'America Lost': The Stories of Three Cities After Decades of Decline

Christopher Rufo didn’t mean to make a movie about religion. He set out to make a documentary about the lives of people in what he calls “forgotten America,” people the economy had left behind. Trillions of dollars in government aid hadn’t changed their lives. The number of poor hadn’t gone down. The cities that lost their industries 50 years ago hadn’t bounced back.

He found that the real source of hope for the poor in these cities isn’t government spending, but the social institutions that gave people purpose, meaning, and a real community. Highest among these are the churches.

His documentary America Lost recently aired on PBS, a rare conservative appearance on that reliably liberal network. It tells the stories of three cities after decades of decline. It begins with the white working class of Youngstown, Ohio, “the poorest city in America,” where the steel industry collapsed in the ‘70s. It moves to the black ghettos of Memphis, Tennessee, which also lost its major employers. It ends in the Latino and black ghettos of Stockton, California, a small city in central California that became famous a few years ago by becoming the largest American city to go bankrupt.

Rufo directs the Documentary Foundation, which produces “storytelling for a free society.” Among his other movies is an award-winning documentary called Age of Champions, telling the story of five people — including an 86-year-old pole vaulter and a 100-year-old tennis player — who competed in the Senior National Olympics. He’s also a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty and the Heritage Foundation.

Yet people survive, even with the challenges. Rufo doesn’t portray the people in these towns merely as victims. He wants to highlight the people who fight back. “Even in the bleakest situations, human beings have agency,” he insists. “We all have the capacity to make life a little better.”

Rufo’s a free-market partisan, and America Lost doesn’t tell quite the story he thinks it does. “At heart the crisis of American cities is a crisis of meaning,” he says early in the documentary. “All the old structures that once provided a solid foundation: faith, family, work, and community, have slowly fallen apart. The real problem is not just economic, but deeply personal, human, even spiritual.”

He delivers the movie’s lessons in several long voiceovers, but not in the stories he tells. The movie shows people in trouble, and a few people who struggle to get out of trouble. The movie treats their situation as something that just happens, without considering the system in which it happened, and happens. It never mentions the effects of race or the sometimes very stark limits to human agency. It tells the poor to “rediscover community,” but does not address the forces that have shattered it.

Government is treated only as a failure, though even in the movie its value is shown. One of the people America Lost show struggling to succeed depends for her life on very expensive treatment for MS, which no private entity could supply.

Yet the stories Rufo tells are moving and sometimes revealing of the shape of people’s lives. They push back against the assumption mainstream liberals can have that the poor are entirely victims, without agency. They point to the complexity of the subjects’ world.

One is a man in Youngstown who goes through wrecked, abandoned houses looking for things he can sell to a recycling center. He gets $42 for one day’s work. People’s “dreams ain’t coming through and they’re getting cast away,” he explains. “It’s going to be up to the individual, to whoever’s going to hold their ground, to make their own space better.” He also uses the things he finds to create collages and paintings and tries to sell those.

In Memphis, a young black man named Joseph talks about his two brothers being killed. He’s been in prison. He doesn’t want to go back. “My brothers were my friends, man,” he says, as a tear runs down his cheek. “Losing these two brothers the way I have, the way we grew up, how close we were, man, that’s a pain, man, that’s really hard to bear. But through the grace of God, I made it, I’m still here, and I’m here for a reason.”

Michael doesn’t want to go back to prison either. A heavily tattooed Latino young man living in Stockton, he has a wife and daughter, but can’t find a job. “It breaks my heart inside to sometimes I can’t provide for my family.” Life in the city feels like a pressure cooker, he tells a counselor at a ministry called Friends Outside. “All those times I was arrested, those times I went away, it’s like the pressure cooker just blew.” He’s left picking up the pieces, he says.

It sounds half like an excuse or a reason to give up. The counsellor gently corrects him and challenges him to begin each day with a purpose. He also comforts him. Taking care of a family, he says, “is a responsibility that most men in this population we come from cannot maintain.” It gets too stressful and they give up. “But you’re not going to give up.” Michael nods. Later he’s shown getting a job with a company willing to hire someone with a record, and keeps at it. Near the end of the documentary, he and his wife have a second child. His life seems to be working out

It’s in Stockton that Rufo comes to see the importance of social institutions, especially religious ones. He hardly mentions churches in Youngstown or Memphis. Pentecostal pastor Armando is shown telling the congregation, including Michael, that Jesus will pick them up, even if they fall 100 times. He tells Rufo that everyone who comes to his church, “they come in hurting, they come in empty, they come in broken, they come in need of a miracle, in need of a healing, in need of a touch, in need of someone loving them.” If they find that, they can change their lives.

