Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Jacobs always struck me as a conservative that leftists like.

It's as if the terms "conservative" and "liberal" and "left" and "right" have decreasing descriptive power as time moves on.

I guess I'm what you'd call a leftist (but I prefer progressive). I read Life+Death and Dark Age Ahead. Jacobs never struck me as conservative, whatever that even means. A preservationist, to be sure. I don't think Dark Age Ahead is going to be handed out at CPAC. Burned maybe.

BTW, what does conservative mean?

Yeah, I’m not sure conservative is the best term because it carries a lot of other baggage especially these days. But favors the status quo, preservationist, change mostly based on community wishes, etc. are all probably pretty fair.

I think it's reductionist to the point of disrespectful to label her with any sort of ideology. What I remember from her books was some really good ideas. My favorite was gradual money vs cataclysmic money.

An essay in the 1964 book Ideology and Discontent makes the case that the public isn't qualified to have an opinion and found that shockingly low numbers of people can define "liberal" and "conservative" but (1) that was when hardly anyone went to college and (2) the author had the structuralist view that ideology was a fight between "marxism" and "anti-marxism" and wouldn't really recognize, say, a black nationalist or an ecofeminist as having an advanced ideology.

It's a running gag that liberals don't liberate and that conservatives don't conserve but I think liberals who liberate and conservatives who conserve have something to contribute.

I think Jane's respect for existing institutions, places and organizations that arise out of markets and fear of centralized planning are conservative. It makes me think of how Petroski wrote a whole book about pencils that comes to the conclusion that central planning doesn't work because no individual knows how to make a pencil.

I see that 'conservatives' and 'libertarians' are claiming her. I'm not sure she'd claim them. She was anti-ideology.

But this conservativism you speak of, it's such a squishy term. Respect for existing institutions, places and organizations fits when it fits and then doesn't when it doesn't. Right now, it doesn't.

Buckley (oh so nobly) said A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. But then he also said that he'd be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. So much for standing athwart history.

no one really knows

A conservative in the sense that anti-car urbanists can pick and choose things they really like from (such as not building a highway through Washington Square Park). Many of those same folks are probably less fond of keeping (as the article notes the fairly atypical) Greenwich Village encased in amber or at least up to the local community to evolve, opposition to the Lincoln Center (though there were certainly community costs), and opposition to non-luxury high-rise developments generally in many cases.

Similarly, strongtowns.org was born of conservative principles and fiscal responsibility.

She's probably just your average centrist, like 90% of people.

Was she conservative?

I don't know much about her politics, besides that she left the US for Canada over opposition to the Vietnam War.

She was pro-market, in many ways. She was mostly against top-down development that overrode people that were already in place (at the time it happened to be government ramming highways through cities using eminent domain). So in some ways she's "conservative" in that she likes property rights, less zoning, etc.

Urban left-leaning people tend to like her because she's very human-scale focused. Many use her anti-highway work to rally against other change (often private and market oriented. Though I love her work to death, I've found a lot of what most of us would call NIMBYs and champagne socialists cite her when opposing a lot of stuff (housing they don't like, etc).

This reason interview (libertarian org) outlines a lot of it: https://reason.com/2001/06/01/city-views-2/

She was: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2011/12/01/conservatives-jane-...

https://mises.org/mises-daily/jane-jacobs-libertarian-outsid...

(Big Jacobs fan over here, I've studied her to death)

AFAIK this is a somewhat misleading statement. Most of Jane Jacobs's publicly available commentary on political topics are in the context of urbanism, where "conservative" (especially as that first article defines it) is not in line with how modern people would define conservative attitudes towards urbanism.

If we look outside the area of urbanism, the picture becomes less clear. For example, Jacobs was anti-Communist, which we'd consider to be a conservative position by definition, but was well within the bounds of mainstream politics across the spectrum in the time she was most active. She also was outspokenly pro-union, which is decidedly not a conservative position in modern politics.

So yes, you can call Jane Jacobs a conservative if you want to use Edmund Burke as a reference point, but honestly, using Edmund Burke to define conservatism is almost a sleight-of-hand parlor trick, given how much modern-day conservatives actually disagree with Edmund Burke himself about.

I'll lend to that. If you use Edmund Burke as the yardstick, calling her conservative is defensible because she believed complex social orders evolve from the bottom up vs grand schemes. My thought is she generally applied this thinking, and that thinking is traditionally conservative. I suppose she is a "radical localist" who stole bits she liked from every side... was a pragmatic, anti‑ideologue, but I do still feel in reading her works, she's is more frequently aligned conservatives than not.

I suppose that is also part of the joy in Jane.

I wouldn't label someone as conservative using urban traffic tangles as evidence of bureaucratic idiocy as a marker. That sort of glittering generality gets you to trains run on time real fast.

I'll ask here as I did above, what is conservatism?

She was a nimby in a era where there should've been more of them. I live in a city that didn't have a jane jacobs, and we're the poorer for it.

Leftists tend to be pretty conservative

A common saying is a politically incorrect leftist sayings is mistakable from alt-right rhetoric. The shoe-horse theory...

It's wrong (the shoe-horse), But a lot of people think(have been told) that.

Horseshoe.

Wow that was a big derp. Thank you.

What makes you think that?

Thought great Americans cities were "great" when they emerged out of small, medium and large players interacting through markets and other traditional institutions. Thought they were threatened by central planners with big ideas (e.g. Robert Moses) but no respect for the status quo.