The Nation City
Why Mayors Are Now Running the World
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
At a time of anxiety about the effectiveness of our national government, Rahm Emanuel provides a clear vision, for both progressives and centrists, of how to get things done in America today--a bracing, optimistic vision of America's future from one of our most experienced and original political minds.
In The Nation City, Rahm Emanuel, former two-term mayor of Chicago and White House Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama, offers a firsthand account of how cities, rather than the federal government, stand at the center of innovation and effective governance. Drawing on his own experiences in Chicago, and on his relationships with other mayors around America, Emanuel provides dozens of examples to show how cities are improving education, infrastructure, job conditions, and environmental policy at a local level.
Emanuel argues that cities are the most ancient political institutions, dating back thousands of years and have reemerged as the nation-states of our time. He makes clear how mayors are accountable to their voters to a greater degree than any other elected officials and illuminates how progressives and centrists alike can best accomplish their goals by focusing their energies on local politics. The Nation City maps out a new, energizing, and hopeful way forward.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
City Hall is supplanting dysfunctional national government on everything from filling potholes to fighting climate change, according to this hype-heavy manifesto on municipal governance. Former Chicago mayor Emanuel, who served as White House chief of staff to President Obama, argues that city government impacts citizens' well-being more than a "sclerotic, clumsy, inflexible, wounded, and weak" federal government mired in partisan gridlock and debt. He showcases mayors from around the country as they fix schools, build infrastructure, refinance pension funds, spruce up downtowns, boost civic spirit, pursue de-carbonization, and defy President Trump's immigration policies. Touting his own mayoral accomplishments, Emanuel lists education reforms including free pre-K and free community college, energy-efficiency measures, police department innovations that lowered crime and reformed the department following controversial shootings, subway and airport upgrades, riverfront promenades, and a 2040 carbon-neutrality deadline. Emanuel may be right about the perils of national politics, but his municipal triumphalism "bout a hundred cities around the world drive the economic, cultural, and intellectual energy of our planet" yields little serious policy analysis, and in ascribing unemployment and crime drops to city initiatives, he ignores underlying factors like nationwide economic trends and demographic shifts. The result is an unconvincing case for small-bore localism over a broad national agenda.
