The issue is that technology continues to progress, both lowering the need for rural populations and raising the sustainable population density.
You are considering it in only one aspect while ignoring important economic calculus.
Those technologies " raising the sustainable population density" aren't free.
They aren't even cheap.
If housing people in cities was cheap, the living costs there would have been low...
And speaking of need for rural populations, ask the same question about city populations.
Yeah, automation affects both...
The trend has always been towards growing more urban over time, until a major civilizational breakdown causes the technological and economic factors to reverse.
Look at what's happening in these cities. Its almost as if they are begging for more or less soft variation of that. Does going full Detroit count as civilizational breakdown?
You can't pack up and move a million people out of the Bronx, San Francisco isn't shrinking without a full-on Depression, and flat-out rural areas continue to have terrible network access because that's infrastructure that scales poorly with area.
As someone who lives a continent away in a sub 5k pop town with decent 20mbps+ internet, i say its more complicated than just that. Many US cities have bad internet issues too....
Of course you won't have millions suddenly moving out, think more of first strangling the flow of people there, and then slow trickle outwards to suburbs/exurbs, with follow up spill to rural areas.
What you'll be seeing best case is a new wave of suburban sprawl, and even that's iffy because of the necessary in-person services. Telework needs computer hardware and extremely reliable network connections.
Computer hardware is a truly petty issue nowdays in a grand list of problems, and internet infrastructure is a more worthy investment than make-work economy for most dysfunctional cities.
The riot plague is not a native result of urban factors, but an outcome of an incomprehensibly complex series of functions, mostly centering on multiculturalist nonsense leading to immense internal friction. Civic Nationalism could cure the current riot plague, utterly independently of degree of urbanization.
Nationalism of any variation and definition is not on the minds of cultural and political elites of the cities, and the variation is just a function of how exactly offensive they would find it.
Its a non-starter for them. You would need to make these elites change, change the elites, or live with the current status quo until its collapse ruins said elites.
The issue with the immigrants is that they hold beliefs and practices caustic to the countries they're migrating to. Not some innate, instinctual blight, but the fact their culture simply doesn't fit inside ours. A melting pot works fine, as it boils everything down to one set of values, the problem is the enclaves forming "cultural mosaics".
The hidden question is
which set of values.
And you are still missing the overarching issue - the very idea pressuring or forcing the vibrantly diverse cultures to conform to American, which they would call "white" values, is offensive to the abovementioned elites and all their supporters.
Cheap immigrant labor isn't voters, at least yet.
There are several avenues through which they become voters or equivalent, currently all of these avenues are matters of hot political debate and even supreme court cases.
Those politics are the behind-closed-doors policy positions of the politicians, not what it is the city folk vote for. The city folk are voting for "helping the poor" and "checking privilege".
Yes, so lets translate it from political speak to simple language - they are being fooled, successfully and enthusiastically, by simple, ideologically flavored propaganda, which they eat up, like anything else with that ideological flavor. Perfect for making lives of politicians easier, but completely antithetical to any sort of nationalism or traditional American values.
Merit and civic nationalism can be sold to this mindset,
In what world? Have you seen all the affirmative action pushing and propagandaizing that has only intensified since the riots?
The mindset itself, the priority, existence and importance of concerns involved are the core of the cultural problem i've mentioned.
The point is, the right can't sustainably convince people with that mindset to itself, the only way it can win is change the mindset, and then there is no need to cater to it anyway.
The Right needs to learn how to do this, tackling the same concerns with its own policies, because it's otherwise going to fall to the same preference cascades and purity spirals the Left is suffering now, be locked away in a powerless bubble, or turn into a mirror of the Left.
Can't happen in current setup of "the right" - it doesn't have a singular ideological, semi-religious even, leading ideology equivalent to the intersectionality based, cultural marxist worldview of the left. It has several ideological camps, if it was to purity spiral, it would first need to decide according to which camp the purity is to be decided - religious right, libertarian, neocon, national-populist etc?
It's not make-work, it's actual work with unusually good terms. Jobs the community actually has need of, like proper grocers to deal with the "food desert" issue, hiring locals and giving pay above the strictly sensible despite (most kinds of) criminal records so there's the impetus for that change. It's directly constructing the economic situation in microcosm to habituate the community to the necessary behaviors. The benefits need to be clear before the cultural change can happen, because there's otherwise no reason to take the risk.
As i said, throwing money won't fix cultural problems. Like your example of food deserts - what good does overpaying the staff there do, when the problem is simply that these stores take too much loss from local crime and other troublesome behavior, and a lot of people don't wanna buy the oh so complained about "healthy foods" anyway, so the stores that do survive don't bother stocking it, because it just takes space and spoils?
If you artificially sponsor these communities benefits of cultural change, where's their motivation for it, when they can enjoy the benefits of it without changing at all?
Its just more roundabout way to have social welfare, by building a whole pretend economy around it, sponsored by taxpayers, who would hopefully not leave, like NYC seems to be fearing now.
New York City Bill de Blasio Thursday continued his push for a tax on wealthy New Yorkers after Gov. Andrew Cuomo publicly pleaded for rich city dwellers to return to the city...
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