What Happened to Richard John Neuhaus + On Vacation

Carmeltopia, the new era of civility in New York City, and more in this week's roundup.

Note: Since we did not take a vacation this summer, I am going to be on vacation next week. There will be no posts. I’m opening comments to all on this post while I’m gone so everyone can weigh in on my question about Richard John Neuhaus below.

What I’m reading: Up from Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America by Michael Lind and Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki.

Carmeltopia

Many of you know that I live in Carmel, Indiana. It’s a town that the Wall Street Journal called Carmel “the Internet’s favorite small city.”

I have an essay in the latest City Journal magazine that examines Carmel’s success, and describes its Republican governance approach as a model for suburban governments. It’s not applicable for everyplace. But if Republicans can’t find a way to create a higher status, more moderate, more pro-investment approach to include in its repertoire, the suburban shift towards the Democrats will only accelerate.

The most famous of Carmel’s innovations is its use of roundabouts at street intersections. Roundabouts offer numerous advantages over traditional intersections. When traffic is light to moderate, cars typically don’t have to stop at roundabouts, reducing delays and tailpipe emissions. Roundabouts are safer, all but eliminating often-fatal high-speed, head-on, right-angle “T-bone” collisions. They require no electricity and keep functioning even when the power goes out. Since there isn’t a captive audience of stopped cars every light cycle, they tend not to attract panhandlers. Likewise, they eliminate the dangerous phenomenon of cars gunning it to make it through a green light.

If roundabouts are in fashion today, Carmel is one of the places that made them so. It has built more than 150, more than anywhere else in the United States. It’s possible to drive through Carmel without ever having to stop. Carmel may be one of the few growing American cities where traffic is better than it was 20 years ago.

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Carmel is situated in a midwestern metro region that is not large like New York, not wealthy like San Francisco, and not a boomtown national talent destination like Nashville. Its remarkable success derives partly from its leadership and governance approach, developed by the long-serving Mayor Brainard and embraced by the city’s Republican leadership. It’s a formula from the Republican Party’s moderate wing: built on political leadership, with an empowered mayor utilizing public-sector investment, focused on community improvement in areas within city government’s control, with commonsense center-right politics.

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The last, and critical, element of Carmel’s success: its Republicans govern from the commonsense center. What is the commonsense center? It is predicated on several themes: a strong public-safety and policing culture; low taxes and effective governance; heavy investment in first-class infrastructure, amenities, and other public goods and services; sweating the details on things like maintenance and operations; welcoming and embracing all people, regardless of race, sexuality, politics, or religion; friendliness to business and commerce; smart climate policies; civil discourse and disagreement—and an avoidance of extreme ideologies.

Many centrist Republican politicians get blasted by populist voters as RINOs—Republicans in Name Only. While undoubtedly a moderate, Brainard was the rare Republican politician who talked more liberally than he governed. For example, he frequently averred that climate change was real and said that the city had to act. He served on an Obama administration climate-change task force. Yet most of his climate-change-mitigation efforts in Carmel were things that he would have done anyway: building bike paths, adding new park acreage, constructing denser multiuse districts. He did not impose onerous green energy mandates on buildings, ban gasoline-powered lawn machinery, attempt to eliminate single-family zoning, or try to get rid of cars—all things touted by the climate-activist Left. Brainard told Governing that “[s]ingle-use zoning is very bad,” but he made no attempt to alter it in most of his city. He enthusiastically championed diversity in Carmel but didn’t engage in antiwhite polemics or criticize religious conservatives or other groups.

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Only Republicans can deliver on this commonsense approach. While centrist Republicans like Brainard and Finkam can easily hold edgy right-wing groups at bay, it is extremely difficult for any Democratic politician to do the equivalent regarding left-wing activist groups. As the recent campaign illustrated, a Democratic victory in Carmel would have meant at least four years of local residents being called racists and other names. No wonder voters rejected it.

Click over to read the whole thing.

When you add it all up, Carmel’s combination of moderate housing costs by national standards; low taxes; business friendliness; solid red-state governance; commonsense-center city politics; great schools; and high-quality infrastructure, amenities, and city services makes it the best city of its type in the country for a more center-right conservative to live.

I also wrote an essay about Carmel here in my newsletter if you are interested.

A Moderate Republican Approach That Actually Delivers Results

Civilizing New York City

I also have a piece in Compact Magazine on how New York’s mean streets are no more.

After moving to the Upper West Side, I managed to convince my father to come visit me in the fall of 2015. It was his first visit since that consulting experience in the late 1970s. After spending a long weekend enjoying the city, we had a final lunch at an outdoor café. I asked him what the biggest change was from 1978. I expected him to say something about safety, or a lack of graffiti. His answer surprised me. 

