Red American Cities, Gentrification, and the Future

A chat with Jordan Schachtel about National Divorce

by Dave Reaboi via substack

Last night, I had a chat with my old friend, Jordan Schachtel, who runs “The Dossier” here on Substack. We discussed several issues relating to National Divorce—cities, gentrification, autonomy, branding, etc. Over the next several months, I’m going to be continuing in this vein, breaking down what I mean by the National Divorce concept—and, importantly, how talking about it necessarily changes the types of things we must face about the state of America today. This is true regardless of how you feel about Divorce as an “action plan.” The chat was edited for clarity and readability.

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Jordan Schachtel: We’re talking about Texas, Florida, and the future of American freedom. This conversation was really inspired by Dave's Substack, Late Republic Nonsense. He wrote a very compelling piece called, “National divorce is expensive, but it's worth every penny.” It generated a lot of replies from both the left and right—many people were very angry about it.

But the intellectual movement that he’s helped build seems to have the wind at its sails. People are taking this issue seriously, even just to open their imagination to something different. There are commentators like our buddy, Jesse Kelly, talking a lot about it, too. You were on the Blaze recently with Michael Malice. He’s also a National Divorce guy, but he comes at it from a different angle than you and Jesse do; you're a conservatives, while Malice is a self-described anarchist. And it's interesting that, even though the gulf between you seems wide, there is kind of a coalition building around the idea.

And it got me thinking: Assuming National Divorce, is there going to be just one new regime? Is there going to be two? what is the optimal place to found a new regime? The two very clear front runners are Florida and Texas. And within those two states, where's the capital of our new regime going to be? Does there need to be a capital?

David Reaboi: There are a couple of issues here. I do think that there needs to be many different capitals in a future Red America. There's a political capital, like for example, in the United States—Washington was a city built from scratch to be just that, because most states didn't want to be under the thumb of the largest city, which was New York. So it was important for the new country that its new capital was geographically split throughout the different population centers in the different states.

And then, you've also got different kind of industry town capitals: there needs to be a financial capital, a cultural capital, a manufacturing capital, etc. If your new country is truly going to have a successful multifaceted society, you're going to want to draw on different types of people. You're going to need people who like to live in the country, and those who like to live in the city. You're going to need folks who like to live in Miami and folks who like to live in the Everglades, if we're talking about Florida, for example. So, on this topic, I'm in the ‘let many flowers bloom’ category. The existence of different cities with strong, different characteristics can draw different types of talent, different types of people into their orbits. So, the fact that there are differences between life in Dallas and Miami or in Houston and Orlando is good.

One large firm was just talking about moving their whole establishment down to St Petersburg, which is right next to Tampa. It's probably got hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under management, or something like that. And then you have Goldman Sachs building a giant office tower in Palm Beach County. You have all these tech guys coming to Miami. Clearly, Florida and Texas are appealing to these Blue Staters with Blue State values and politics. It's great to see a large infusion of capital into some of these places—if it was only just money. But with it comes political ideologies that can do real damage to the city. What do you do to protect your society or country from these foreign ideologies that could potentially threaten their stability?

This is an important point. It's a problem that, in general, the right has had no understanding of. It's just not on the radar at all, and it probably falls into the category of urban planning or gentrification—which is something that the right just hasn't given a crap about at least for the last 50 years, since the advent of the ‘fusionist’ Right represented by National Review and other GOP party organs, which have been primarily libertarian on these matters. Today this view is best exemplified by the City of Miami with its young mayor, Suarez. He’s begging for as much money as he can to bring into the place—just bring it, just bring it, just bring it—because the city exists only in order to generate revenue and, of course, nothing bad could ever happen. The city will never change—and if it does, it’s only to be richer, cleaner and better.

I'm here to tell you, just from my own life experience, that that’s bullshit. New York City and San Francisco, in particular, went through a gentrification process that destroyed the individual character of both cities, and left them a hollow shell of what they once were. The prices skyrocket, pushing out the small businesses that make a city unique and interesting in favor of in favor of chains owned by multinationals—the only people who can afford the rents. What’s worse is, it also ends up driving out the middle-class. The libertarian-minded types don’t spend any time thinking about people who aren’t Captains of Industry, and they forget that every successful city needs to have a thriving middle class.

