Zoning Out 

Stuck:
How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
by yoni appelbaum
random house, 320 pages, $32

Disposable:
America’s Contempt for the Underclass
by sarah jones
avid reader, 304 pages, $30

In an era in which the American dream slips ever further from the grasp of the common man, these two books seek the causes. What are the roots, both authors ask, of the economic stagnation of the American working class? Sarah Jones’s subject is the plight of essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic; Yoni Appelbaum’s is the history of America’s declining social mobility, which he blames on property schemes and zoning laws.

Both authors shed light on the fractures in our national fabric: the indignities heaped upon those whose labor sustains us, and the barriers to a better life for them. An additional point of interest is that the books represent two possible versions of the future Democratic Party. For those of us who are not Democrats, however, the books are limited by their ideology and miss the deeper moral and communal crisis.

As Jones’s Disposable movingly recounts, the pandemic laid bare a disparity between the working class, thrust into precarious frontline roles, and the corporate titans who reaped windfall profits from their toil. Her empathy for these essential workers—whose sweat and sacrifice propped up an often indifferent society—rings true. Millionaires and billionaires were made in the stock market while waitresses boxed up dishes for DoorDash.

Yet Jones’s writing, laden with the jargon of gender, race, and capitalism, drifts into abstraction, disconnected from the daily realities of the workers she aims to understand and champion. Her seminar-room Marxism, with its “feminized poverty,” “structural racism,” and “social murder,” is too mired in identity politics to inspire a broad coalition. And it profoundly misreads the working class, whose aspiration is not to revolutionary upheaval but to dignity, stability, and a paycheck earned through honest work.

Jones’s mistake is one she shares with much of the contemporary Democratic Party. She writes extensively about the need for more government funding to solve every problem imaginable, while disdaining religion and family—the very things that sustain working Americans. A dismissive quip about a family member “colonized” by Fox News epitomizes the elite disdain that has driven a wedge between the left and the heartland. If Democrats don’t want to suffer a replay of 2024, they should reject such rhetoric.

But then, that is just what makes this book such a revealing glimpse into the Democratic campaign machine. The intersections of Jones’s own identity—college-­educated atheist journalist white woman under forty living in Brooklyn—­indicate an approximately ­100-percent probability of supporting Kamala Harris. Catering almost exclusively to the sensibilities of this demographic is why the Democrats lost at the ballot box. And this book’s prose—by turns chiding, vulgar, shrill, and ­off-putting—makes it a time capsule of the era that gave us the ­Harris ­candidacy.

Appelbaum’s Stuck makes, on the face of it, a much more promising case. The book makes a sweeping argument, not just about America’s lost ­mobility—the once shining promise that you could rise, relocate, and remake yourself—but about its meaning in our national story. As opportunity has been hoarded by the privileged few, we have lost sight of America’s most profound contribution to the world: that of freedom to live as one chooses.

Once upon a time, as Stuck tells it, America discovered that you can choose the community you want to live in, rather than being stuck in the one you were born into. Appelbaum lionizes the early American pioneers who lit out for the frontier; he also reminds us of the lost tradition of “moving day,” when all rental leases expired on the same day—a quirky urban institution that fostered social mobility by ensuring that all renters knew what day they were saving for if they wanted to “move on up” to a nicer apartment. The mass day of renegotiation also gave renters of all classes more leverage in settling their contracts. Now, Appelbaum argues, Americans are becoming more stable and localized, like their European cousins (“oysters”).

It’s a thought-provoking narrative. But Appelbaum is much too uneasy about local attachment. He suggests that it can bring forth political monsters:

A more sedentary community will homogenize itself over time as social forces press longtime residents toward conformity and the flow of new neighbors bearing novel ideas and customs and beliefs slows to a trickle. The result is deepening polarization. Geographic mobility long served as a counterweight within American politics against the more virulent strains of racism, nativism, and populism.

It is hard to imagine any immigrant community that has come to our shores agreeing with that framework. And it would certainly be foreign to the original American settlers, who journeyed together, founded communities together, and lit out for the frontier together. They formed their communities around their shared Protestant faith—and around scriptural texts that told them to love their neighbors, not abandon them for some rootless pursuit of opportunity or chosen identity.

Communities like theirs—in which families flourish, traditions endure, and mutual aid binds us ­together—are not obstacles to progress but its bedrock. Was the secret to American success really, as ­Appelbaum believes, that we were open to all individual choices? Or was it that we didn’t have the old European problem—that the land was already owned, and its ownership secured by intricate legal and ecclesial structures that could be deployed against a powerless majority?

There is much of interest in Appelbaum’s book. He makes a serious case for urban density and planning deregulation. His account of racialized zoning laws is sharp and warranted. Members of my wife’s family still tell stories about their own exclusion from moving up and out of inner-city San Francisco because they were Chinese. As ­Appelbaum notes, the Northern California town of Modesto was the first to pioneer zoning laws, and it did so explicitly to keep the Chinese sequestered in their own districts.

