The failure of nerve among many elements in American society is already evident enough: a retreat into privatism or worse, a surrender to nihilism, the politics, if you will, of Peter Pan ...

Today, they are supplemented by air conditioners, making urbanites prefer to be indoors over outdoors. “Air-cooled privatism,” an a US historian called it, is transforming the public urban space.

By 1935, the corporate liberal conversion from privatism to business-government partnership was well under way. Corporate liberals served President Franklin Roosevelt throughout the Depression and ...