I’ll admit this one’s stretching the theme a bit, but here’s a Daniel Bachman tune under his old moniker.
The future evolution of proprietary cities
We live in the era of urbanization. Currently 54% of the World’s population lives in cities, up from 34% in 1960. Such urbanization combined with political decentralization has led to the increasing importance of cities. Cities have been inserting themselves into conversations which earlier only included nation states.
With that in mind I would like to examine the potential growth path of proprietary cities, cities where the land on which the city is built is owned by a single proprietor. Such cities offer two advantages. The first is better administration. Many developing countries are riddled with corruption. New cities can start with a blank slate in such areas as education and public safety, escaping often dysfunctional government bureaucracies. The second is institutional change. Proprietary cities can offer an island where there exists rule of law and property rights protections in countries that sorely need them.
So, why would a country offer a private developer institutional autonomy? There are a number of reasons. The private developer could show how increased economic activity would generate more taxes. The private developer could guarantee the creation of a certain amount of jobs. The private developer could ensure a certain amount of investment, alleviating the need of the state to build infrastructure. Perhaps the state realizes territorial change is far easier than country wide institutional change.
Regardless of the reason why proprietary cities are spreading, the fact remains they are spreading. However, proprietary cities are spreading under different institutional arrangements with their host states. There are three categories of such arrangements. First, some are being built as joint ventures with the host state. Second, other proprietary cities have contractual arrangements with the host state. Lastly, some host states create a legal framework for the creation of competing proprietary cities.
A public private venture, like King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, has several advantages. First, governments typically have deeper pockets than private developers. This allows greater initial investment. Second, government involvement in the project could allow for greater institutional autonomy as the city is not entirely private, diminishing potential fears about a corporatist dystopia. The downside is that greater government involvement means greater government involvement. This will likely slow down any project with bureaucratic delays, as well as increasing the likelihood of further government intervention in the future.
While I do not expect public private ventures for proprietary cities will go away, they will not be the dominant form of proprietary cities either. They will likely occupy a middle ground, used by corrupt governments to showcase a big project as well as to hand out favors to politically connected cronies.
Honduras has taken the furthest step in creating a legal framework for the creation of proprietary cities with ZEDEs. While not proprietary cities, ZEDEs will be run by a technical secretary appointed by a government established committee, they do come close. The ZEDE law allows for the creation of numerous competing zones. Different developers can try different strategies to attract residents, the best strategies winning.
If Honduras sees success with the ZEDEs, similar laws will likely multiply throughout Central America. Successful ZEDEs being copied along with the law. It is possible other parts of the world, Africa for example, could notice the ZEDEs and copy them. However, ultimately I am skeptical ZEDE style laws will grow beyond Central America. Drafting such laws so as not to be corrupted by the political process is extremely difficult and there is no interest group which would push for the passage of such laws.
The most promising long term strategy, but likely the most difficult short term, is proprietary cities having exclusive contracts with their host states. A city developer could draw up a contract and offer it to several different governments, promising increased tax revenue and the creation of new jobs. The developer in return would ask for a degree of institutional autonomy to help the city flourish. The main stumbling block is there does not exist any developer with enough experience or expertise to credibly offer such a contract.
However, as proprietary cities achieve success in other areas, such as Honduras, the skills necessary to create such a contract and credibly offer it will emerge. Companies investing in ZEDEs and similar autonomous zones will begin to acquire the skills necessary for large scale expansion. Eventually, private companies will competently be able to offer hundreds of millions to billions of dollar investments in new cities. Such potential investments will give them strong bargaining power in asking for institutional autonomy.
Proprietary cities are likely to continue to compete with traditional city governments. The success of proprietary cities will depend on the degree of institutional autonomy they obtain from host countries which in turn will depend on the mechanism by which they are able to exist in the host country.
Opus Dei could school the neoreaction
I believe I first heard of Opus Dei in 1999 when I was working on a political campaign with a good friend who I would describe as a “devout” Catholic. I was interested in the Church at the time, mainly for its central place in the history of the West. My friend and I had numerous late-night discussions (beer for him, martinis for me) about history, politics and the Church. One night after we’d had a few he asked, “Have you ever heard of Opus Dei?” I hadn’t.
