The four most prominent characteristics of the Trump penthouse—its phenomenal size, ornamental gaudiness, aping of the European royalty and affinity with classical European artistic traditions, and public conspicuousness—are also how earlier generations of upper-class New Yorkers used their homes to display their wealth and power and convey their distinction. This pattern was at its height during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, during the reign of famous uber-capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, with whom Trump seems to identify. Prior to the late 19th century, the houses of elite New Yorkers were decidedly more modest than they became in the Gilded Age; afterwards, the wealthy generally chose to shield their residences from public scrutiny and their tastes shifted away from the classical and neo-classical.

Among the handful of upper-class homes built in Manhattan during the colonial period that survive today is the Morris-Jumel Mansion in the present-day Washington Heights section of the upper part of the island, which was constructed in 1765 as a country house for Roger and Mary Morris. Roger Morris had been a colonel in the British Army and was a member of the royal governor’s executive council; Mary Morris was the daughter of Frederick Philipse, one of the wealthiest men in New York colony. Their country estate covered 130 acres of woodlots, orchards, and pastures and offered sweeping views of both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, lower Manhattan, and what is now the Bronx. The Morrises’ primary residence stood at the corner of Whitehall Street and Stone Street in lower Manhattan, close to the Bowling Green neighborhood that stood as the most exclusive enclave in the colonial city.

Another example of an upper-class New York City home from this same period was the six-room, two-story brick house where Abraham Lodge, a prosperous attorney, and his family resided during the 1750s. The Lodge mansion employed superior building materials such as brick and glass which had been previously unavailable in the colonies in either quantity or quality, and its interior boasted fine furnishings—many of them imported from Europe—that displayed the refinement and gentility of its owners.

Few images of the Morris country mansion appear to exist, but contemporaries remarked on its large size (for its time) and its elegant Palladian architecture. The Morrises were Tories who fled the United States following the American Revolution, and their country estate was seized under forfeiture laws and fell into disrepair. In 1810, the house was purchased by Stephen Jumel, a wealthy French merchant, and his wife Eliza, who remodeled it in the Federalist style that was then the height of architectural elegance, adding a columned portico and overhauling the interior. Today, it is a historic house museum.

By the 1830s, the city’s prime upper-class residential area was the Lafayette Place-Bond Street neighborhood in what is now Greenwich Village. As the economy of New York City took off after the War of 1812 and the merchants’ offices, warehouses, shops, and rooming house that were the products of this urban economic boom began to encroach on old elite neighborhoods (like Bowling Green) in lower Manhattan, upper-class New Yorkers relocated to new neighborhoods like Lafayette Place-Bond Street that were emerging on the periphery of the built-up area. There, merchants, lawyers, bankers, and physicians settled in newly fashionable row houses and mansions. In 1835, Seabury Tredwell, a prosperous hardware importer, and his wife Eliza bought a red brick and marble row house on a block of Fourth Street in the Lafayette Place-Bond Street enclave for $18,000 (which would be equal to $460,000 today). While many similar dwellings that went up in this vicinity before the Civil War were subsequently demolished or transformed beyond recognition, this house and its furnishings have been preserved almost completely intact because the youngest Tredwell daughter continued to live there until her death at age 93 in 1933. Three years later, the building became the site of what is now the Merchant’s House Museum.

Able to live well, if not as extravagantly as their nouveau riches neighbors the Astors and the Vanderbilts, the Tredwells made use of their city house (and their country estate in Rumson, New Jersey) to corroborate their wealth, prestige, and taste. The front and rear parlors that occupied most of its first floor had wooden Ionic columns and plaster moldings inspired by the fashionable Greek Revival design. New household technologies like the Tredwells’ modern bell system and cookstove became status symbols for elites.

