Each of these three cities represents a major tendency in American life, an experiment in ideals less fully realized than in other places. Los Angeles is the centrifugal city, the center of a multiculturalism that assumes it can operate without a core of shared civic values; Washington, D.C., has been an example of black nationalism in power; and New York represents the lost world of New Deal liberalism deformed by dependent individualism, the linking together of economic overregulation with a free market in morals.

Together each of these cities has lived in the shadow of what Professor David Sears called "the riot ideology," the assumption that the violence of the sixties riots and their criminal aftermath were both justified and, to a considerable extent, functional in rectifying the sins of racism. The power to disrupt became a claim against the treasury. Violence, or at least the threat of violence, became a way of extracting money from the federal government, if only as riot insurance. But with vast federal budget deficits and widespread black, as well as white, middle-class flight from the cities, this public sector approach to peddling pathology has played itself out.

The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America's Big Cities
By Fred Siegel
Pages xi-xii