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I went for a belated NYC run this morning, and am sorry to report that I saw very few black-clad anarchists. Also, the city is not yet in flames 1/
The political question of the day is whether Trump can win politically by hammering on a nonexistent crisis of order in America's cities. You would think not, but I'm not 100% confident 2/
As Pew had documented, we went through a quarter-century of rapidly falling crime — and all the way through, people declared that crime was rising 3/
One reason is that people live in bubbles. After 2016 there was endless reporting on how urban types don't understand the lives of guys in diners. But there's equal if not greater absence of comprehension going the other way. 4/
I haven't seen systematic polling about how rural and even some suburban Americans view life in big metropolitan areas. But my guess is that you'd find some remarkable misconceptions 5/
My favorite letter of all time was from a supporter of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who insisted that us urban Northeasterners just didn't get what life was like for people like him. "How would you feel if New York was full of immigrants?" 6/
As I mentioned in yesterday's newsletter, even some well-educated people I know believe that the brief episode of looting in the early stages of the NYC BLM protests left much of Manhattan a wreck; how many people think Portland 2020 is Newark 1967? 7/
Anyway, important to realize that claims of urban anarchy are almost entirely fantasy. 8/
