For weeks on end, Americans were told to stay indoors. And for weeks on end, Americans listened (for the most part). For every social-media story and maudlin advertisement feigning concern and peddling social cohesion, heroism, and sacrifice, a governor, public-health official, talking head, Hollywood celebrity, or tenured university professor warned Americans in a very stern tone: Millions will perish if we do not continue the course.
That is, until the tragic death of George Floyd. The subsequent protests (peaceful though no less in violation of social-distancing guidelines) and the pillaging mobs (dismissive of social distancing and the precepts of civilization) have undermined months of public-health policy, and the “stay home, slow the spread,” “don’t wear a mask” — oh, wait, “wear a mask” — doctrine has been rendered meaningless, at least for the godless kneeling at the altar of wokeness. Looted small businesses, already bearing the crippling costs of lockdowns, now face property damage and depleted inventories. Economic growth and crime reduction in urban neighborhoods could be set back years, if not decades. And this is to say nothing of the families who will flee for the suburbs.
Why in the supposedly enlightened time of 2020 does the United States feel like a kingdom of hopeless serfs who must obey their hypocritical lords without dispute? If there was ever a time when we needed an investigation into the economic and social conditions that have literally and metaphorically fanned the flames of the riots, that enabled the hypocritical abandoning of lockdowns, and that set the stage for urban anarchy, it’s now. And thankfully, Joel Kotkin’s latest, The Coming Age of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, is one such book. Among the books that could end up defining the times in which we find ourselves here in the United States and throughout the world — from South America to Italy to the South China Sea — Kotkin’s work is not as widely read and discussed. But it ought to be.
Perhaps it is only when one stands before what appears to be a particularly unnerving precipice can he ask the following questions. Will tribal riots, egged on by multiculturalist doctrinaires and progressive journalists, flare up more and more often in densely populated, gentrified cities? Could a Bernie Sanders– or Jeremy Corbyn–style socialist lead the free world within the decade? Are future generations bound to become serfs in a zero-sum gig economy, toiling under surveillance systems and Chinese manufactured drones? Will they actually own anything, like a three-bedroom home? Are we misguided, conspiratorial even, to consider this future seriously?
In The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, Kotkin answers: You are not conspiratorial. We are in for revolution, but we are not doomed. Plodding through studies and demographics, he supports a thesis that is at once frightening and galvanizing: Feudalism is making a comeback as liberal capitalism loses its appeal.
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