“I can’t believe how nice everybody is,” he said. “Back then, I was always fighting with people—fighting with cab drivers, fighting with waiters. People were always shaking their fist at you.”

But I thought about it and realized he was right: People in Gotham are very nice today. The city’s reputation from movies I’d watched was of a hyper-aggressive city of macho toughness. I was expecting people to say things like, “You, f—ing f—, if you do that again I’ll f— you up.” But the entire time I lived there, only one person ever yelled at me like that.

In fact, I found New Yorkers to be as nice as Chicagoans or the inhabitants of other Midwestern cities.

Click over to read the whole thing.

What Happened to Richard John Neuhaus?

While telling his history of America in Democracy and Solidarity, James Davison Hunter told couplet stories of contrasting people on the left and right to illustrate his narrative of the evolution of what he calls America’s hybrid Enlightenment. He contrasts John Dewey with Reinhold Niebuhr in one such pairing. And Richard Rorty with Richard John Neuhaus in another.

In both cases the reputation of the conservative seems to have suffered more than the liberal. Niebuhr was once a giant but fell tremendously in stature, although is still referenced, still has a following (including, famously, by Barack Obama), and is experiencing something of perhaps a nascent renaissance.

The same happened to Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor who became a Catholic priest, a civil rights activist who marched with Martin Luther King, a co-founder of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, and later the leader of the Catholic neoconservatives and founding editor of First Things.

Hunter writes of him, “At the time of his death in 2009, Neuhaus was arguably the most famous conservative Catholic in America.”

For whatever reason, probably because I’m not Catholic, I’d never even heard of Neuhaus until after he died, but he appears to have been a very major figure who only died 15 years ago. Yet he’s almost completely disappeared from the discourse. I rarely see him referenced, and when I do it’s almost always by someone who is trying to criticize today’s First Things by talking about how Neuhaus felt differently on some point.

I wanted to ask Hunter about this, but had to cut that question due to time constraints. I’m wondering what those who were more familiar with him have to say about this. Perhaps it’s as simple as his being gone long enough to be forgotten but not long enough to be rediscovered.

What do you think accounts for the rapid disappearance of Neuhaus?

Best of the Web

Financial Times: Porn streamer OnlyFans paid owner $630mn in dividends - Subscription streaming company’s payouts to ‘creators’ rise to $6.6bn

Ari Schulman/NYT: The World Isn’t Ready for What Comes After I.V.F.

WSJ: Nation With Lowest Birthrate Is Rocked by Soaring Sales of Dog Strollers - The article is about South Korea, but it’s the case here too. I started noticing in NYC more people buying strollers and carriers for their pets that were very similar to those for babies. There’s nothing wrong with getting a pet if you don’t have kids. It’s probably a great idea. But there is something shifting in the psychology in the way people are now anthropomorphizing these animals.

Someone linked to this interesting piece from 2023 by Ruxandra Teslo arguing that aristocratic women played a far smaller role in the rise of Christianity than commonly believed. It’s an examination of part of the book The Making of a Christian Aristocracy by Michele Renee Salzman. Teslo writes:

It seems the idea of women as major players in Christianisation started with the theologian Adolf Harnack in 1902. In one of his key pieces of work, he hypothesizes Christianity took hold of upper class women to a disproportionate extent. All subsequent works on the topic have been influenced by him. Indeed, Henry Chadwick, the famous theologian, writes in 1967 that “Christianity seems to have been especially successful among women. It was often through the wives that it penetrated the upper classes of society in the first instance”. Later on, feminist scholars embraced this idea and were rather keen to perpetuate and emphasize the role women played in the early Christian Church.

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What about all the textual evidence and the examples of prominent women in the Early Church? The author argues the textual and literary evidence has often been misinterpreted, as well as cherry picked. And, even accepting the most generous reading of the texts brought forward by past historians, the role of women in Early Christianisation is still greatly smaller than that of men. Indeed, what could have been a decent argument in the vein of “Maybe women had a bigger role than one would expect given the patriarchal nature of society at the time” suddenly turned into “Aristocratic women were the major drivers of Christianisation”.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest on Tony Hodge’s podcast and was mentioned in this piece by Andy Naselli.

New this week:

• My podcast was with James Davison Hunter about Democracy and Solidarity.

• I also wrote a piece about Hunter’s book, talking about the great unraveling of the American Experiment.

• Again, my article about Carmel appeared in City Journal and my piece about New York’s culture in Compact.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Remember, I’ll be on vacation next week so see you after the break.