Of course, the middle class looks different in a big metropolis than it would in in the Rust Belt or someplace like that. In the big cities, it could be called a creative class. In a big city, these are the people that made the place worth inhabiting in the first place; these are (or were) the people who give it its unique character. When they leave, the city becomes just a playground for the unimaginative rich: the same stores, the same restaurants. It looks like Epcot. The only difference between New York City and San Francisco is a couple of buildings and the natural habitat; you can buy the same stuff at the same stores, eat at the same types of restaurants, etc. This isn't limited to the United States, either. This phenomenon traverses the world: you have a small, nomadic elite class of wealthy “anywheres” who create essentially the same types of large cities, but with different scenery.

This is hard to figure out, but there needs to be a point at which the development of a city is sort of arrested—between a free-for-all of crime, dirt, and grime on one hand, and between Bloombergian decadence of plastic-like chain stores and super high rents. I was lucky enough to live in New York City during the Giuliani years; you still had the advantages of gentrification in terms safety, but the city was basically the same as it always had been.

There was an old website that was nothing but a log of stores and restaurants that had existed in New York which had closed, year by year, with the number of years that each had been in business. Just skimming through the list painted a horrifying picture: this is what it's like when you're losing the city's history. One place was around for 150 years; another for 95 years, a third for 75, etc. All gone. After the gentrification of the Bloomberg years, New York is a city that no longer exists in the same way that it once has. How can it? A city is more than its idea of itself—or others’ idea of it; it’s the connection of people to things and institutions with a history. As conservatives or people on the Right, we need to be very, very mindful of that dynamic.

Not a lot of people know about the situation Miami, but the mayor is very soft. He's part of this legacy group that has controlled Miami for a very long time. I think his father was also the mayor, and he's living off that legacy. He's making a name for himself by encouraging a lot of investment, but he’s not a guy who's going to protect the institutions in a city. He doesn't really talk about that much, which is a giant red flag.

It would be nice if they were to protect the free market—but slowly after so much of this money comes in, the Left takes over political life. In so many of these Blue cities, they’ve forced out the middle income people; it's the super-rich and the super-impoverished. San Francisco is the perfect illustrations of what happens with when the Left takes over.

This is one of the great things about the nationalist moment that we were in: it brings us back to the most important guiding principle: what are the things that makes life better and and worth living for the citizen. We're not addicted to free trade abstractions or ideological formulas. We want to make things better for the people who actually live here—whether it’s a big city, a small town or the country itself.

The Right need to start studying urbanization and gentrification and coming up with alternate plans. I The Left identifies some of the many of the problems very well, but their solutions are, I think, often ridiculous and inappropriate. But leaving a city up to the free market—just saying, “hey, do your worst”—is a recipe for disaster. It’s making the place unlivable and generic. Frankly, it's happening right now to Miami, which is a city that I really love. I can't wait to leave it, though, because I see these forces creeping up on the city.

I mean, it's interesting if you think about it, the difference between Abbott and DeSantis. And it's specifically between Florida and Texas, too. Florida as is known as more of a traditional swing state, and yet it has the most based governor; Texas has a very long reputation as a right-wing state and it's got a cucked governor—or let's say, half-cucked.

I think there are kind of a couple of different reasons for that, having to do with the histories of both Texas and Florida. The last couple of decades, the strength of the Bush-Rove dynasty in Texas, which has been very libertarian minded and terrible on immigration, for example, because so many of the donors and so many of the very wealthy folks in Texas make a living, one way or another, through immigration and cheap labor. Meanwhile, the traditionally Democratic, southern-most counties closest to Mexico are turning red, one after the other, because they have to deal with the consequences of open borders policy advocated in tony Dallas and Houston suburbs—and they want to stop the flood.

