and No. 8 Detroit. In all these areas the cost of living is around the national average, but salaries are higher. You may be surprised by Detroit, but this ranking looks at the total metro area, which is in much better shape than the core city. With good-paying jobs, many connected to the revived auto industry, the Detroit metro area is in far better shape than is commonly suggested.

    Of course, the Motor City may lack the glamour and stratospheric wages of Silicon Valley, but its far lower costs offer a surprising high standard of living. Nor is it the only Rust Belt city that ranks highly. Consider No. 13 Cincinnati, No. 15 Pittsburgh, No. 16 Cleveland and No. 19 St. Louis. In the future it may make sense for more individuals and companies to take a second look at these areas.

    Expensive, And Not Producing Enough Good Jobs To Make Up For It

    Not all expensive cities are worth the cost, particularly if you are considering a move. Take 89thplace San Diego and 97th place Los Angeles, two California cities with idyllic climates and dynamic histories, but that now have become too expensive to offer a high standard of living for anyone not making far more than the local average salary.

    The tragedy for these Southern California metro areas is that, while they have seen a rapid escalation in housing prices and rents, they have not been able to take a meaningful part in the tech boom that has driven up wages in San Jose and the Bay Area. San Diego’s mean wage of $58,000 might seem more than respectable, but with a cost of living 36 percent above the national average, it reduces the real pay in this attractive coastal city to a more modest $42,700.

    Most critical, however, is the clear downshift in the standard of living in my adopted home region, greater Los Angeles. Once L.A. was full of high-wage jobs, many of them tied to aerospace and manufacturing, as well as high-end business services. Those industries have been eroding for well over a decade, replaced, in large part, by lower-wage positions in hospitality, retail and health. Now it is one of the poorest big cities in America, yet one with extraordinarily high costs, particularly for housing. The cost of living in LA is 46 percent above the national average, driving real wage from a respectable nominal average $59,000 to a dismal adjusted $40,400.

    Left Behind

    Most of the metro areas at the bottom half of our list are smaller, with barely a million people or less. Many of these are in high-cost regions, notably our last-place finisher, Honolulu. In the Hawaiian capital, the average paycheck is $48,800 but when you factor in our cost of living modifier, the real income falls to $33,900. That’s partly due to a lack of developable land that drives up property prices and also due to the high proportion of necessities that are imported, including food and oil.

    This pattern is repeated by many areas in our bottom 10, including the California cites Stockton (94th), Fresno (98th), Riverside-San Bernardino (102nd) and Santa Rosa (105th). In all these cases, incomes tend to be  modest, but costs, particularly for housing, are higher than their economies would logically warrant. Much of the “credit” here may well belong to California’s restrictive land use and housing policies, and generally poor climate for manufacturing, agriculture and other blue-collar businesses.

    What does this tell us? Metro areas that want  to improve in these rankings need to focus not just on developing their economies, but also policies that keep costs competitive with other regions.

    Center for Opportunity Urbanism
    Standard of Living Index: 2015
    Rank (of 106) Metropolitan Area Annual Pay Per Job, Adjusted by COU CoL Index
    1 San Jose, CA $68,855
    2 Houston, TX $62,305
    3 Durham, NC $59,526
    4 Bridgeport-Stamford, CT $58,704
    5 Hartford, CT $57,050
    6 Boston, MA-NH $56,979
    7 Atlanta, GA $56,647
    8 Detroit,  MI $56,421
    9 Dallas-Fort Worth, TX $55,529
    10 Seattle, WA $55,123
    11 Charlotte, NC-SC $55,122
    12 Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV $54,525
    13 Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN $54,265
    14 Birmingham, AL $54,256
    15 Pittsburgh, PA $54,168
    16 Cleveland, OH $54,059
    17 Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI $53,668
    18 Denver, CO $53,526
    19 St. Louis,, MO-IL $53,519
    20 Nashville, TN $53,144
    21 Des Moines, IA $53,115
    22 Kansas City, MO-KS $53,009
    23 Austin, TX $53,002
    24 Memphis, TN-MS-AR $52,911
    25 Columbus, OH $52,319
    26 Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD $51,912
    27 Fayetteville (Bentonville), AR-M $51,876
    28 San Francisco, CA $51,723
    29 Baton Rouge, LA $51,492
    30 Chicago, IL-IN-WI $51,425
    31 Raleigh, NC $50,980
    32 Tulsa, OK $50,798
    33 Indianapolis. IN $50,781
    34 Akron, OH $50,578
    35 Harrisburg, PA $50,483
    36 Louisville, KY-IN $50,390
    37 Richmond, VA $50,053
    38 Oklahoma City, OK $50,018
    39 New York, NY-NJ-PA $49,760
    40 New Orleans. LA $49,739
    41 Albany, NY $49,578
    42 Phoenix, AZ $49,403
    43 Sacramento, CA $49,323
    44 Portland, OR-WA $49,262
    45 Dayton, OH $49,203
    46 Winston-Salem, NC $49,079
    47 Knoxville, TN $49,060
    48 Milwaukee,WI $49,022
    49 Baltimore, MD $48,771
    50 Toledo, OH $48,705
    51 Wichita, KS $48,608
    52 Melbourne (Palm Bay), FL $48,230
    53 Augusta, GA-SC $48,065
    54 Omaha, NE-IA $47,956
    55 San Antonio, TX $47,910
    56 Little Rock, AR $47,900
    57 Chattanooga, TN-GA $47,877
    58 Jacksonville, FL $47,810
    59 Madison, WI $47,510
    60 Rochester, NY $47,486
    61 Grand Rapids, MI $47,459
    62 Salt Lake City, UT $47,368
    63 Syracuse, NY $47,239
    64 Greensboro, NC $47,013
    65 Greenville, SC $46,762
    66 Buffalo, NY $46,500
    67 Columbia, SC $46,437
    68 Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL $46,410
    69 Allentown, PA-NJ $46,141
    70 Springfield, MA $45,585
    71 Providence, RI-MA $45,323
    72 Worcester, MA-CT $45,236
    73 Jackson, MS $45,196
    74 Colorado Springs, CO $45,017
    75 New Haven CT $44,848
    76 Charleston, SC $44,613
    77 Miami, FL $44,589
    78 Orlando, FL $44,527
    79 Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC $44,290
    80 Las Vegas, NV $44,265
    81 Spokane, WA $43,770
    82 Albuquerque, NM $43,486
    83 Tucson, AZ $43,484
    84 Bakersfield, CA $43,464
    85 Boise, ID $43,103
    86 Scranton, PA $43,082
    87 Lakeland, FL $42,907
    88 Youngstown, OH-PA $42,766
    89 San Diego, CA $42,716
    90 Lancaster, PA $42,227
    91 Modesto, CA $42,034
    92 Portland, ME $41,902
    93 Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL $41,547
    94 Stockton, CA $40,512
    95 Provo, UT $40,473
    96 Sarasota (North Port), FL $40,434
    97 Los Angeles, CA $40,432
    98 Fresno, CA $40,226
    99 El Paso, TX $40,074
    100 Oxnard, CA $40,049
    101 Ogden, UT $39,966
    102 Riverside-San Bernardino, CA $38,598
    103 Daytona Beach (Deltona), FL $38,242
    104 McAllen, TX $38,182
    105 Santa Rosa, CA $35,370
    106 Honolulu, HI $33,903

