My family and I lived in Shanghai for the 2007-2008 academic year. This was a China that was still quite open, that still admired America, and that was full of an extraordinary, surging energy. We lived at the J.W. Marriott in Tomorrow Square, in a skyscraper that looked down on the 12-story Peace Hotel, which our Chinese friends never tired of telling us had been the tallest building in Shanghai as recently as 1994. Now we looked out onto a landscape of extraordinary buildings, each taller than the next. Most of them were in Pudong, a district across the Huangpu River that had been farmland and small villages until the early 1990s. Every night we watched these buildings light up in bright neon colors, a show as good as fireworks.
The day we left China, with our 12 L.L. Bean bags full of stuff, we drove on a brand-new road to a brand-new airport. When we finally landed at Newark, our home airport, I was struck by how shabby it seemed in comparison. Driving home on the New Jersey Turnpike, I noted the bumpy pavement, the grimy industrial landscape of Elizabeth, N.J., and the mix of old and new buildings, from strip malls to shiny pharmaceutical headquarters, along the way.
I asked myself how it was that the United States was a “developed country” while China was still a “developing” one. The answer was not hard to find but also not obvious – at least to me. It’s the difference between renovating and building from scratch.
Renovating is building, as Danielle Allen tells us in her opening post here at The Renovator. She is right. It is particular kind of building, however. I am a great believer in renovation and its close cousin, renewal. In my 2021 book titled Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics, I described it as “ a concept that looks backward and forward at the same time. … The ‘re’ is a constant returning to our past but also to our ideals; the ‘new is creating something that has not existed before.’”
Both renewal and renovation mean changing or even transforming what exists within the confines of a predetermined structure. If you have ever renovated a house or apartment, you will know renovating can be harder and more costly than building fresh. It typically involves tearing old things down, stripping to the “bones” of a structure, while taking care to preserve the best of what came before. In the process we often encounter surprises pleasant and unpleasant. Discovering beautiful old bricks or a wide-board pine floor is lovely; finding rotted wood, crumbling mortar, and a leaky foundation is something else. Old things often have both.
That process and those discoveries, good and bad, are exactly what we encounter as we renovate our democracy within the structure of our Constitution and our history.
At the same time, Americans are obsessed with the new, beginning with the concept of “the New World,” old as it was to the indigenous peoples who had stewarded the land for centuries. The blank page, the empty plot, the “boldly go where no human has gone before.” The promise to immigrants burdened by their pasts in other countries or to Americans seeking to escape their failures that they could become new people and live whole new lives is a deep part of the American psyche.
That is why I am calling this column The Builder. As a country, we need renovation but also building from scratch. We need visions of what we can be that we have never been before. We need American dreams that are not simply of material abundance but of psychological and spiritual flourishing, of hope and beauty.
The view from my window in Shanghai was inspiring in many ways. The Chinese government has indeed wrought miracles, lifting millions of people out of poverty and raising elegant skyscrapers from rice paddies. It faces none of the messy factional interests that are the daily fare of democratic self-government. When constitutions create constraints, the government simply creates new constitutions, four since 1949.
In the United States, by contrast, the Constitution is the enduring container of our democracy. As long as we remain a government of, for, and by the people, we cannot just raze the ground and start over; we must renovate. I believe that we will be more inspired to undertake that renovation if we also build something truly new. My own vision is of a confident, caring, connected America, a country that celebrates generosity and community as much as competition and capitalism.
The blueprints for that America are emerging from many different people and places across the country. It is time to start building, together.
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