Conservatives in Cities — Desperate Refugees or Confident Pioneers?
Right-wing critics of cities fundamentally misunderstand the problem — and the solution
Many American conservatives worry about the “fall of civilization” but hate actual cities. This gives us the strange spectacle of people bemoaning the Fall of Rome while secretly desiring a repeat performance.
Anyone looking at the political landscape can see why.
The strongest political support for the right in all its shades comes from places with few people and lots of land rather than vice versa. Cities, meanwhile—especially big cities, the “global centers” and tourist hotspots — are very often the great bastions of the left, populous pockets of blue in seas of red.
It’s no wonder, then, that both the GOP and conservative pundits spend so much time blasting cities and praising rural life as the “real” part of the country. This results in some amusing scenes, like the Ivy-League-educated Ted Cruz warning of “New York values,” rich university-educated pundits in big city studios ranting on Fox News about the harm done by New York City, DC, and Hollywood to real America, and a man who thinks ID is required for grocery shopping projecting himself as the representative of the “common man” in the country’s heartland.
If cities are brought up at all, it is usually in a negative context — Chicago as an avatar of the failure and dysfunction of black urban life, New York as a source of looney SJW legislation, DC as the source of all the country’s ills with its wonks and elites caring about nothing but cocktail parties, and LA embodied by Hollywood: the bastion of all that is evil in “librul” America.
To be sure, modern conservative thought has always had a powerful strain of populist or nostalgic thinking which glorified the village and derided the city. From the Slavophiles in the former Russian Empire to Victorian-era reformers, people of conservative temperament and conviction often distrusted and even detested the modern city with its uncontrolled chaos, far-too-rapid change, and seeming lack of civilization.
But at least until recently, there was room for some conservative interest in the city, seen in the efforts of journals like the aptly named City Journal and the New Urbanism section of the American Conservative. William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, was a man of the city, even running for mayor of New York City at one point with the aim of saving it for conservative purposes. (Of course, Buckley had his populist streak as well, once famously quipping: “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.”)
Yet it seems that what’s left of that positive interest is gone, leaving only the derision and hatred of those evil bastions of liberalism and their obvious and proven hatred of America.
A Dangerous — and Self-Fulfilling — Approach
This is not a recipe for a healthy movement. As Nick Lindquist notes in Outset, urban areas are growing in America, just as they are around the world. Currently, well over 50 percent of the world’s population live in cities—according to a United Nations study, that number is supposed to get close to 70 percent by 2050.
Cities are not only where the people are, they’re where the economic and cultural power resides. Americans who write off cities are doing themselves a great disservice; in this unequal contest of strength, so-called Real America is not well-positioned to win over the long term.
Even if, by some miracle, the conservative population and movement manage to protect small town America from further ruin and deprivation, that would nevertheless signal an admission of defeat on their part, a concession that the overwhelming majority of the population—especially the younger crowd—have no desire in conservative ideas, and that the best we can hope for is a preservational, fortress-like retreat into communities incapable of further growth or development.
Solutions — And Why They Fall Short
At the same time, I find the current arguments for conservative integration to be lacking in imagination. The idea that Republicans — and by extension conservatives in general — ought to do everything they can to reclaim cities is sloppy. Far too often, articles and books about how people on the right should engage and adapt to urban culture lest the movement die out strike a note of desperation; they seem overeager to prescribe latching on to any lifeboat around, no matter how rickety or leaky — hardly very different from the desperate clinging to what’s left of small town America we hear among Trump supporters.
William Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, famously told the president in 1862 that to issue an Emancipation Proclamation without first securing a victory and demonstrating hope of ultimate triumph would be like “our last shriek on the retreat.” So, too, here — without any hope of success, or any idea of what we wish to achieve by infiltrating cities outside of mere political or cultural survival — engaging cities may make the decline less painless. Yet the decline would still come.
Wouldn’t it be better to address the factors causing the decline, rather that ensuring that the decline is inevitable, though more manageable?
Sarah Quinlan and Shoshana Weismann, two up-and-coming thinkers on the right, have a much sunnier vision of conservatism’s future within cities. They envision a movement anchored in the ideas of freedom and opportunity — the sort of message Ronald Reagan and his heirs used to offer Americans. They present a strong case that conservative ideas of limited government and freedom to pursue dreams can greatly contribute to the lives and welfare of all city dwellers, and that there is no reason many people who usually don’t vote for candidates on the right should not give such ideas a chance.
There is real potential in these ideas, yet I find them ultimately unsatisfying. Liberty, opportunity, demographic diversity— these are all wonderful things, and they are especially vital as the very conditions that enable cities to thrive. But they remain mere means to an end, not ends in themselves.
The way I would put it is as follows. The free market and limited government side of conservatism, directed towards government and its constraints, is a “thin” version of conservatism. It is interested primarily in politics and the freedom of individuals and communities to pursue their goals, but it never states nor so much as even gestures at which goals are worth pursuing and which are not.
The conservatism I believe in is a “thick” version: encompassing the idea that government should stay out of people’s lives as much as possible, but also in encouraging through dialogue, persuasion, and work that people pursue ends which have served humanity so well over the generations wherever they have lived — family, community, tradition, religion, self-improvement, the seeking of virtue, and the pursuit of the good.
To get conservatives truly emotionally and enthusiastically invested in cities, it is vital to demonstrate that thick conservatism has a place in cities, too — not in place of other visions, be they thin conservatism, liberalism, or otherwise, but alongside them.
The Heart Can Dwell in the City Too
I think paleoconservatives and Trump supporters, groups with a remarkable degree of overlap, get most of the world wrong. Their analyses tend to be ahistorical and incredibly selective; they are often blind to the real weaknesses and failings of the small towns they so ardently defend; and their suspicion of those who aren’t Real Americans™ ranges from indifference to suspicion to burning hatred.
But they do get one big thing right: Home is where the heart is.
If we want committed conservatives of all kinds to really invest in cities, a narrowly political motivation won’t ever be enough. We must speak of home, not just housing; the pride of profession and vocation, not just income brackets; traditions and culture in their deep and thickest sense, not just a nice variety of restaurants; communities in their tangible sense, not just dots on a map; history and heritage, and not just of the touristy kind.
We must argue convincingly that cities are not just opportunities for increasing conservatism’s political reach, but places where conservative ideas might be refined by, but also potentially influence, other points of view. Cities ought to be seen as places of lasting value for generations of people, not just places where you can make a buck. As Quinlan suggested to me as a headline for this article: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”
Here on Arc Digital, in the coming weeks, I will be talking about some core ideas where cities and conservative ideas in their broadest sense cross paths — the NIMBY vs. YIMBY debate, the history and traditions of cities and how they grow and evolve, and, finally, why an emotional and serious investment in cities is not a desperate clinging to a life raft, but a confident investment in conservatism’s future.
This series does not pretend to cover all the potential issues raised by the relationship between conservatism and cities. It is rather the start of a conversation on the matter, a matter that will likely never end — just like life in cities themselves.
