What bothers me most about this inflammatory language is that it provides ideological cover for only the shittiest of knee-jerk solutions. In the Progressive era, Beauregard observes, commentators believed problems could at least be fixed. Terms like “crisis,” “doom loop,” and “urban death” carry a far more intractable connotation or at least... See more

All of these trends had been decades in the making, but as esteemed urban planner Robert Beauregard notes, it was the summer of unrest that marked a paradigm shift in the minds of the American public. In Voices of Decline , his seminal work, Beauregard traces American perceptions about urban progress and regress in the twentieth century through a... See more

Remaining in the context of New York, it could look like this... The Right is fear-mongering about the dangers of everyday life in the city, while the Left doesn’t want to admit that the city has gotten progressively more dangerous. The Right doesn’t want to admit that police officers aren’t doing their job, and the left doesn’t want to admit we... See more