WHEN THE ROT FIRST SET IN: Remembering Ed Banfield’s The Unheavenly City.
Ed Banfield, the author, is the most important American social scientist. The Unheavenly City (1970) is his most essential work and a remarkable bestseller. Here, we find ourselves in capable hands and can begin to rethink our expectations and attitudes.
At the peak of liberal domination of American life, Banfield’s book noted that liberalism had reached a core contradiction. On the one hand, liberalism was responsible for the engine of economic growth that is the modern city, oriented to commerce and technological development, and therefore requiring a highly educated class managing things. On the other hand, liberals had by the 1960s come to experience city life as an endless series of horrors, of crimes against humanity, not only problems in need of redress, but crises justifying revolution. Expectations of progress embodied in a new generation of urban, collegiate liberals led to a gradual abandonment of the Enlightenment.
Banfield therefore restated boldly the case for economic improvement (Chapter 2, The Logic of Metropolitan Growth), one of the most popular aspects of the Enlightenment, which had achieved its most remarkable success in the 1960s. He also began an analysis of the class problem in America, including what had led elites at that time — the people who most benefited from American peace and prosperity — to turn against America in the name of the poor, racial minorities, etc. (Chapter 3, The Imperatives of Class). The subsequent six chapters then made good on the promise of the introductory chapter to show how misguided elites, in policy as much as in the formation of opinion, had become regarding issues of race, unemployment, poverty, education, crime, and riots.
American politics have in many ways been treading water since the late 1960s. The Hard Hat Riot occurred in New York City in May 1970; at the start of the year, Time magazine declared “The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans,” and condescendingly wrote about its subscribers in what would eventually be known as the “Gorillas in the Mist” style of journalism:
The Supreme Court had forbidden it, but they prayed defiantly in a school on Netcong, N.J., reading the morning invocation from the Congressional Record. In the state legislatures, they introduced more than 100 Draconian bills to put down campus dissent. In West Virginia, they passed a law absolving police in advance of guilt in any riot deaths. In Minneapolis they elected a police detective to be mayor.
Everywhere, they flew the colors of assertive patriots. Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared with the menacing confusions of their own society.
The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over–the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.
But in 1969 they began to assert themselves. They were “discovered” first by politicians and the press, and then they started to discover themselves. In the Administration’s voices–especially in the Vice President’s and the Attorney General’s–in the achievements and the character of the astronauts, in a murmurous and pervasive discontent, they sought to reclaim their culture. It was their interpretation of patriotism that brought Richard Nixon the time to pursue a gradual withdrawal from the war. By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation, and this began to shape the course of the nation and the nation’s course in the world. The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans.
And they’d like to finally break the logjam in their favor, which makes the entrenched Beltway elite feel even more paranoid than usual. As Glenn wrote in 2019, “What’s happening in America is an echo of what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening because of Trump. Trump is the symptom of a ruling class that many of the ruled no longer see as serving their interest, and the anti-Trump response is mostly the angry backlash of that class as it sees its position, its perquisites and — perhaps especially — its self-importance threatened.”