In the late 1860s and the 1870s, upper-class residences resumed their progression up the east side of Manhattan. They were displaced from the pre-Civil War elite neighborhoods (like Lafayette Place-Bond Street) as retail shops, stables, warehouses, and middle- and working-class inhabitants overtook those areas, while also being pulled further uptown by the open space and larger lots available there. In the 1880s the finest upper-class neighborhood in the city was Murray Hill, which occupied a corridor that ran up Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue starting at around 23rd Street. Extravagant mansions occupied the corner lots in Murray Hill, including Alexander T. Stewart’s at Fifth Avenue and Broadway, Leonard Jerome’s at Madison and 26th Street, and Collis P. Huntington’s at 57th and Fifth Avenue. Stewart was an Irish-born entrepreneur who opened the first department store in the United States, the famed Marble Palace at 280 Broadway in New York City in 1848, and who went on to make a fortune from retailing; Jerome was a stock speculator as well as a sports aficionado who participated in yachting and thoroughbred horse racing; and Huntington was one of the promoters who constructed the Central Pacific portion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad.

Many of the architects who built these Gilded Age mansions had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and their designs mimicked Georgian town houses, Venetian palazzos, and French chateaus. Richard Morris Hunt created the mansion of William K. and Alva Vanderbilt at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street in the style of a French Renaissance chateau. It was built primarily by craftsmen brought over from Europe, and decorated with stone and wood carvings, stained glass, and embroidered textiles imported from the continent. Even grander was the 130-room palace of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, which occupied an entire block front on the west side of Fifth Avenue from 57th Street to 58th Street, and to this day is the largest single-family house ever built in New York City. Seabury and Eliza Tredwell’s row house (which had 17 rooms and 7,100 square feet of inhabitable space) could fit inside this Vanderbilt colossus 10 or 12 times over.

By the end of the 19th century, New York City guidebooks were lavishing 10 or 15 pages apiece on Murray Hill, with some laying out stage coach or pedestrian tours that let tourists “pass miles of the most magnificent and costly residences in America.” They supplied the home addresses of grandees such as Cornelius Vanderbilt II, John Jacob Astor IV, and John D. Rockefeller, along with descriptions of their mansions that estimated their construction costs. Like tourist maps that show the location of the homes of celebrities in Los Angeles today, these guides encouraged visitors to gawk at the fairytale mansions in Murray Hill. With their showmanship, ostentation and huge expense, these mansions advertised the achievements of their robber baron owners.

Since the Gilded Age, the homes of upper-class New Yorkers have gone in divergent directions. Many elites became concerned about their privacy and security and either moved their primary residences out of the city altogether or lived in apartment buildings, like the River House, at 435 East 52nd Street. After World War I and World War II devastated European societies and brought about the political and financial eclipse of their hereditary peerages, the European aristocracy lost most of its allure for rich New Yorkers. While the stuffy European traditions and the over-the-top displays of ornamental splendor of the Gilded Age never entirely faded away, in the 1950s elite New Yorkers with fashionable tastes began to adopt a modernist aesthetic, and by the 1970s they preferred more vernacular styles as they went about gentrifying brownstone neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and former industrial areas like Soho and Tribeca. For the most part, wealthy New Yorkers who were alert to contemporary design tastes and social values no longer modeled their residences on the palaces and manor houses of the European royalty; once au courant, those styles now seemed dull and passé. Donald J. Trump’s Manhattan high-rise home is a throwback to the time when the New York upper class was at the pinnacle of its power and wealth, and did not shrink from commanding others to do its bidding.

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I’m a real estate agent in South L.A. The scarcity of inventory has created a seller’s market and left a lot of buyers wondering how they can get their offers accepted among the frenzy. In this market, buyers have to move fast and bid above the asking price to win the bidding war. I can’t remember the last time a client bid below asking price and got an acceptance. Such is life in today’s South L.A. housing market.

If you live in South L.A., as I do, it’s obvious why so many people are trying to buy here. The inventory is low for a reason—not too many people want to leave, and where else could they go that is equally fabulous and affordable? This is especially true for the seniors who’ve been living in the community for many years. On the other end of the spectrum, there are many buyers coming over this way who have been priced out of the West Side, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. South L.A. is an ideal alternative for them because it’s close to Culver City, LAX, downtown, USC, and the 10, 110, 405, and 105 freeways.

Many of the neighborhoods where I do business—like Windsor Hills, Baldwin Hills, View Park, and Park Hills Heights—are located on a hill, so you get magnificent views. The houses are gorgeous, spacious, and stylish—buyers are really getting a bang for their buck. And there is so much soul on our blocks. There are generations of folks who have upheld the community with tender loving care and the utmost pride. There are still block clubs and block parties—there is a distinct community here. I should know, I’ve lived in Leimert Park for many years and now Windsor Hills.

