Disorder in the Liberal City

On Individualism and the Failure of Urban Order

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It’s the stench that gets you. Television has desensitized us to suffering and violence, but the tart smell of unwashed bodies and the effluvia of an encampment still offend the nose, if not the eye. It’s only experience that turns the visual visceral. More than once, I’ve dodged a mentally ill person stumbling into oncoming traffic while driving to the gym in Austin. I’ve yanked my dog away from used needles hidden in the grass in San Francisco. I’ve sat on a crowded New York subway while a fidgety man flicked a razor blade in and out of his mouth. If you’ve spent any time in America’s cities in recent years, you’ve probably had an experience like this as well. If we’re lucky, these signs of disorder are merely sensory offenses, but they have become familiar features of life in many downtowns and on transit systems.

Liberal governance is often blamed for this—but disorder is anathema to the truly liberal city.

Chris Arnade, who has literally walked across cities worldwide, has written a lot about disorder on America’s streets. In a recent essay, written from “spotless” Seoul, he laments that “We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening.” Arnade blames our “culture of individuality,” which elevates self-expression over citizenship and fuels “antisocial tendencies” like drug abuse and mental illness.

Writing in response to Arnade, Addison Del Mastro shares his concern about disorder but diagnoses it differently. The problem, he argues, is not merely a culture of individuality or soft-on-crime politics, but a deeper strain of American “folk-libertarianism,” the instinctive belief that no one should tell you what to do. Reflecting on his travels in Asia—echoing Arnade’s observations from Korea—he found the orderly public behavior there almost oppressive: free of disorder, but also of spontaneity. America’s “you-do-you” ethos, which tolerates more disruption and rudeness, may be more appealing to American sensibilities. As he puts it, America’s “deeply individualist culture…really is incompatible with density and living in close proximity with a lot of people all the time,” although he thinks we’ve erred too far on the side of individualism.

I agree with Arnade and Del Mastro that culture matters here, and that ideas of American individualism shape how we experience public space. They’re also right that American society tolerates a wider range of behavior than many others. But what we are seeing on our streets is not simply the tail of that distribution. Shooting up on a street corner or screaming into the void are not examples of individualistic self-expression. They are symptoms of people who can no longer exercise their freedom within the bounds of a shared civic order.

Instead, the problem with our cities is that they aren’t individualistic enough.

In our political discourse, we tend to talk about “individualism” in unhelpful ways. In the framing that Arnade and Del Mastro employ, both “protest speech” and “pissing in a subway car” could fall under a broad-brush definition of individualist self-expression. But these are entirely different things. Political individualism embodies the tradition of respecting and protecting individual rights: to speak, to assemble, to secure contracts, and the like. This is the classical liberal tradition, and the foundation of the American system. Political individualism—otherwise known as liberalism—means that every person’s rights must be protected equally, under the rule of law. Those rights are reciprocal: my freedom exists alongside yours, not at its expense. Our 250-year history has often been a fight to make that actually true.

Conversely, individuality is how we express ourselves and behave in public. It can range from the morally meaningless—blue hair, goth clothing, punk music—to behaviors that create minor externalities, like smoking or talking loudly. But it does not include monopolizing public goods, destroying property, or outright violence. Individuality derives in part from individual rights, but it is not a free pass. Personal authenticity does not entitle you to YOLO your way into crimes against humanity.

Treating destructive behavior that imposes costs on others as “individualism” undermines the concept of political individualism and, with it, the system of equal rights that makes it meaningful. This conflation leads us away from solutions and toward the sad conclusion that urban disorder is the inevitable price of American liberty. But it’s actually the opposite that’s true.

Disorder is not a consequence of political individualism. It’s a failure to enforce it.

Political individualism requires more than formal rights on paper; it requires the protection of shared space in practice. A society committed to equal liberty must enforce the norms that allow millions of strangers to coexist in dense urban environments. When homeless encampments colonize public parks, or the mentally ill take over public bathrooms, or addicts shoot up and drop needles in school zones, a small number of disruptive actors are effectively allowed to privatize public space. Everyone else loses the freedom to use it.

