The United States needs a new capital

My dream for an American Ankara

The United States needs a new capital city.

It needs to be much closer to the median American than Washington D.C., both geographically speaking and culturally.

Right now we have an unfortunate situation where millions of people, especially in Middle America, don’t really identify with their capital or feel any pride in it, and oftentimes they actively despise it.

This situation alienates people from their institutions in an unhelpful way and encourages a functional separation between “heartlanders” and “coastal elites” that unnecessarily divides people. We need to fix this.

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I don’t blame anyone for disliking D.C. The place has horrible vibes—a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm, as JFK famously put it.

It was probably inevitable that it would develop such a character, having been established in a sleazy backroom deal between Jefferson and Hamilton as part of negotiations over the country’s banking system.

But to give the founders their due, the Potomac made a lot of sense for our capital in the early years of our republic. In this period America was effectively an Atlantic society highly dependent on trade with Europe and Africa, and our “mean center of population” was roughly in Maryland or northern Virginia (this probably explains why so many of our earliest leaders were Virginians):

But this location become a much more questionable choice in the 19th century, as Manifest Destiny propelled our nation across the Appalachians and toward the Pacific. During this period America became more of a riverine civilization centered around the Mississippi and its great tributaries the Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, as well as the Great Lakes and Erie Canal:

This incredibly extensive system of internal waterways, which cut through some of the most fertile land on the planet, facilitated rapid growth and the development of a robust internal market. Over the course of the 19th century America thus became less of an Atlantic society and much more inwardly focused. In these decades she dedicated most of her energies to settling the frontier, driving off the Indian, and adjudicating internal disputes over slavery.

As this occurred, the mean center of population moved west into Ohio, and that state unsurprisingly produced a large number of Presidents, as Virginia had in decades past.

But despite this shift, we kept our capital in Washington D.C., and mostly centered the priorities of America’s “eastern establishment” in NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia. These men remained staunchly focused on Europe and the Atlantic; to them all states west of the Appalachians were basically colonies.

During the Civil War this became an awkward affair because D.C. was situated immediately on the Confederate border, not far from the CSA’s own capital of Richmond. From a purely military perspective, it probably would have been wiser to relocate to Philadelphia or NYC or even Chicago after Virginia seceded, but from a symbolic perspective D.C. was too valuable as a representation of historic compromise between North and South. Had Lincoln abandoned it, he probably would have lost crucial support in Maryland and Kentucky. So for morale reasons D.C. remained the capital, and this likely made it much easier to reintegrate the South after the war.

But during the Gilded Age that followed American politics were no longer a simple dialectic between North and South. The rapid expansion of rail networks had opened up California to mass settlement, and Pacific entrepots like San Francisco began to flourish as Americans grew curious about Polynesia, Japan, and China.

Meanwhile, the Homestead Act had drawn millions of German immigrants into the agricultural Midwest, enabling Corn Country to assert its own distinct sectional identity. This was first apparent in 1896, when the Nebraskan firebrand William Jennings Bryan faced off against McKinley bearing a populist agenda that emphasized inflationary debt relief for impoverished farmers. Bryan lost because he got crushed in the rapidly expanding cities of the industrial Midwest, but he won sweeping victories in the more agricultural prairie states and thinly peopled Mountain West.

Notably, this was the first time in American history where the electoral narrative wasn’t “North vs. South”, but some manifestation of “Heartland vs. Coastal Elites”. There was definitely a sense in Bryan’s rhetoric that distant and out of touch plutocrats in D.C. had betrayed the simple farmer of Middle America by pursuing cruelly deflationary hard currency.

Would this kind of rhetoric have been so powerful had the capital been moved at some point to better reflect the country’s new population distribution? I suspect not.

Anyway, as the Gilded Age turned into the Progressive Era, America’s mean center of population slid further west into Indiana. But curiously, we never saw an incredible density of Hoosiers in the White House, as we had Ohioans and Virginians.

I suspect this was in large part caused by a kind of “geographic polarization".

The American population started out unimodally clustered around the Tidewater region, with lower densities in the Deep South and New England. But settlement/growth over the 19th century was bimodally distributed between two distinct poles in the Mississippi River and Northeast Corridor.

The former pole rose faster, and that moved the population center west on aggregate, but the simultaneous rise of New York and other northeastern cities meant that the “center of gravity” became a lot less influential than it had been.

In other words, Virginia in 1800 was like a “mountain” between Boston and Charleston, while Indiana in 1900 was like a “valley” between Chicago and NYC.

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Despite Bryan’s failure, the early 20th century was in many ways the peak of the agricultural Midwest’s power and influence. Missouri of all places was actually the fifth most populous state in 1900.

But alas, the ruralites quickly ran into hard limits on their expansion—the midwestern dry line, the rocky mountains, the Dust Bowl—and urban industrial regions continued to rapidly overtake them in population.

