In the photograph above, you see an eleven-year-old boy wearing a tie who is looking up at the flag. That’s my father in 1926. My grandmother said that he always seemed to have a flag with him as a kid. It was through my father that I inherited a strong attachment to America. He’d grow up to become a naval aviator who was awarded the Navy Cross for “extraordinary heroism and courageous perseverance” fighting the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Wounded, and nearly losing his life in a crash landing on the deck of the USS Yorktown, my father, like thousands of other men, never fully understood or dealt with his wartime trauma.
Despite adversity rooted in the psychic residue of combat, my father was an unusually insightful man. In the years since his passing, I’ve become increasingly aware of the significance of his wartime contributions, and what he fought for, namely democracy.
Speaking to the House of Commons in 1943, Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us.” Lots of research supports this statement. Relative to urban sprawl, walkable, human-scale development provides social, economic, financial, environmental, and health-related benefits. All of this contributes to civic health and a functional democracy, which brings me back to my father.
Some might argue that American democracy seems beyond repair. Civic and political life are a mess. For this reason, as well as several others, I believe there’s a case for establishing and pursuing a national goal of expanding opportunities for middle-class families to live in walkable, human-scale communities. I say “middle-class families” for a reason. I consider them to be the backbone of any functional democracy. In terms of a rationale, we can start with the fact that over half of America has expressed a preference for being able to live in a community where you can actually walk places.
Do I think such a goal will ever be established? Not necessarily. But I’m saying it should. We’d have to deal with our pathologies in a way we are currently not. We’d have to have candid conversations of a sort that might threaten or offend people on the margins of both the left and the right. And we’d have to operate more democratically at the local level than we do today in terms of community-based participatory design and development. We’d have to do many things differently.
I’m hardly the first to argue the case for making a life in cities and towns. I’ve noted before that Aristotle said, “Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life.” The degree to which we can do this reflects civic health. And in America, dysfunction born of an unresolved racial past gets in the way. Add to this rampant illegal immigration, offshoring of jobs, gun violence, widespread addiction, and a billionaire class and billionaire wannabes who feather their nest at the expense of the middle class. Yes, America has these problems and more.
Suburbia is ideally suited to a fractured, fearful nation. People from different income brackets live in their isolated pods, where houses are sold to people like them. Gated communities take this separation to the next level. This said, I’d opt for a gated community over returning to the pathologies my family and I experienced for over three years in one of Washington DC’s most dangerous neighborhoods.
These days, American cities are also building more and more skyscrapers which is urban sprawl’s vertical variant. Researchers have found that authoritarian societies build an average of 1.6 more skyscrapers each year than the healthiest democracies. Compare, for example, Norway, to both the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Norway has a score of 100 on Freedom House’s index of civil and political liberties. Oslo, its largest city, has no buildings that meet the definition of a skyscraper which is 492 ft (150 m) or taller. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have Freedom House scores of 20 and 10 respectively, reflecting the fact that both are repressive, authoritarian societies. Both countries are enamored with skyscrapers. Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah Tower is soon to overtake the UAE’s half-mile-high Burj Khalifa as the tallest building in the world.
The fact is, urban sprawl, in its vertical and horizontal variants, erodes civic health and democracy. I’m not the only person to make this point. Researchers have explored this same issue and have drawn similar conclusions. A good starting point is J. Eric Oliver’s well-regarded book, Democracy in Suburbia.[i] Expanding opportunities for the middle-class to live in new and revitalized walkable, human-scale communities holds the promise of strengthening civic health and democracy.
American democracy is marred by excesses, corruption, and faults. Our national leaders have periodically made some very serious errors in judgment. One of the worst was overthrowing a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953, which set the United States on the path to 9-11. Two other particularly egregious examples include national security justifications used to go to war in Vietnam and Iraq that were rooted in deception and lies. Or if we’re being charitable, perhaps it was just gross negligence and incompetence.
For over eighty years, America has operated as the world’s hegemon, with unparalleled economic power, military strength, and cultural influence. Some admire the country. Others resent much of what it represents, Regardless of which camp you fall in, it may be in your self-interest to have an America that is committed to improving its civic health through candid dialog confronting our hatreds, mythmaking, excesses, and more.
Writing in the Atlantic, George Packer noted that in the wake of the country’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, many on both the political left and right considered America something less than a benevolent power. After the withdrawal, consensus in these two groups converged around the idea that the country needed to exercise restraint and disengage from the world. Describing this convergence, Packer notes, “For restrainers on the right, liberal zeal threatens national sovereignty and traditional values around the world and at home. For those on the left, democracy is the pretty lie that hides the brutality of capitalism and imperialism… the two sides have made a temporary marriage at what they see as liberalism’s sickbed.”
This consensus unraveled six months later when, in February 2022, Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine. It soon became clear to most that Ukraine was willing and capable of fighting against authoritarianism and for a democratic future rooted in liberalism. Without U.S. support, Ukraine would become what Packer describes as a “Russian-occupied wasteland” whose existence would “encourage future aggressors around the globe.”
For people living in the “safety and comfort of the West,” it might feel good outright rejecting liberalism and American hegemony, yet what are the options? Can we name a country with comparable power that has shown itself to be morally superior? Mid-20th-century Germany or Japan? Present-day China or Russia? Packer writes, “The restrainers can’t accept that politics leaves no one clean and that the most probable alternative to U.S. hegemony is not international peace and justice but worse hegemons. They can’t face the reality that force never disappears from the world; it simply changes hands.”
Packer lays out a doctrine rooted in the idea that American leadership pays much closer attention to the foreign policy mistakes of the past. Stop fueling civil wars with arms shipments. Get out of the business of nation-building. End the practice of sending American troops to “fight and die for democratic illusions in inhospitable countries.” Build long-term support for democracy abroad without “arming insurgents or manipulating regime change.” And yes, send weapons to an actual democracy that is fighting off a brutal, authoritarian foreign invader.
In this future state where America more adeptly uses its “power on behalf of freedom” the health of American democracy is relevant. For example, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, it is clear to most that its outcome will shape what’s possible to achieve in Ukraine, which has ramifications for the rest of Europe. I don’t wish to oversell this point, but improving America’s civic health can pay dividends abroad, which can provide additional benefits at home.
Today, serious issues plague American democracy. Uncontrolled immigration, an opioid crisis, guns as the leading cause of childhood deaths, income inequality, racial unrest, temporary foreign workers undercutting American labor, impoverished cities, and the increasing consequences of climate change, are but a few on the list. Misinformation and political polarization thrive in this ecosystem of dysfunction.
Just as America’s built environment shapes much of life, our unique domestic history—in the form of an unresolved racial past—shaped our built environment in ways not widely acknowledged. For example, the single-family subdivisions many of us grew up in have an explicit racial origin. And the many urban neighborhoods in crisis today are the same neighborhoods that the federal government planned to fail as a matter of racist policy back in the 1930s when most of these places were still overwhelmingly White.
There’s good reason to begin or expand a conversation about this intersection of place and history. Objectively speaking, the United States is the most consequential country on the planet in terms of the preservation of freedoms valued in the West. A German, Englishman, or Frenchman might deservingly scoff at unflattering American stereotypes, yet both the people and the place are more complex, creative, and resourceful than clownish caricatures.
We stand to benefit from applying our considerable energies to understand both how our unique past shapes the present and how we can build and revitalize affordable, well-designed, walkable communities of the sort that a majority say they prefer if they were available.
[i] Two additional titles that explores the relationship between suburbia and civic health include Kevin Kruse’s White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.