That was, however, all quite a long time ago. Chinese Americans, like all racial groups, are no longer legally restricted from moving. That has been the law since the 1917 ruling in Buchanan v. Warley, and it has been well enforced since just after the last Baby Boomers were born.

In another respect, too, Appelbaum’s critique seems outdated. When Americans expanded into ever larger spaces, it was because such spaces were right in front of them as lands of possible conquest. Is Appelbaum about to celebrate President Trump returning to this tradition as we contemplate retaking Panama and bringing Canada and Greenland within our borders? Presumably not.

Indeed, Trump emerges as one of the book’s scapegoats for complex issues. Appelbaum would have done well to ponder why so many working-class Americans—the same people whose struggles he charts—see in figures like Trump and JD Vance not malice, but a megaphone for their unheard cries.

Appelbaum’s preferred solution is to liberalize zoning, trade, and building—without seriously questioning mass immigration or inequalities of power. If Jones’s book is a time capsule of the defeated Democrats in 2024, Appelbaum very probably represents the Democratic future. He can bring in libertarians and capitalists with his YIMBY economic policies—no risk here that the asset-rich will cease to grow richer—but he keeps the coastal activist base happy by including just a touch of racial identity politics and a whiff of lavender identitarianism. You can already see other prominent liberal journalists like Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and Matt Yglesias moving in this direction, toward a woke–libertarian synthesis. As they do, watch libertarians denounce Trump as racist and join the Democrats.

What unites Jones and Appelbaum, despite their divergent paths, is a shared blind spot: a materialist reduction of labor and mobility to matters of power and money, forgetting the spiritual and communal sinews that hold society together. Jones’s Marxist fervor and Appelbaum’s libertarian flirtations equally fail to recognize that work is more than a paycheck. It’s a calling, which Americans recognize offers inherent dignity. That American vision is a reflection our Christian origins, which tell us of the Creator’s command to steward the earth.

Mobility, likewise, is not merely the ability to move, but the freedom to forge a life of purpose within a stable home. What if Americans choose to remain in their hometowns? This is essentially what my wife’s family did after the Chinese Americans were given their economic freedom. Northern California might as well be their Israel. They moved to nicer neighborhoods, but for five and six generations they have stayed mostly within driving distance of thick extended-family networks.

Both authors, in their rush to indict systems and ideologies, neglect the erosion of family, the waning of faith, and the hollowing-out of local bonds. Jones’s ideological drift reveals a writer more at home among coastal elites than among the workers she champions, while Appelbaum’s nervousness about communal ties betrays a failure to see that the American dream is as much about a place to stand as a ladder to climb.

It also prevents him from observing—even as he frets about how to increase the housing supply—that reducing the population by twenty to thirty million immigrants would free up eight to twelve million housing units, thus significantly reducing housing costs and increasing social mobility for citizens. 

And Appelbaum does not pause to contemplate a pressing question. Should America import a permanent servant underclass, economically crush the majority of working citizens, and allow communist satellite states to make luxury shoes with the equivalent of slave labor so that the asset-owning class can go on ever nicer cruises? Whether Appelbaum likes it or not, that’s the reality of the current system. Jones’s book is at least blunt about the moral outrage of American inequality.

Neither book, ­however, is able to fathom what Trump and his team are attempting: a renegotiation of the settlement for the American worker. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said, the old system is not ­working: “The top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities. The next 40% owns 12% of the stock market. The bottom 50% has debt. They have credit card bills, they rent their homes, they have auto loans. We’ve got to give them some relief.”

The recent tariffs are designed to recenter economic policy on American workers rather than American owners. The message the administration is sending to corporations is simple: If you want to sell to Americans, you need to make it in America, and thus employ American labor. The libertarians will complain that “tariffs are taxes.” Well, what’s wrong with a tax system that prioritizes the needs of the working class and the average citizen—especially if the tariffs, which operate like a sales tax, are paired with a decrease in income tax?

Obama’s best policy was his recognition that we can either import lots of labor, or we can enact free trade to allow corporations to re-allocate work, but we cannot have both and make it economically. Obama chose to deport noncitizen workers. Trump is doing the same, plus aiming to bring the factories home. The neoliberal (and libertarian-inflected) economic policy of the past forty years has been to liberalize all markets, open the border ever wider, and let the rich get fabulously rich. The losers, it is assumed, can be compensated by taxing a bit off the top of the winners. As of this past month, that strategy has come to an end. I say good riddance.

The timeless wisdom of our forebears is that human flourishing springs from strong families, vibrant churches, and tight-knit towns. ­Appelbaum claims these existed because as Americans moved they needed to develop these networks afresh in each location. I would counter that they existed because of a particular culture, a powerful base of productive workers finding productive work, and a healthy birthrate—all of which are in danger of being lost forever. These two books, however well researched and well intentioned, are ignorant of things that the working class know ­instinctively. It’s time we listened—not to the ideologues, but to the still, small voice of a traditional way of life that has guided us through darker days than these.