Meanwhile, as the 20th century progressed and America began to engage as deeply with the Pacific world as it always had the Atlantic, California began to rapidly expand in population, quickly becoming the largest and richest state. It arguably still fell behind New York in overall influence, and could never catch up to its eastern rival as a major financial center, but Los Angeles and San Francisco were nonetheless able to establish powerful specialized niches in entertainment and tech. These cities developed alongside Portland and Seattle into America’s most forward-thinking and often insane bastion of progressivism—a “Left Coast.”

At the same time, Texas managed to build an impressively diversified economy upon the oil and agricultural wealth it had established in the 19th century, and in doing so became the most vibrant and powerful pole of “Red America”.

Following the widespread midcentury adoption of air conditioning, it was joined in this position by other “Sun Belt” states like Florida and Arizona, who enjoyed explosive success attracting retirees and tax refugees from northern climes.

The rise of California and the Sun Belt completed the transformation of America’s demographic landscape. It moved America’s center of population south and west, from Indiana through Illinois and into south-central Missouri, where it stands today.

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I think America’s “demographic geometry” has a really big fundamental problem:

It is incredibly harmful that so many of our elites are distributed specifically on the coasts in a kind of “woke ring” that very palpably surrounds Middle America.

Polarization is almost inevitable when the mean center of population is thousands of miles away from one hostile pole (controlled by entertainment / tech elites) and almost equidistant from another hostile pole (controlled by media / financial / government elites), while itself sitting in a region that’s sparsely populated and culturally impotent.

This dynamic makes people in the sticks feel like they’re “trapped”.

It gives people in the interior regions a “concentric circles” model of the world where they live in a peaceful and nice Shire that’s surrounded by an urban jungle full of bizarre and licentious city folk, with hordes of unfamiliar foreigners beyond that who are being admitted in excessive numbers by the irresponsible (if not actively malevolent) liberals watching the gates.

This encourages them to either disengage from the broader world and essentially think like provincial and sectionalist hobbits, or to actively fear and resent the “coastal elites” who seem to want to impose strange and foreign customs on them.

Thankfully it seems that Texas and more recently Florida basically exist outside of this dynamic. Conservative white people in these states don’t feel “trapped” because they control their own ports and maintain their own centers of power that aren’t pathetic compared to NYC and LA. They don’t have the same disengaged / resentful hobbit attitude you see in the Midwest, and instead will aggressively assert their own will to power. You see a somewhat similar attitude among Bavarians toward Berliners.

But on the whole most conservative whites have the pouting hobbit mentality, and this is what I’m trying to mitigate.

I’m also trying to fight an equally destructive mindset that emerges among the coastal elites. The current landscape makes it very easy for them to dismiss Flyover Country as irrelevant and not offer them any basic respect, or even pay attention to what’s going on there. Hence Trump 2016 and subsequent developments. This needs to change and we need to get elites more engaged with prole discourse.

I also want to make elites more patriotic. In the current system, once you have money and education it’s too easy for you to identify with foreigners over your own countrymen. Instead of thinking of yourself as a protector and representative of your nation’s proles, you begin to think of yourself as a “global man” who ackchully has more in common with globalists from other countries (i.e. foreigners who transparently ape midwit American attitudes). Obviously this just furthers the cycle of mutual resentment and deepens polarization.

I think it’s much healthier for a country to have the dynamic you see in the medium-sized nation-states of Europe and Asia. In these countries, most obviously France and Japan, it is the geometric center of the country that has the elites, while the proles live more on the periphery.

This in my assessment creates more of a “noblesse oblige” in the elites, and generates a sense of civic duty, because instead of shifty merchants on the outside of society they feel like “kings in the castle.”

They are still cosmopolitan and decadent for sure, but when they meet foreigners they’ll at least try to be cultural representatives, and will have some sense of loyalty to the higher ideals of their nation.

Meanwhile there is more of a healthy mindset among the proles, in which the smart ones can easily move to the big city and the grug ones can stay put, but it isn’t necessarily a high-stakes identitarian thing like it has become in America. The proles don’t feel trapped by the elites, and there isn’t as strong a conservative - liberal - foreigner continuum.

It’s all still there to some extent, don’t get me wrong, and I’m sure many a Breton farmer resents the Parisian bureaucrat bossing him around. But it’s nowhere near as toxic as you have stateside.

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So I’ve laid out the problem, how do I aim to address it?

I think America can only be reintegrated, revitalized, and depolarized by taking a page from the Emperor Constantine’s book and moving the capital to a location that better reflects our polity’s current geographic and demographic center.

To that end, I want to create a massive new capital complex in the Midwest that will serve as a more culturally neutral power center. This city will be created essentially from scratch, much as Washington D.C. was created, and will be run as a very deliberate ideological project.

I want to use this capital to erase the idea of “Flyover Country”. I want to squeeze American power and wealth and influence inward from the periphery, so we become less of a donut and more of a delicious cookie. Above all, I want to make Middle American whites more ambitious, and forcibly break them out of their disengaged hobbit mentality by forcing them to engage with power.