But this disorder is not only a violation of the public’s rights. It is also profoundly inhumane to the people living in it, as I argued in “We’re All Experiencing Homelessness.” Leaving the severely mentally ill to deteriorate on the street, or addicts to slowly poison themselves in public view, is often framed as compassion. It’s actually an abdication of responsibility. A liberal society that takes individual rights seriously has obligations not only to protect the public, but also to intervene when people can no longer meaningfully exercise their own freedom. In that sense, Arnade is right that empathy demands intervention. But if his moral case is correct, the causal explanation lies elsewhere. The disorder visible on American streets is not a triumph of individuality or political individualism, nor does it arise from people “broken by our celebration of freedom.”

It reflects the breakdown of the liberal institutions that once sustained urban life.

Those institutions operated across several domains: housing, health care, and the systems that enforced basic norms of public order. In each case, the failure is not simply one of policy, but of the institutions themselves. In high-opportunity cities, land-use regimes have become fundamentally illiberal, mired in anti-democratic proceduralism and rigid regulation, preventing us from building enough housing. Older forms of inexpensive urban housing like SROs were regulated or banned out of existence. At the same time, we dismantled large parts of the mental-health system without building adequate alternatives, putting thousands of people who might have lived in cheap rooms or supervised institutions out on the street. The result was modern street homelessness. Layered on top of this is an opioid crisis that has dramatically intensified the disorder associated with street homelessness.

Our approach to policing disorder has likewise become incoherent. We criminalize public activity that causes no real harm—like selling loosies or food cart vending—while failing to enforce what actually does, like fare evasion, shoplifting, and open-air dealing. At the same time, we ask police to manage problems they are not equipped to solve, from mental illness to chronic homelessness, without providing the institutional capacity—beds, treatment, and housing—that make enforcement possible. Meanwhile, the informal mechanisms that once sustained civic order—from Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” to the occasional finger-wagging “Karen”—have closed the blinds or become suspect. This is rational: informal norms only function when they are backed by formal institutions. When neither formal nor informal enforcement works well, civic order inevitably degrades—and an “Age of Assholes” emerges.

A liberal order cannot exist without functioning institutions that protect both individual rights and the shared spaces in which those rights are exercised.

Cities were the shared spaces in which those institutions first emerged. Long before liberal rights were codified in law, cities created spaces where individuals could live more freely than they could under older social hierarchies. As I wrote in “The Freedom of the City,” this idea was captured by the medieval German phrase Stadtluft macht frei—city air makes you free. For centuries, cities allowed people marginalized by mainstream society to live more freely, both politically and socially. Before minorities, women, and gays had equal rights, cities often allowed forms of life that were illegal or taboo elsewhere: interracial neighborhoods, single women living independently, gay bars and social networks, dissident salons, underground music scenes, safe harbors for immigrants. This was not tolerance of disorder, but of difference: a willingness to allow people to live differently so long as they could live together. Urban life thus allowed people to become individuals in the political sense, and from that freedom, social individuality followed. Rather than being at odds with cities, individualism has historically been one of the conditions that made urban life possible—and individuality one of the forces that made it vibrant.

Today, the threat to the liberal city is not individualism or the tolerance of difference, but the erosion of the institutions that once kept disorder in check. The liberal city—one in which people are politically free to live as full individuals—has always depended on rules of civility, functioning institutions, and the enforcement of norms when they are broken. When that civic order erodes, urban life itself begins to deteriorate. Modern cities remain one of the greatest expressions of liberal civilization, but they only work when the civic order that sustains them is taken seriously and safeguarded. Restoring that order requires more than resolve; it means rebuilding the institutions—and the expectations—that make shared freedom possible.

Disorder is not the price of liberty in the city. It is evidence of its retreat.

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