I think of the deep-Blue State GOP organizations, like the ones in Illinois or Wisconsin or Minnesota. They’re battered and beaten, pathetic state parties, because they know very well that they're not going to win. So these state parties often end up becoming like a kind of festival or orgy of graft and corruption. And there are no stakes, are just no stakes. On the other hand, of course, you've got the Texas GOP—they know they're gonna win, so they think they can afford to kick back and promote wishy-washy candidates who stand for nothing, children of governors and congressmen, etc. You get complacent and think you don't need to have hardcore right-wingers in office if you think of yourself as the most the most right-wing state.

The other thing that's interesting about Texas—and where it has an edge—is that Texas is really the only state with a defined and very, very strong identity. Someone I’d met recently in Dallas mentioned that the Texas brand is stronger than Coca-Cola’s.

That's so important. It’s a fascinating point now that I think of it—it's like how many Afghans will identify as Pashtun before they identify as Afghan. I think if a foreigner were to ask someone from Texas where they're from, they would say Texas first. So, there is a culture in Texas that can thrive. And, you already have the whole “Republic of Texas” legend and history within the imagination of millions of Texans. We’d like to build something like that in Florida, but we're not there yet. A future Texas Republic could essentially be a superpower overnight, positioned from the jump to be successful. Just from energy resources and economic power alone, it could be more powerful than any single European country.

That's true. Unlike most other states, Texas has a whole chain of proprietary Texas businesses that are set up to serve the Texas market. The big one, of course, is HEB/Central Market, which is an amazing supermarket chain that exists only in Texas—or maybe one or two places like Oklahoma, that may as well be Texas. It's the kind of thing that that gives me hope: larger businesses recognizing that there is enough demand and enough customers in Red States upon which they can build a business and make a living. A company doesn't need to be a ubiquitous multinational like Nike in order to sell shoes.

There is amazing business potential there. How many people voted for Trump this last time, in 2020? About the same amount of people that live in France. And the French have their own industries serving just their citizens: their own insurance companies, their own supermarkets, their own banks, etc. There are more than enough potential customers in Red States—or, frankly, even just in Florida and in Texas, because they're big enough.

I think people with who have accumulated a lot of wealth, and who feel similarly about politics, really need to take this red pill. And I hope that, the last two years, they've come to realize that time is of the essence. And I think that you make the perfect point there: we need to red pill as many as people as possible to the reality that they're facing, in the future, a political rupture; the political system is collapsing. People certainly see it in the economy now, right? They're skyrocketing inflation. The Federal Reserve has kept interest rates to zero and is just pumping up the stock market. The Treasury is printing trillions of dollars. People see it on the economic side—but, for whatever reason, on the political side, they think, “this is great country, ergo, it’ll last forever.”

When I wrote the National Divorce piece--I thought it wasn't all that esoteric of a point, but it ends up being one, because nobody reads the whole thing. People read the tweet and maybe the first couple of paragraphs and then they're done. But the point of the piece—and, to the extent that I talk about National Divorce at all—it is meant as a rhetorical device to spur thinking about Red State autonomy.

If we're too complacent, if we say stupid things like, “oh, America will just be around forever; let's not even think about National Divorce, because this whole thing isn't ever going to go tits-up at some point.” 

That kind of thinking is a mechanism that prevent us from doing the thing that we need to do—which is, to build stuff. 

I hope it will spur people to recognize that they must get serious. What do we need to build? What should we have already built? The day after the whole thing goes tits-up, and America is done, what are the things we’re going to need to have, in order to survive?

I think people on the right—I forgot how exactly you categorize them—but the ones who cry during patriotic movies. Of course, you can and should be patriotic about a nation that reflects your values. But so many of these folks can’t face that we're no longer living in that same America of the war heroes of World War II who stormed the Normandy beaches. I think so many people are caught up in this like Hollywood type aspect of what it means to be American. And that includes for too many people, I think sacrificing their entire livelihood for this nation that needs to stay together.

Right. It loops back to the beginning of our conversation, because at the end of the day, what is this polity? Whether it's a city or it's a country, it’s the people. You change the people, and you change everything. This is both the cycle of regimes on one hand and, on the other, it’s a larger problem with our country as founded—which isn’t what a lot of people can stand to hear.