He told me a fairly amusing story about how Opus had tried to recruit him during his distinguished undergraduate career at Georgetown University. Someone invited him to an event at the Georgetown Opus Dei “Center for Men” and he hung out there a bit, but never seriously considered joining.
“Two interesting things about them,” he told me. “One, these guys would only drank one beer, then stop. Two, they had the Washington Post in the lounge, but the ads for women’s lingerie had been cut out.”
Despite his own intense faith, this wasn’t for him. He was at the School of Foreign Service studying to be a diplomat. Detractors of Opus Dei love to shout that it tries to recruit the best and brightest young Catholics who are planning to go into international relations, law, politics and journalism.
Of course, MSNBCBS, the Department of State, Senators and NGOs try and recruit the same set of people to work for them, but they’re Righteous Progressive Warriors for Peace and Justice, so that’s just fine.
My friend still had a copy of Camino they gave him, and he gave it to me to read. After that, I did some more research on the organization and its founder, Saint Josemaria Escriva.
At any rate, this post is not meant as a thorough history of Opus. The Wiki bio of Escriva is a pretty balanced presentation of the history and development of the movement. Some years later I read Dan Brown’s excrescence of a book
At this point, the reader may fairly ask, what the hell has all this to do with Neoreaction? “NRx” is a mainly internet-based socio-politico-philosophical inquiry, not a religious order, has no leader that can be discerned, no structure, no history, no monuments or even office space. Opus has this:
But here’s the crux (think about what that means): Neoreaction can only affect society if it gets elites to support its ideas, intellectually, financially and eventually physically. Right now, Western elites, the Princeton-Harvard-Yale-DC-Oxford-Davos-Brussels axis, are about 99.44% pure Cathedral Prog, (with a Ted Cruz thrown in for color). The tip of the NRx spear realizes that its real mission, at this point, is to recruit elites as supporters (or at least, sympathizers. Opus calls them “collaborators”). The Neoreaction doesn’t seek political power within the current liberal democratic nation-state systems of the West, nor is it a mass movement, nor is it interested in “members” who aren’t very intelligent. Like Opus Dei, NRx has a certain exclusivity that keeps it lean and focused, and at the same time seems to make even intelligent opposition lose objectivity.
Opus and the NRx bring out something primal in “Progressives,” because they’re impervious: men without shame or fear or guilt, at least of the kind that Progs use as a rhetorical hammer to threaten and bludgeon their opposition. “Conservatives” can’t stand for long against charges of racism or sexism or ableism or whate’er, because they’re liberals. Nothing enrages the Progs like a person who refuses to be intellectually cowed by charges of “hate.” A powerful, organized group of such people is their deepest secret fear.
Neoreaction isn’t there, yet, not by a long way. It might take some steps by imposing more demands on its followers, the same way that Opus does, and all the successful religions do. The “Mainline Protestants” have withered in direct proportion to their embrace of “inclusiveness” and their depiction of Jesus as your Special Boyfriend who won’t judge you, and who will always take you back despite the fact you cheated on Him.
Opus Dei demands you sleep on the floor once a week, arise the instant the alarm goes off and dedicate your every waking moment to excellence and to raising up your daily work to God.
There’s a hint of this in some Neoreactionary blogs, lately. While they have different forms, organization (or lack of it), and goals, Opus Dei and the Neoreaction have in common a distaste for the disgusting aspects of modernity and an ethos of raising up the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Of right reason guiding a right social order. Neoreactionaries need emulate Opus Dei in this way: to raise their standards, to conduct themselves as elites and to improve themselves physically, mentally and spiritually. The best way to spread the word is by living example.
Jim Webb, Jonathan Chait, and the left’s moment of truth
It remains the most peculiar feature of contemporary liberalism that during these waning years of the Obama era it is still in search of a set of organizing principles. In practice, of course, appeals to increasingly crude identity politics reigns supreme, with what passes for an overarching narrative being the so-called “coalition of the ascendant.” The pernicious assumption behind this idea is that everything can be reduced to demographics and that no appeal to common sense or conviction is necessary; the advantage of such intellectual laziness, of course, being the support it lends to the self-satisfaction that to be aligned with the naturally harmonious and enlightened coalition of all racial and sexual/gender minorities is to be on the right side of history, and all critics therefore self-evidently illegitimate.