“We’ve tried to solve our problems through top-down public policies,” Rufo says in the concluding voiceover. Twice he wryly intercuts his explanation with clips of politicians who promise economic revival but don’t deliver. In one, Clinton, Bush, and Obama are shown speaking in Youngstown, promising economic revival. Obama promises a new one million square foot plant and all the jobs that would bring. It was never built.

“I’ve learned that real change doesn’t happen from the top down. It happens from the inside out,” he continues. “It starts within each individual human heart and then slowly works its way outward.” That requires helping the poor “rediscover the traditional sources of meaning: faith, family, work, and community, and adapt them to the modern condition. As a society, we must ensure that being poor doesn’t mean being disconnected from the primary sources of human happiness, so that those at the bottom can lead dignified, meaningful lives.” While remaining, one notes, at the bottom.

“If I didn’t have a family, I wouldn’t be alive right now,” Michael says. His wife and children and the life they’ve created give him a reason “to keep moving forward. They give me a purpose. The thing I’ve been looking for my whole life is to be here for them. … That changed my heart. It’s a miracle.”

I ‘like’ to ask the question

“What is worse, being nuked or run by Liberals?”

Then point out Hiroshima or Nagasaki Japan and Detroit Mich in 1946, 2000 and 2020.

(Doesn’t have to be Detroit, just check out inner cities under D ‘leadership’)

“...incompetent, criminal Dems...”
Redundant, heh, as we all know.
And there are N other descriptors - all indicating lack of ability/morals - that could be linked with the now discredited word “Democrat”. Oh, N is a very large number.

Now, now long do we put up with them before we drive them out?
By ANY means possible.

“Now, now long do we put up with them before we drive them out?
By ANY means possible.”

I keep seeing the calls to fight, the calls to not give up, etc. I have yet to see any plan of action.

Ok, I’m fighting, I’m positive... positive Harris and Biden are going to lay waste to America.

In some cases these cities have simply outlived their usefulness and no longer hold the same place they once did as centers of commerce.

It was an establishment GOP Congressman who made this astute point in a business leadership meeting I attended a few years ago when he was criticizing his fellow Republicans and corporate leaders for their failure to do a better job “selling” their economic agenda to the public:

“It’s not ‘globalism’ at work when a company closes an old steel mill in Ohio and builds a new one in Arkansas.”

These cities are examples of shades to come when the Rats take over. And they will eventually. But as long as I have a breath I’ll fight them. I was hoping to live long enough to see a second term for our beloved President. This cancer has to wait a little longer.

the lockdowns demonstrated with the new technology most businesses can profitably function without a hugely expensive central urban location: combine this with the lawlessness of no bail laws and defund the police politicians. commercial and residential real estate values are dropping. businesses and people who can are leaving.

Tell you what, if I were a Democrat, I really wouldn’t really feel too peachy right now.

They may (I said ‘may’) have defeated Trump, but he is far from repudiated. Trump planted a lot of seeds that are no bearing fruit. And nobody really respects Biden/Harris, it’s just that four years of Propaganda made enough people dislike Trump. And if already is looking like the Democrats will overplay their hand, as they always do.

But as they say, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” The most popular phrase you’ll hear in 2021 if Biden wins is “If I knew it was going to be like this I would have voted for Trump.”

I don’t expect Trump to run again in 2024, if it comes to that. But in Ron DeSantis, I see his heir apparent. Now, realize he is the Democrats Number One target in 2022. The 2022 Florida Gubernatorial election may very well become the most expensive Gubernatorial election to date. They know they must kill DeSantis’ chances, because if he prevails in his re-election bid, he is bullet-proof, and will be the GOP Nominee in 2024, with Trump’s endorsement.

The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of the people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.

Thomas Jefferson

A byproduct of the Marshall Plan. After WW2, Japanese and european steel mills, having been targets, were in ruins. Billions of dollars in US money went to rebuild our competitors to state-of-the-art manufacturing plants. What else could possibly happen but they would overtake us?

After the war, Dr. Deming taught the Japanese statistical quality control and proper sampling during production which also enabled them to implement Just-In-Time manufacturing. American manufacturers at the time didn’t pay much attention to him.

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