I love the ease and convenience of living here, the vitality of Leimert Park Village during a festival, and the beauty of Kenneth Hahn State Park, the prettiest place in the city, with its 360-degree view of the city I love the most. I used to think, “Why aren’t more people coming to buy these beautiful homes in the Crenshaw District and across South L.A.?” It used to feel like I was in on a big secret—not any more. Open houses are packed every weekend and there are multiple offers on everything!

The high housing prices just about everywhere, and the improved safety and growth in South L.A., have brought many Angelenos to the area. The downside to the new interest is that I see many people who grew up in South L.A. and want to buy here, but can’t afford it. One of my missions is to help people like that figure things out—too many people don’t even try to pursue the idea of purchasing a home because of prices and competition. A lot of prospective homeowners are still under the impression you need a 20 percent down payment and a perfect credit score. You don’t— 3.5 percent down, a 620 score, a winning mindset, and a well-connected agent will get you there. You just have to be brave, and willing to stick it out.

It’s so nerve-wracking for these new buyers. I’ve made a habit of investing an hour (or two) to explain the market and answer questions on what to expect in the escrow process. I have a “to do” list with 12 key items covering basics from preparing an offer, what escrow is, looking out for important deadlines, how to make an offer, how to protect your earnest money deposit, and what the home inspection is going to be like. My sessions tend to have a special emphasis on how to cope with the emotional aspect of the transaction, something I can empathize with after having bought and sold my own home. I even do a few check-in calls throughout the process to see how they’re feeling about it all. A great deal of psychology is involved here. Positive encouragement is a must.

Of course, in this area once you’ve got the keys, you’re getting some headaches too. The big question in South L.A. is: When are the public services going to catch up with the needs and lifestyles of community? I live here too and have small kids, and so I, like my clients, need to see South L.A. fulfill more of its potential. The need for more affordable housing is obvious, we need more parks (especially parks tucked away from major traffic), and we’re desperate for better roads and more sidewalks. There are people who live in Baldwin Hills who would like to walk down La Brea to the grocery store, without dealing with 40-mile-per-hour traffic. But there’s no sidewalk on that stretch of street.

Another grave issue is that the schools have been a huge disappointment. We have some pretty good preschools, but elementary and junior high schools could be better. Crenshaw and Dorsey High Schools are OK, and View Park Prep is strong but many parents believe it should be better organized.

While there are some retail and grocery options, South L.A. still has a long way to go. The produce selection at many of our major grocery chain outlets here would be totally unacceptable in Beverly Hills or Brentwood. I’d love to be able to do all my shopping and spend all my dollars in the community, but it’s tough. So I do what I can, including attending neighborhood council and stakeholders meetings. I’ve even made cash donations for special improvement projects in Leimert Park. I have also made a commitment to order books by calling Eso Won Books (in Leimert Park Village) instead of clicking Amazon, and I can usually pick them up the next day.

I am a big believer that there are no new problems in the universe—all these issues have remedies! The keys to progress will be collective effort and pooled resources. I think a lot about the late Lark Galloway-Gilliam, who lived in Leimert Park—she would always say that we all need to “slow down, be present, and listen (to each other).” I would love to see neighbors old and new talk to each other more, even if it’s about ethnicity or race. It’s hard to get your neighborhood together if you don’t really know each other. Nothing can be resolved without true and honest dialogue from the community. Hopefully after conversing, folks will see that the most significant commonality is the desire to build a better community for the sake of our children. Raw dialogue can be uncomfortable but it is often where brilliant ideas and strategies for change can emerge.

The post The Secret Is Out, South L.A. Is One of the City’s Hottest Housing Markets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By 2010 this ethnic change in South L.A. had continued such that people of Mexican ethnicity outnumbered blacks everywhere east of Interstate 110, from Watts north to Interstate 10.

The two of us have long studied the ethnic quilt of Southern California, and recently updated our 1997 book on the subject. For us, the story of South L.A. is part of a larger, shifting story of segregation and desegregation. This second change—of blacks shifting and being replaced by Latinos— is not special to South L.A.; it has occurred in other once-segregated ghettos in Altadena-Pasadena, Monrovia, Pacoima, Long Beach, and San Bernardino.

