I got to read a liberal disquisition last week about our horrible modern cities:

It sometimes feels like our cities are broken: soulless and sprawling, full of concrete and cars, loud and dirty and devoid of community. Just hard to live in.

But don’t worry. Now there’s “Strong Towns,” a non-profit that “believes American cities were badly made and is fighting for ‘cities of all sizes to be safe, livable, and inviting’.”

I get it: “fighting” is always about politics.

What is wrong with these people? Do they still think that the problems of the transformation of human society in the last 200 years is going to be solved by yet another political Plan to force them to conform to the latest liberal conceit?

Instead, let’s look at the modern city in a moderate and sympathetic way.

Ever since the industrial revolution really got going, about 200 years ago, humans have swarmed into the cities. And why? Initially, so they could get work in those dark satanic mills of which the poets complained.

But why? Why would they leave their idyllic country villages and their organic rural communities?

Could it be because they were starving? Or they couldn’t afford to pay the rent? Or that there weren’t any decent jobs for agricultural laborers at the annual hiring fair on Lady Day?

But maybe things were copacetic all along. My numbers show the UK population growing from 9.1 million in 1700, to 16.0 million in 1800, to 41.2 million in 1900. That’s even with all those Brit settler-colonialists spreading out across the world to steal it from its traditional inhabitants since time immemorial. So the Brits swarmed into cities, “soulless and sprawling, full of [brick and horses and carts], loud and dirty and devoid of community. Just hard to live in.” And thrived.

Do you see the point? Humans have just experienced the most stunning social transformation ever during the last 200 years. Say what you like, but the transformation from hunter-gathering took thousands of years.

Today per-capita income is up by 50 times over agricultural times, according to Great Enrichment writer Deirdre McCloskey, even though our rulers handicapped us with a couple of world wars, some serious economic meltdowns, and a couple of continental-sized totalitarian regimes that killed their peoples by the millions.

Yes. Our cities aren’t perfect. They all seem to have gangs, as noticed by Charles Dickens’ young Oliver Twist in London in the 1830s, long before The Gangs of New York became world famous, and even before drug gangs brought Chinese fentanyl into the United States to create the homeless crisis. The Brits got onto the gang problem early, and it was in 1829 that Parliament passed Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Bill, allowing Dickens to create the character of Inspector Bucket in Bleak House.

Now here is my daily Lecture to Liberals. If you want to make our cities safe and brimming with community, dear liberal friends, then Refund the Police to take out the gangs. But why? Simple. We need to Refund the Police to make our cities safe for women.

Experts agree that it is women that create human community, not men, but they can’t do that until they feel “safe,” after the men of the community have knocked some sense into the young hooligans peddling drugs on the street and fighting with the gang next door over territory.

This is not rocket science, dear liberal friends, but common sense that every human can understand and appreciate -- provided their minds have not been infected with the virus of woke or progressive ideology, or corrupted by the need to get research grants.

Know what I think was the best urban planning idea ever, that beats all the urbanists and new urbanists and “15-minute cities” combined? The Levittowns built just after World War II.

And do you know why? Because Levittowns allowed moms to move out of the city into the leafy suburbs and raise their children away from the “soulless and sprawling” city. And moms really liked that. Because Levittowns were “safe.”

One other thing. Do you know why we need suburbs with their safety and their curvy streets? Bikes. It was scarcely a century ago that God invented the modern bicycle and trendy chaps like Thomas Hardy started biking the country lanes of England. A mere 50 years later, when I was a kid in England in the 1950s, my sister and I biked every day down Beech Avenue to The Avenue where our cousins lived. And then we would all bike over to play at The Warren. Today, parents start their toddlers on balance bikes (I had to look it up) when they can barely walk.

“What if our cities were healed, full of suburban houses with white picket fences and little kids riding balance bikes in the street?”

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

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