What America was, and is, and might become

I just came back from New York City. Going there is like walking into America's past. You can see the patched-over, depreciating remnants of the nation we were in the 1920s, when modern New York was built - a highly urbanized nation, based in manufacturing. A mostly white nation (except in the South, where blacks were still quasi-imprisoned). A nation where subway systems and tall buildings were symbols of our industrial might.

Cheap fuel, the highway system, white flight, and the service economy changed America into something the hat-wearing New York businessmen of the 1920s would barely recognize. Inner cities went from concentrations of economic might to concentrations of black poverty. Trains were left to rust (or, in the new cities of the West, never built). Suburbs flourished, parking lots blossomed. Zoning came, and malls and then strip-malls replaced shop-lined streets. Instead of chance meetings in cafes and bars and trains, people met their friends and lovers in dance clubs and churches and the internet. White people lived in the quiet 'burbs, while black folk scrabbled in the abandoned husks of our once-mighty urban centers.

But the wheel turns. High gas prices, immigration, and the end of urban housing assistance mean that the sun may soon set on the divided America of the late 20th century. The suburbs will no longer be places of refuge from the sight of people with non-Caucasian faces. Cities will become more important to our economy, as transport costs rise; urban real estate will become more expensive, and "gentrification" will occur. The collapse of finance, and the rise in shipping costs, may mean that manufacturing - an urban activity - becomes more important to our economy.

I don't see this as a danger at all. In fact, I see it as our great opportunity to turn our country into something it never has been - a peaceful, multi-ethnic, urbanized society. In order to do that, we're going to need to rediscover the importance of public goods; those trains, for example, will be back in our lives. We're going to need to change a lot of our zoning laws, so that people can live nearer to where they shop. We're going to need to expand our narrow ideas of race, so that Asians and Hispanics become as unremarkable to us as Italians and Poles became 80 years ago. And we're going to need to stop being afraid of black people that we see on the street. A new culture of respect and friendliness will have to replace our attitude of "fuck you, I'm going to run you over with my SUV." And we'll have to learn to once again see our democratically elected government as an instrument of the people (all the people), instead of desperately trying to hoard government handouts for our own tribe.

Can we become this new civilization, without disintegrating int corrupt fractured tribalistic anarchy? If we can, America will end this century having reclaimed its place as the world's leading nation. Maybe it just depends on how much we want it.

Update: For better or worse, the new transition has begun.