Housing and home ownership are at the center of this story.

From roughly 1920 through the 1960s, white society generally did not permit blacks to own or rent housing outside certain areas. Restrictions on the future sale of a home to only whites were widely found on property deeds, and mortgage lenders usually restricted tightly the area within which they would provide a loan to a black family (a practice known as redlining).

Between discrimination in the job market and
low levels of educational attainment, even blacks who owned houses in these areas often did not have the money to maintain the housing very well. These difficulties in homeownership and maintenance resulted in increasingly poor and crowded housing in the ghettos. South Central (now South LA.), named because it focused along Central Avenue, was the largest such ghetto in the region.

When segregation began weakening during the 1960s, some middle-class blacks left behind the oldest and poorest housing east of I-110. They moved westward into other South L.A. neighborhoods or to Inglewood or southward into small cities like Compton, Gardena, and Carson.

While the public often associates the 1980s and 1990s in South L.A. with crime, the 1992 riots, and related challenges, there was another reality: housing prices were rising along with home ownership. In the 1990s, in fact, professor James Craine of Cal State Northridge has shown that housing prices in the South L.A. area increased faster than those in Los Angeles County as a whole. By the 2000 census, 40 percent of black households in South L.A. were owner-occupied, according to USC Professor Dowell Myers.

Behind those rapidly rising prices was strong demand on the part of Latinos, especially young Mexican and Mexican-American families. That demand, and the price trend, have mostly continued, with the exception of the Great Recession, which began in 2008.

One result: many black families in South L.A. have built substantial equity in their homes from earlier decades, giving them much more choice about where to live. And people have taken advantage of that choice, with former residents of South L.A. dispersing across other areas of Southern California.

Blacks in the San Fernando Valley, for example, have become widely distributed, though primarily in neighborhoods where housing costs are relatively low or average. In more distant places like Lancaster, Palmdale, Victorville, and Moreno Valley, some blacks were able to purchase inexpensive new homes, priced low because those locations meant long commutes to jobs.

Population numbers can disguise this dispersal. Between 1990 and 2010 the number of blacks in the five-county area increased by 1 percent. That small change hides the fact that blacks in Los Angeles County decreased by 6 percent during this period. But the number of blacks in Orange County grew by 43 percent during the same period, with even faster growth in other outlying counties.

Within the cities of L.A. County, a similar dispersal pattern emerges. Blacks now comprise just 9.6 percent of Los Angeles City’s population while blacks represent a quarter of the residents of Gardena and Carson. But the place with the highest percentage of blacks in the five counties of Southern California is a prosperous and unincorporated neighborhood bordering South L.A., View Park-Windsor Hills, where 85 percent of the population is black.

View Park is a reminder that the broader dispersal of blacks across the region is not the whole story. There is still a large area of South L.A. in which blacks comprise at least 45 percent of the total population. This includes View Park-Windsor Hills and the mostly middle-class black populations of Baldwin Hills and Inglewood.

Many blacks who could afford to move far from South L.A. prefer to stay more closely connected with community there, and some who have lived in neighborhoods with very few blacks have moved back to South L.A. for reasons of cultural comfort—to be closer to the institutions, services, and retailers that serve that large black population. Middle-class blacks have developed a strong social, cultural, and commercial focus in Leimert Park.

Despite the recent dispersal, Los Angeles remains quite segregated between blacks and whites. The level of residential segregation can be measured by what demographers call “the index of dissimilarity,” the most widely used statistic for this purpose. John Logan and colleagues at Brown University have calculated that L.A. is the 14th most highly segregated of the 50 U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest black populations.

But such a ranking represents an improvement. Our calculations for 1960 show Los Angeles as the second most segregated metropolitan area in the country; in that year, only Chicago was more segregated.

We have found the segregation that still lingers is no higher between whites and blacks than between whites and Mexicans, or Chinese, or Salvadorans, to name a few of the many new immigrant groups creating their own communities among friends and family who have also made the journey to Los Angeles County.

Those communities may too disperse in time. L.A.’s desegregation since 1960 was most directly the result of blacks moving slowly but steadily out of their segregated ghettos into what had been mostly white suburban neighborhoods. Our mapping shows that the major sources of the diminished numbers of blacks in L.A. County are still those leaving old black concentrations that had been built up in the days of segregated housing.

So South L.A., as now constituted, represents a legacy of both segregation and desegregation. Or to put it another way: South L.A. and its people, through their movement, have reshaped not only their region but also communities throughout Southern California.

The post South L.A. Is a Story of Both Segregation and Desegregation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Think of voting in a place where 52 percent of the voters rent government-owned housing at steeply reduced prices; another 32 percent rent from the wealthiest resident family. The remaining 14 percent either hold office in that government’s highest positions or own some of its biggest businesses. Don’t forget that many of the other people living in this place work for this government and its wealthiest family. More importantly, the ruling family’s biggest customer is the government. That family also supports and employs the officials who run for office.

You might wonder if this as an allegory of a government-run society that has almost swallowed up what remains of its private sector. But, no, my fable is about an actual place; the City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley—a place that is a precursor of the privatization of everything public—prisons, schools, universities, health care, military, even our state security apparatus.

Those who live in it, or in its shadow, simply call it Industry. Whichever name you give it, its Manticore-shaped boundaries include about 2,500 businesses, a day-time work force of 50,000, but a resident population of no more than 200. Until a few years ago, it was ruled by the Perez family. And the election I asked you to imagine voting in occurred on June 2, when voters there returned a Perez-backed council majority to power.

Industry’s privatization saga, however, was years in the making. It began in 1954 when James M. Stafford, a large landowner and grain mill operator serving on the Los Angeles County regional planning commission, committed a series of conflicts of interest to prevent the nearby blue-collar suburb of La Puente from putting his property inside the boundaries of its proposed city. In his official capacity, Stafford and his powerful mentor, County Supervisor Herb Legg, launched technical challenges to stall La Puente’s cityhood petition drive. Behind the scenes, Stafford, with the county government’s backing, organized landowners inside the La Puente Valley’s industrial corridor to submit their own cityhood petition to include its freeways, railroad lines, and industrially-zoned property—and to exclude its homeowners. This elimination of Industry’s electoral opposition came to be known as the “zero population growth” policy.

Restricting the proposed city’s population to its land-owning class left Industry with too few people to meet the legal minimum for incorporation. To get around those rules, the city performed its own special math: The founders counted the El Encanto Sanitarium’s 131 patients and 31 employees to meet the residential requirements for cityhood.

But that was not the end of the fight. Local property owner Walter Pyne challenged Industry’s incorporation alleging that Stafford, the second-largest property owner in the newly proposed city, abused his position for personal gain. The Southern Pacific Railroad, the new city’s biggest landowner, took Pyne’s lawsuit seriously. It sent a pair of its real estate buyers to persuade Pyne to sell them on an option on his property. The railroad needed Industry’s incorporation to protect its rail switching yard and its development plans from residential encroachment. The railroad succeeded. Though there are few remaining public records documenting the deal, we know that Southern Pacific resold the option to a shadowy firm called Canyon Rock Products; the notary who officially recorded the deal was named Glenn R. Watson, who just happened to be Stafford’s lead defense lawyer against Pyne’s lawsuit.

With Pyne out of the way, Industry incorporated in 1957. Watson, incidentally, was promptly appointed Industry’s first City Attorney. Stafford didn’t even need to be elected to continue wielding influence and that’s how Industry liked it: He still got to decide which of his pals got the sweet service contracts or the much more lucrative real estate development deals that were later bankrolled with state redevelopment funds.

Industry’s incorporation story, however, was no outlier. It simply wedded two powerful definitions of municipal purpose from its neighbors –the City of Vernon’s 1920s era industry-only model and the City of Lakewood’s contracting out of its public services to private contractors – to organize its government like a private enterprise. Industry’s political philosophy was only an incrementally more radical expression of the already aggressive laissez faire ideology practiced by the developers who were using the Lakewood Plan to build in a dozen other newly incorporated cities in Los Angeles County.

Over the years, the city and its business owners consolidated its privatizing gains by carefully crafting a kind of indentured electorate. As in Vernon (before scandal forced that city to increase its housing stock of city-owned apartments to diversify its electorate), 84 percent of Industry’s voters now rent their homes from City Hall or from the Perez family. Leases for homes there can require as little as $675 a month (or less than half the going rate for comparable lodging), and implicitly communicate their quid pro quo expectations to voters. So it’s not surprising that under these circumstances the Perez family, who inherited the city’s administrative apparatus after Stafford was convicted of bid-rigging and contract-skimming in 1984, would regain control of their city.

Nor was it a big surprise when, following the public embarrassment of a 2009 Los Angeles Times investigation, a city audit in May concluded that Industry had paid former mayor Dave Perez and his family’s other businesses more than $326 million for their services over a 20-year period, including “$4.9 million,” the Times reported, “for lawn mower rental and street cleaning fees billed at six times a competitor’s rate.”

What was surprising was that a majority of Industry’s city council had emerged to challenge the Perez family and the city’s established order. Mayor Dave Perez suddenly stepped down in 2012, citing health issues, but amid allegations that one of his family-owned firms had used a 19-acre parcel of city-owned land for free without the city’s permission. That revelation was a by-product of the state’s decision to shut down local redevelopment agencies in 2011. The state created an inventory of real estate that Industry’s redevelopment agencies would have to sell off, and that forced the city to explain why the former mayor had used the parcel since 2001 without paying rent or signing a contract. The city council couldn’t settle its differences with Dave Perez and thus filed a lawsuit against in 2012.

The audit’s release upped the ante in this dispute when it gave the anti-Perez group the confidence to cancel its trash-hauling contract with the Perez operation; the audit also sparked separate investigations by the District Attorney and California State Controller. The anti-Perez council majority’s move to stay in power also upset the rarely interrupted practice in which their council predecessors left office before their terms ran out so that their colleagues could appoint their replacements. The stage was set, in other words, for one of the rarest events in Industry’s history: a contested election.

The Perez clan ran a slate of their own candidates to oust the council members who they had previously put in place but had dared challenge them. But the campaign that followed was rather anti-climactic. No debates about the cost of letting Industry hollow out the democratic principles of city government. No debate about how Industry might mitigate its massive carbon footprint and particulate pollution spewed from the trucks and trains that shuttle the port’s goods to its warehouses and factories. Instead, anti-Perez candidate, Mayor Tim Spohn, reinforced this silence when he assured the news media that there were actually no issues to debate, and that the election contest would not interrupt the city’s smooth operation.

That’s why the contest came down to which faction would best represent the interests of its property- and business-owning “citizens,” and their rent- and job-dependent voting proxies. The anti-Perez faction wanted to serve the city’s business sector by making the principles of fiscal prudency part of its administrative ethic. The Perez clan promised to restore Industry to its “former glory,” leaving voters to fill in their own blank about what that meant.

The victory of the Perez-backed slate, while not a surprise, disappointed those who had expected something to come of recent media attention. And concerned San Gabriel Valley residents should not expect much from the ongoing investigations. Previous investigations against the city (about nine, counting the D.A.’s and controller’s probes) have proved only that its officials enjoyed the legal authority to grant the Perez family, and many others, lucrative service and development contracts. There have been two exceptions to this rule: the FBI investigation that culminated in a criminal conviction against Stafford in 1984 on bid-rigging and contract-skimming charges and District Attorney Ira Reiner’s successful 1985 civil action against a former Industry City Attorney for self-dealing in selecting the city’s municipal bond broker. But neither of these cases altered the structure of Industry’s government and its relationships to contractors or developers.

If you want change Industry, you have to dismantle the privatizing forces that have made this city immune to meaningful reform. It begins with realizing that cities, including Industry, are the sum of laws, accounting methods, the stories they tell about themselves and administrative techniques that structure their power relations and shape their built environments. Industry’s most important strains of governmental DNA include its industrial-only purpose; creative boundary drawing that keeps out the meddling suburban rabble; media narratives that code its recurring “corruption” scandals as breaches of individual morality; a model of city management that outsources municipal services to private contractors, and the California redevelopment laws and financing mechanisms that paid for its industrial development. Laws going back to the medieval city charter guarantee Industry’s fraction of sovereignty even in the face of scandal.

The best way to address our Industry problem, in other words, is to change how we think about government. We need to shift our focus from obsessing on the moral failure of individuals who have “corrupted” well-intentioned laws and look for the specific technologies that have made the privatization of government, from City Hall to the White House, seem natural and necessary.

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