Our country has been understood for many years as a “propositional” nation—which means that, rather than a nation founded on shared ethnic, religious, or historical ties, what binds us together is little more than an ideological commitment to the American Founding, to the ideals of the Declaration, etc. And look, I believe in those things; I think those things are great. They're wonderful. 

But what happens when a majority—or a substantial minority—no longer believes in those things? There's no law of the universe that says that that says that people will believe in the principles of their Founding documents in perpetuity. Then you’ve got serious problems with the integrity of the regime.

I think your buddy Malice said something to the effect of, “the Constitution is great—that is, if people are willing to follow it.” But t's just only a piece of paper at this point. Democrats and even some Republicans will allude to it if they need to use its authority, but it doesn't seem that we’ve got any semblance of a constitutional Republic. We're just in this weird stage of authoritarianism where the ruling class in Washington DC does whatever it wants and just like plays pretend constitutionalism. And you turn on the TV and then there's the kangaroo court. It's total clown show.

We're so far off from our days of being a constitutional Republic. The COVID experience really exposed that, putting lie to the idea that we have real protections in place that would prevent us from being consumed by the craziness of authoritarian city, state, or federal governments. That doesn't appear to be the case at all. This is a reason why I hesitate today to identify myself as a conservative—what are we conserving? It doesn't seem like there's anything left to conserve in these 50 United States that we have together as a single, unified nation. And I hope more people awaken to this reality.

Yeah, I agree. I think many of us are trying to figure out what is the word that we use in lieu of “conservative.” It's especially poignant for folks like us who grew up as conservatives and came of age, frankly, in a different America. Sure, a lot of these trend lines were apparent. I didn't know that we would get this far—but, then again, I saw the National Divorce thing coming November of 2012, after Obama was reelected. I realized that we’re now living in a different country. And that realization has informed my position since; absolutely nothing that has gone on since then has even remotely changed my mind about it.

Once you’ve been red pilled on this issue, it's impossible to reverse course. Both of us have spent time in Washington, DC. When you see what's going on there—and who the lawmakers really answer to, spending all their days with lobbyists, etc. And if you aren't an executive from Pfizer or Boeing or McDonald's, they don't even want to hear from you. Trump had that famous phrase when he was trying to convince black voters to vote for him. He said like, “what do you have to lose, at this point?” That’s my appeal to people who are on the fence.

I was part of that normie right-wing until I saw that the FBI was trying to overturn Donald Trump’s election. And I thought, “holy shit, we cannot have an FBI that can do that.” And the media and all the government bureaucrats were out to kill this guy off, despite him winning an election they consider to be illegitimate. At that point, you don't have a country anymore.

I've become very pessimistic about voting and national elections, too. if I have a busy day during the 2024 presidential election, I’m probably just going to bypass standing in line to vote altogether; it feels like a waste of time. I have a hard time imaging how the system is going to fix itself from within. Although our ideas might sound radical to some, the idea that you're going to vote your way out of this problem by simply electing a few more politicians in Washington, DC seems even more unrealistic.

I wish there was more time. We're in a kind of purple period right now, where more and more people are waking up to realize that we need to build—and some are going about building things slowly. The noose hasn't tightened yet. Usually what happens is the news tightens, and only then do people understand the urgency of the moment. My biggest fear is that the whole thing comes crashing down before we're ready. And before we’ve achieved some measure of autonomy.

Of course, we won’t achieve, let's say, full political autonomy until the whole thing goes belly up—but we don't even need that. We just need to be able to get out from under the thumb of Blue industries, finance, culture, education, communications, economy and government and live our own lives according to our values.

Everybody has a stake in this, and everyone has a role to play. if you've got a business of any size—large, small, mega corporation, whatever it is—figure out how you can modestly or fully orient it towards helping our people. For example, if you've got a sneaker company, sell expressly to folks on the right. Cater to Red customers the same way that Nike caters to Blue customers. I mean, when they have Colin Kaepernick in their ads, what they're saying to Red America is, “we don't want you to buy our shoes—or at least, we couldn’t care less if you did.” Let’s buy shoes from companies that not only don’t despise us, but is proud to have us as customers.