“What has made this moment feel different is not the anxiety about incivility, which has always been there, but rather the performance of it. It’s relentless.” — Molly Brady on incivility in the age of the smartphone

Whatever happened to the American front porch? Builders killed it to save money, says the Harvard law professor Molly Brady — and with this death went one of the key stages on which Americans have practiced the art of being neighbors over the last 250 years.

Brady is a contributor to America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance, a new volume of 62 essays from the Harvard Law School faculty edited by Alexandra Natapoff. Brady’s subject is the land, real-estate and local government law determining neighborliness. Thus her interest in front porches.

Brady grew up in Utica, New York — on the old Erie Canal — a Rust Belt town whose fracking fights, abandoned housing, and urban renewal steered her toward property law. Utica is also, despite its red politics, a place well versed in the art of neighborliness — with the town warmly welcoming recent Bosnian and Iraqi refugees.

Incivility isn’t new, Brady says. What’s changed, she argues, is its performative virality. With a phone in every pocket, we can now watch our fellow “citizens” behaving badly. Meanwhile the physical infrastructure of community — the front porches and corner stores — has been zoned, sprawled, and value-engineered away. Analogue porches have been replaced by digital chatrooms.

Brady’s remedy is unfashionably local. On Zoom or in person, she advises, show up at your local planning meetings. Brady even requires her Harvard students to attend at least one local meeting so as to demystify the real work of governance.

The republic, as Ben Franklin so famously warned, is ours if we can keep it. Keeping it, Molly Brady suggests, may require in-person attendance on a Wednesday night at your local planning commission. And it might also require hanging out on your porch. If the builders ever give them back to us.

Five Takeaways

• The Performance of Incivility. Incivility isn’t new. What’s new is the phone in every pocket — fellow citizens behaving horribly, at any moment, relentlessly.

• The Death of the Porch. Builders killed the porch to save money; sprawl and zoning killed the third places. Without physical competition, technology wins by default.

• Tocqueville’s Scalability Problem. Town-meeting democracy may never have scaled — but party preference tells you nothing about road paving. Darker: homevoters maximizing home values built the affordability crisis.

• Glimmers. Zoom changed who participates in land use; Newton and Cambridge show process can produce better substance. Don’t think this is for someone else.

• 2076. Best case: less demonization, real work on housing and the environment. Worst case: Atwood, civil war, environmental collapse. Men pay consultants to learn to make friends.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy America Unfinished: mitpress.mit.edu/9780262060431/america-unfinished

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: America, still unfinished
00:01:57 From Utica: fracking, abandoned housing, urban renewal
00:02:43 A J.D. Vance childhood? Yale Law classmates
00:04:58 Finished, not unfinished: the Rust Belt question
00:06:04 A republic if you can keep it
00:07:25 No escape from the original sins
00:08:38 A nation of immigrants — Bosnian newspapers in Utica
00:10:11 Was Tocqueville right?
00:12:26 Did America get too big? The scalability problem
00:13:33 Incivility: always a concern, now a performance
00:15:15 Blame the Internet? Zittrain and Putnam
00:16:50 Physical versus technological community
00:17:12 The death of the porch
00:18:26 Can we blame the market? HOAs and meaningful choice
00:19:30 Levittown: can suburbs have community?
00:20:50 Should local government govern more?
00:22:19 Chicken and egg: polarization all the way down?
00:22:49 Road paving isn’t partisan — and the homevoter problem
00:25:07 Land: the last bipartisan issue?
00:26:37 Models that work: Newton and Cambridge
00:29:23 San Francisco: rich, mismanaged, preempted
00:31:41 Does Molly show up? Belmont, Arlington, and Zoom
00:33:35 Anonymous in the Facebook group
00:34:11 Men paying to learn friendship
00:36:09 What local government can do: land, process, substance
00:38:02 Utopia 2076: the best case
00:40:00 The worst case: Atwood, civil war, environment
00:41:30 Thanks and goodbye