Jonathan Chait’s much-discussed essay of this past week identifies and deplores this phenomenon with the aged and less than satisfying label “PC culture.” The responses from the left have ranged from the unbowed dogmatic intersectionalist call to arms to the consensus-liberal denial that Chait has aptly labeled “anti-anti-PC” to the sincere radical who agrees with Chait but still feels a need to shoot the messenger. The point they all seem to be missing is that Chait’s argument is not so much about free speech in abstract principle but about the mainstreaming of this phenomenon in American liberalism. Indeed, the nerve that Chait seems to have struck so deeply in many on the left is to have pointed out that what has made radicalism so painfully irrelevant in the post-Cold War era is that virtually without exception, it has been hobbled by the same affliction as liberalism: the idolatry of identity politics.
It is doubtful that Chait intended this, for as his detractors have not tired of pointing out, he is a product of The New Republic in its heyday as a bastion of what leftists have obnoxiously labeled “neoliberalism.” (Speaking for myself, though I would have still labeled Chait a left-neocon as recently as five or six years ago, he is far from the only alumnus of Marty Peretz’s TNR to have proven thoughtful and worth reading once freed from his grip). In other words, Chait has historically identified himself with that faction of American liberalism that first elevated cultural appeals at the expense of bread-and-butter economics or any appeal to historical liberal principles. As Ross Douthat points out in his Sunday column:
What’s interesting about this ambition is that it’s about to intersect with a political campaign in which the champion of liberalism will be a Clinton — when the original Clintonism, in its Sister Souljah-ing, Defense of Marriage Act-signing triangulation on social issues, is a big part of what the new cultural left wants to permanently leave behind. . . . Can Hillary, the young feminist turned cautious establishmentarian, harness the energy of the young and restless left? Or will the excesses associated with that energy end up dividing her coalition, as it has divided liberal journalists of late?
Enter the most likely and formidable alternative to Hillary in the coming primary, Jim Webb. To begin on a personal note: in 2006, I had just moved to New York and finished college, kicking over the last traces of illusions about the radical left and any prospects for it. It was first seeing Jim Webb on The Colbert Report that summer that made me think I could in fact stand to be a Democrat again.
Grand pronouncements are nice but having a full life is better – the truth about Charlie Hebdo
Progressive journalist and civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald has a motto: “Misapplying private death etiquette to public figures creates false history and glorifies the ignoble.” He rejects the idea that atrocious public figures deserve a reprieve from condemnation upon their death. By his philosophy, if they commit sins in the public square, then let ‘em have it once they croak.
I don’t agree with Greenwald on this invidious practice. For respect’s sake, we shouldn’t pounce before the blood is dry, even on the most mendacious figures. We’re all guilty, on occassion, of the same motivations that inspire the worst dictators. Some period of time is owed before pointing out personal failings.
In that spirit, I think the requisite amount of time has passed to comment on something disturbing about the whole Charlie Hebdo shooting affair. While I agree with Pat Buchanan that desecrating sacred objects is neither wise nor worthy of celebration, my beef is more specific. Following the shooting, government leaders and the Fourth Estate celebrated the unqualified right of free speech of all people (the blatant contradiction of criminalized Holocaust denial in Paris didn’t faze the showboats). The outpouring of support was bolstered by repeatedly dredging up an old quote by Charlie editor Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier. In an interview conducted after the 2011 firebombing of the magazine’s office, the head of the iconoclast publication declared, “This may sound pompous, but I prefer to die standing up than live on my knees.”
Shameless self-promotion
I have something very timely and more broadly interesting coming up, but I thought it would be a good idea to make known the following piece I co-wrote, dealing with material from my first book, that went up today as party of Tikkun magazine’s “Open Hillel Dispatches” – just a bit of a shout out to Those Who Lost in American Jewish History, whom I’ve taken on as a torchbearer:
