A Citizen of the Urban Archipelago

I found this thanks to Michael at electicism.

I have to say, it's the first encouraging thing I've read since the election, and it makes a lot of sense too.

It's time for the Democrats to face reality: They are the party of urban America. If the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide. Urban voters are the Democratic base.

...It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. And we are the real Americans. They--rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs--are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers. Red Virginia prohibits any contract between same-sex couples. Compassionate? Texas allows the death penalty to be applied to teenaged criminals and has historically executed the mentally retarded. (When the Supreme Court ruled executions of the mentally retarded unconstitutional in 2002, Texas officials, including Governor Rick Perry, responded by claiming that the state had no mentally retarded inmates on death row--a claim the state was able to make because it does not test inmates for mental retardation.) Dumb? The Sierra Club has reported that Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee squander over half of their federal transportation money on building new roads rather than public transit.

If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents. John Kerry won among the highly educated, Jews, young people, gays and lesbians, and non-whites. What do all these groups have in common? They choose to live in cities.

…For Democrats, it's the cities, stupid--not the rural areas, not the prickly, hateful "heartland," but the sane, sensible cities--including the cities trapped in the heartland....the challenge for the Democrats is not just to organize in the blue areas but to grow them. And to do that, Democrats need to pursue policies that encourage urban growth (mass transit, affordable housing, city services), and Democrats need to openly and aggressively champion urban values. By focusing on the cities the Dems can create a tribal identity to combat the white, Christian, rural, and suburban identity that the Republicans have cornered. And it's sitting right there, on every electoral map, staring them in the face: The cities.

Read the rest. It's a compelling article, and well worth considering. Much has been said about the Democrat's needing to reach out to the folks in the red, state, and I've taken part in it. But maybe that strategy is simply surrending ground, fighting the right on their own turf, where they have clear home-field advantage.

I know in my own case I sought to move to a urban area, because I knew that as a gay man I'd probably find a greater degree of tolerance there than I would in a rural area. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Take a look at just about any urban area with a population of 500,000 or more, and you're probably going to find it has a fairly active and visible gay community, because they can be visible there, whereas the "heartland" can still be rather heart-less where gay and lesbian Americans are concerned. I'm not sure why cities tend to have a higher degree of tolerance in general, but I think it's because the diversity of the population in cities usually requires the development of tolerance in order for people of different ethnicies, backgrounds, religions, and orientations to live cheek-by-jowl with each other peacefully. Don't think cities are more tolerant than rural areas? Ask Matthew Sheppard and Brandon Teena.

We can't literally secede and, let's admit it, we don't really want to live in Canada. It's too cold up there and in our heart-of-hearts we hate hockey. We can secede emotionally, however, by turning our backs on the heartland. We can focus on our issues, our urban issues, and promote our shared urban values. We can create a new identity politics, one that transcends class, race, sexual orientation, and religion, one that unites people living in cities with each other and with other urbanites in other cities. The Republicans have the federal government--for now. But we've got Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York City (Bloomberg is a Republican in name only), and every college town in the country. We're everywhere any sane person wants to be. Let them have the shitholes, the Oklahomas, Wyomings, and Alabamas. We'll take Manhattan.

To all those who live in cities--to all those depressed Kerry supporters out there--we say take heart. Clearly we can't control national politics right now--we can barely get a hearing. We can, however, stay engaged in our cities, and make our voices heard in the urban areas we dominate, and make each and every one, to quote Ronald Reagan (and John Winthrop, the 17th-century Puritan Reagan was parroting), "a city on a hill." This is not a retreat; it is a long-term strategy for the Democratic Party to cater to and build on its base.

Maybe it's time to, not-so-much turn our backs on national politics, but turn our focus towards our communities. I don't know about other places, but in DC, people are moving back into the city, tiring of the commutes from the suburbs, and comforted by a less-dysfunctional city government than in past years. Maybe it's time to start making our urban centers more attractive by focusing on the things this article is talking about. Maybe it's time to start working on the areas where we are, and let the rest of the country shift for themselves. (And maybe it's time to start keeping more of our money in our centers, rather then sending it out to the center of the country, and lower regions.)

The article is a longer, more thought out version of the "F@#! the South" prose that's been makign its way around the internet, and some of it is rather funny. Democrats, however, might be well served to take the authors' points seriously in the next four years and beyond, if they wish to build a base they can depend on. It doesn't mean abandoning the national political arena, because all of these plans are laid with an eye on regaining ground in that arena, but the reality right now is that not much is going to be accomplished there in the next four years. And it can be too easy to get tied up in battles on the national level, all the while negleting areas of strength that need to help to grow stronger for the next big fight.

I also like that the editors added a nice touch in a note to red-staters at the end, or I should say "the  blue at heart, in states of red."

We all know that not everyone who lives in the suburbs is a raving neo-Christian idiot. The raving neo-Christian idiots are winning, however, so we need to take the fight to them. In this case, the fight is largely spiritual; it consists of embracing the reality that urban life and urban values are the only sustainable response to the modern age of holy war, environmental degradation, and global conflict. More important, it consists of rejecting the impulse to apologize for living in a society that prizes values like liberalism, pluralism, education, and facts. It's time for the Democratic Party to stop pandering to bovine, non-urban America. You don't apologize for being right--especially when you're at war.

At war, indeed. And we aren't the ones who initially called it that. They did.

Comments

[Tim Who?]

I do love my city...