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo by w:Flickr user Bill Jacobus [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Real Estate Doesn’t Make an Economy

    From Southern California to Shanghai and London, inflated real estate prices have evolved into a simulacrum for broader prosperity. In an era of limited income gains, growing inequality, political dysfunction and fading productivity, the conjunction of low interest rates and essentially free money for the rich and well-placed has sparked the construction of often expensive, high-density residential housing.

    This heady period of rapid real estate asset inflation could soon be coming to an end, followed by a potentially nasty correction in high-density, high-cost, more urban core locations. Since the 2008 crash, centered in overpriced single-family housing, density has been the new mantra, a trend largely echoed in the media, academia and among the planning professions.

    The notion that dense, expensive urban real estate would dominate the future rested on two assumptions. First, it was widely explained to developers that millennials would prefer to rent small apartments for the foreseeable future, padding the profits of the investor class. Second, it was assumed that money would continue to pour into elite Western cities from the newly rich of China, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East.

    Today, both trends are diminishing. Millennials are getting older, and by 2018 more will be in their 30s — when most people seek out single-family homes — than in their 20s. We are already reaching “peak urban millennials,” as University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers suggests, while the replacement generation, known as the “Z” or “plurals,” will be somewhat less numerous.

    At the same time, high-end residential investors from the once booming BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are, with the exception of India, now experiencing slower or negative growth. They are likely to be a far less reliable source of funds for high-end luxury housing.

    Read the entire piece at the Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo by Mark Lyon — Full Floor For Rent.

  • Erasing Anglo cultural heritage risks what makes our republic diverse

    It’s increasingly unfashionable to celebrate those who made this republic and established its core values. On college campuses, the media and, increasingly, in corporate circles, the embrace of “diversity” extends to demeaning the founding designers who arose from a white population that was 80 percent British.

    In this American version of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” which tried to eviscerate traces of China’s past, venerable buildings are being renamed, athletes refuse to stand for the national anthem and, on some campuses, waving the American flag is now considered a “microaggression,” while English students at Yale want to avoid reading the likes of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer.

    Of course, some changes are justified. Asking anyone, particularly African Americans, to revere the Confederate flag or attend schools named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan is, indeed, offensive. But in our zeal to address old wrongs, we may also be sacrificing the very things that have made this republic so attractive to millions from distinctly different backgrounds for the last two centuries.

    Why we come here

    Just to clear the air, I have not a single drop of British blood in me. The closest ties I have to what I consider my cultural and political home country come from my great uncle Simon, who served in Gen. Allenby’s Jewish brigade in World War I, and that my wife, born in Montreal, came into the world a subject of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. Career wise, I did work for a think tank in London for several years.

    But what ties most Americans to the founders is not race, but our embrace of a political and legal culture based on distinctly Anglo-Saxon ideas about due process, representative government, property rights and free speech. These proved infinitely superior to the divine right of czars, kaisers, emperors and other hereditary autocrats for generations of non-Anglo-Americans.

    This system, always capable of amendment, has allowed waves of traditional outsider groups — African Americans, Latinos, women, Mormons, Jews and Muslims — to join the economic, political and cultural mainstream. In some cases, as in the case of President Obama, they have also secured the highest reaches in the national firmament.

    Read the entire piece at the Orange County Register.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo: William Robert Shepherd [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons