Down and Out in Paris and Boston

Outgoing North Carolina senator John Edwards wasn’t the first person to notice the Second America, which he described in a primary campaign speech as a place where full-time workers live in poverty, lack healthcare, and pay high taxes. In 1991, conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan took a cab ride uptown in New York City every night for a week. “It was like passing through a different world,” he wrote. “We are two countries; and many Americans in the first country are getting weary of subsidizing and explaining away the deepening failure of the second.”