Not all government functions will be moved to this new capital. Some of the less glamorous ones can stay in D.C., which will henceforth become part of Maryland. We should probably put our Asian embassies in San Fran or even Honolulu, and definitely should conduct all European diplomacy out of NYC. Then most administrative departments we will move to Seattle or Boston or Phoenix or Miami so as to promote a general connection with the federal government and higher society across all regions of the country, and not just its demographic center.

But the most important functionalities—Congress, SCOTUS, and POTUS—must all move to the Midwest.

To house these bodies our new capital must have an awe-inspiring Presidential Palace. The White House is far too understated and WASP-coded for modern America—let’s have Trump or his descendants replace it with a big gold tower that’s more appealing to the Ellis Islander sensibilities of trans-Hajnal whites like myself.

I’m thinking we should pour billions of dollars into making this the tallest building in the world. Let’s create a Mile High Tower with the President’s office at the summit. Maybe it can have a balcony where he can take Xi or Kim or Putin during high stakes negotiations.

It’s extremely dumb that a nation as wealthy as America ever let some podunk Arab oil sheikhs build the world’s tallest building. We should never have given up that title.

We have a moral obligation to ourselves and our progeny to build something so tall and so expensive and so beautiful that no other nation could even *fathom* building anything comparable.

We need a monstrously imposing phallic symbol that constantly reminds us and everybody else that Americans are superior, and that other people are obligated to kiss our ass and do what we say.

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So let’s talk specifics for our new capital, starting with name.

“Washington, D.C.” has always sounded very awkward and stupid to me. Even the “District of Columbia” sounds off. Why did it need to be a “district”? Who came up with that? Does any other country use this nomenclature?

It should have just been “Washington” or “Columbia”. The most powerful country on the planet needs a capital that doesn’t sound clumsy and weird.

So I propose we go with the simple and elegant New Columbia. This works because it gives proper acknowledgment to the old capital’s history (which will mollify traditionalists) while asserting its own bold and distinct identity.

Next let’s talk geography.

I propose a site on and around the town of Cairo on the southern tip of Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers:

Cairo is an ideal location for several reasons.

Obviously it is geopolitically strategic, being both highly defensible and easily accessible. No rival could harm this city with anything less than an ICBM, but you could sail there from Pittsburgh, Omaha, or New Orleans. Meanwhile, you could build a massive airport here that could reach anywhere in the lower 48 in just a few hours.

It’s also situated neatly between the country’s mean and median centers of population:

This is a part of the country that feels equally “southern” and “northern”, and equally “western” and “eastern”—the vibe is best described as quintessential Americana. The nature is gorgeous, the culture convivial, and I think anyone from California to Vermont would feel comfortable here.

Cairo itself is a poor and mostly black town with a pretty sad history, while the wider region is rural and conservative. All of these people, black and white, would need to have their property appropriated via eminent domain so we can bulldoze everything to build dense high rises. We should probably give these people 10x market value for the land so liberals never bitch about it and taint the legacy of our project like they did with Washington.

In practice the city that develops here will draw educated 115 IQ whites from across the region, and will quickly start to resemble St. Louis or Kansas City or Omaha more than either Chicago or Nashville.

It will be an environment where both liberals and conservatives basically feel comfortable, which is an absolutely essential condition for our national capital.

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The great thing about creating a city from scratch like this is you can experiment with a lot of cool ideas in urban design that would never be possible in an existing city.

You can implement the sort of dense and walkable neighborhoods liberals like while employing more traditional aesthetics like Art Deco that conservatives tend to enjoy. This combination will likely make everyone happy.

You can likewise ensure NIMBYs never take power and property values never get out of hand by creating enormous complexes of cheap condominiums that connect to more beautiful and less utilitarian public spaces via free public transit. Anyone who wants to live in New Columbia and contribute to public life should be able to do so cheaply and easily.

Most importantly, you can use the extraordinary circumstances of a planned community under the control of the Federal Government to restrain criminality with significantly greater force than is tolerated in most cities. Unleashing a Singaporean level of brutality on criminals will contain the worst externalities of cheap housing and provide a workable model for other cities to imitate.

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I am not sure how this plan would get achieved in practice. It would obviously require some kind of massive sea change that makes the unthinkable thinkable.

But from a broader historical perspective, this sort of thing happens all the time. Nations *very* frequently move their capital to better service a new demographic geometry. We all know the famous cases of Rome to Byzantium and Moscow to St. Petersburg, but there was also Istanbul to Ankara and Beijing to Nanjing, both of which are pretty comparable to what I’m proposing here.

People will bitch and moan about the inviolable “history” and “majesty” of Washington, but Istanbul had a hell of a lot more of those things than D.C. ever could, and the Turks still knew it was a good idea to put their administration in Ankara instead. We need to popularize this as a talking point until it enters the discourse and this goal becomes a mainstream GOP objective.

At that point I suspect that if you somehow got DeSantis / Masters / Vance in power circa 2040 and had 60 GOP Senators on board this could be achieved in our lifetime.