OPINION: To save America, restore the right to rise
By Josh McManus
Jackson Rising Facilitator
America’s crisis is not abstract. It’s not cultural. It’s not even partisan. It’s economic and it’s lived every day in cities like Jackson, Mississippi. The defining promise of this country has always been the Right to Rise: the belief that if you work hard, contribute to your community, and play by the rules, you and your children’s lives can get better. That promise is breaking down in plain sight.
When people say the system is rigged, they’re not talking about ideology. They’re talking about lived experience. Rent eats half a paycheck. The grocery bill grows faster than wages. Small businesses struggle just to get started, let alone scale. Downtowns hollow out while talent drains away. Parents work more hours for less security. Young people leave places they love because they don’t see a future there. Jackson knows this story all too well.
This breakdown didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of decades of downward mobility and disinvestment in the very places where opportunity is supposed to be born. As goes Jackson, so goes Mississippi. As goes Mississippi, so goes the United States.
If we want to save America, not rhetorically, but practically, we must restore the Right to Rise. And the fastest, most durable way to do that is by rebuilding opportunity in the flyover and forgotten cities that have always powered this country. I know this because post industrial cities have been my obsession for nearly thirty years; from Chattanooga to Detroit, Akron to New Orleans, and now here in Jackson.
Cities are where the American economy is made real. They are where productivity happens, where ideas collide, where culture is created and where inequality is felt most sharply. When cities like Jackson work, America works. When they don’t, the entire country pays the price. For too long, we have tried to fix cities with slogans, one-off programs, and disconnected grants. What we need instead is a grounded, muscular, relentlessly practical agenda for urban renewal that rebuilds opportunity at scale.
Jackson Rising shows what that might look like in practice. Jackson Rising is not a branding exercise or a wish list. It was a disciplined process that brought over 300 business leaders, residents, institutions and public officials together to answer hard questions about Jackson’s future and then align around suggested priorities. The process, the strategy, and the measurable outcomes are documented openly at jxnrising.com, because this work matters only if it can be understood, tested and replicated.
It starts with a vision for the place you actually are. Every city needs a clear, shared answer to a simple question: What are we trying to become? Not a glossy pitch, but an economic vision rooted in local strengths, history, and ambition. Cities that win are cities that decide. They choose abundance over scarcity and take the disciplined risk that working together might actually work.
In Jackson Rising, that means aligning land use, infrastructure, workforce development, entrepreneurship, and capital around a future Jackson can realistically build, not one imported from somewhere else. Vision is not fluff. It is economic infrastructure. Without it, money scatters, talent leaves and public trust erodes. With it, capital and ideas can finally compound.
Next, we must unleash thousands of small businesses and social enterprises here in Jackson and across America. Our country does not lack entrepreneurs. It lacks systems that let them survive. Permitting is slow. Capital is misaligned. Procurement shuts out local firms. Technical assistance is fragmented. The result is an economy dominated by a few giants and a long tail of people locked out of ownership.
If you want upward mobility, you need ownership of businesses, properties and ideas. Cities must become startup engines for lifelong residents, not just venture-backed founders. Jackson Rising explicitly looks at small business formation as core economic development, not a side project, aligning philanthropy, public dollars, anchor institutions and policy to make local enterprise viable. A city that helps thousands of lifelong residents start durable businesses does more for mobility than any single megadeal ever will.
We must also learn to harness what I call the “Economic DNA” of cities. Every city has a unique mix of industries, institutions, skills, culture and geography shaped over generations. Too often, cities chase the same generic future: the “Silicon Valley of Somewhere Else”. That’s how you get sameness without success.
Jackson Rising takes a different path by grounding future opportunity in Jackson’s real assets: its cultural capital, its institutions, its land, its people, and its role in the broader Southeastern economy. This is a strategy, not nostalgia. Economic mobility accelerates when people can build a future without leaving home.
Finally, we need transformative projects driven by serious public-private partnerships. Not ribbon cuttings. Not vanity projects. But catalytic investments that change how the city works: reclaiming blighted corridors, rebuilding the downtown hub as a mixed-income employment center, converting vacant land into housing and light industry, modernizing infrastructure to support new businesses.
The government can’t do this alone. The private sector won’t do it without public leadership. The deal has to change. Jackson Rising demonstrates how cities can set the table by demanding public value in exchange for private capital, and moving with urgency when that alignment exists. These projects create jobs immediately and opportunity for decades. They rebuild confidence, one of the most undervalued economic assets we have.
Restoring the Right to Rise is about results, not ideology. People don’t need to be convinced the system isn’t working; they already know. What they need is proof that someone is finally serious about fixing it. That seriousness looks like focusing less on national abstractions and more on local outcomes. It looks like measuring success in businesses started, wages raised, neighborhoods stabilized and young people who stay because they finally see a future.
The American experiment has always depended on the idea that progress is possible where you are. Not just somewhere else, for someone else. The path forward isn’t mysterious. It runs straight through cities like Jackson, Mississippi. Restore the capacity to generate opportunity, restore the Right to Rise, and America rises too.
