The Moral Inversion of Progressive City Politics
When words stop meaning anything, cities stop working
Politics in a blue city are strange because struggles for power don’t unfold through policy, but through vibes, and by extension, language. Factions seeking narrative control during elections use buzzwords to convince citizens that they are progressive. “Preservation,” “affordability,” “equity,” and “gentrification” all once meant something. Now they are worn smooth from misuse.
Because blue cities are also often college towns, this problem with words extends beyond City Hall. The closer you live to a university, the more likely you are to encounter people who feel that words are life and that debate itself is existential. Near universities, city politics become rife with performative certainty, moral signaling, and the conflation of words with action. All this forms the scaffolding for moral inversion (see last week’s post), in which the language of virtue is intentionally used to disguise and promote immoral or harmful acts.
In local politics, this can manifest in a multitude of petty ways, such as one person attempting to promote themselves and their cause by defaming another—a zero-sum game. But those same habits of inversion don’t stay personal for long. Once moral language is corrupted, it scales: bad actors translate their distortions into policy. In land use, those distortions become blueprints.
When Land Use Words Mean Their Opposite
Consider what moral inversion looks like applied to our housing debates:
Those who build urban housing are blamed for causing sprawl.
Small developers who create local projects with local tenants are often portrayed as corporatists, soulless, extractive, and Wall Street-based.
Those who design affordable housing are presented as threats to affordability.
Each inversion deserves its own essay, but the pattern is clear. Inverting language allows factions to signal virtue by demagoguing others to secure power.
In most cities, the cause is structural. Professional planners and academics—trained to perfect systems rather than build things—create complexity that privileges policy insiders and penalizes enterprise. Complex codes, coupled with opaque and approval systems, allow demagogues to rise by “defending the people” against those who are simply trying to navigate the broken system.
…what Inversionists say does not match what they do.
With this scapegoating, the inversions migrate to policy. Codes ostensibly meant to protect equity lock-in exclusion. Anti-corporate rhetoric handcuffs everyone except the corporations large enough to navigate the maze. The inversionists claim to fight for the poor, while ensuring the poor have nowhere new to live.
In short, what Inversionists say does not match what they do. This is moral inversion, and much of it is intentional.
Why Moral Inversion Persists
Moral inversion offers the inversionist two main benefits: simplicity and sanctimony. With simplicity, black and white thinking requires little effort to practice, and in a world of short attention spans, it is an effective way to attract cult followers. Offering salvation without work will always have appeal. It’s a lazy way to become popular.
With this dichotomy between good and bad, inversion inevitably starts with populism but leads to despotism. The common denominator throughout populism and despotism is holier-than-thou sanctimony, the notion that one group is morally superior to another. This, too, appeals to the masses, who want to blame someone else for their plight.
Combined, simplicity and sanctimony enable the inversionist to claim the moral high ground and claim power, all without actually doing work or taking responsibility for their own behaviors.
In every progressive city, the anti-development faction is small but loud. They are highly credentialed, deeply certain, and rarely self-reflective. They are entirely reliant on the world seeing them as all good and their opposition as fundamentally bad. This is why they spend inordinate hours establishing the non-truth that all builders and developers are terrible people, motivated only by profit, etc.
When these assertions are challenged anecdotally, inversionists react in anti-social ways. They act out because their ability to benefit from this system collapses as soon as they are recognized as anything other than unimpeachably good (or, conversely, when their scapegoats are recognized as anything other than unimpeachably bad).
Thus, once such virtuous language is co-opted by bad actors, it becomes a tool of control, and reform itself looks suspicious. Anyone proposing change, especially pragmatic change, is cast as the villain. Why? Because reform threatens the idea of the inversionists as the exclusive custodians of virtue.
You can see this pattern play out in how every city—from Portland to Durham—turns reformers into villains, for the devilish act of wanting to build homes during a housing crisis. In progressive circles, inversion is most prevalent in areas with high elite overproduction, such as the West Coast, New England, and college towns.
I will write more about why people buy into the framework in a future post.
But there is hope
Yes, inversion is maddening. And for those not paying close attention, it is tough to spot. But truth still finds its level. Always.
Every empire of self-righteousness eventually collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Eventually, words regain meaning when actions reveal truth. Those who weaponize language to hide their failures eventually run out of words.
And that’s when cities start working again.
👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿 These articles on moral inversion have been my urban planning therapy. I am the reformer, the urban healer, the planning truth teller, calling out in the wilderness of sensationalism and intellectual dishonesty led by demagogic community leaders. I have been warned that I will have a difficult time here. But still I rise!