Why do Republicans hate cities?
Grotesque as cities can be, they’re less grotesque than the people who applaud their failure.
Are people who live in cities just “coarser and meaner” than nice country folk? Is city life grotesque, subhuman, and counter to human nature? If you ask Dennis Prager or American Conservative, the answer is yes.
Republicans hate cities. They’ve been celebrating huge population drops in New York and California as signs that “Liberal” policies are conspicuously failing. Never mind that those people are merely evacuating to other liberal cities. And never mind that these commentators live and work in the same cities they pretend to despise. As city born and raised Dennis Prager said, cities are “centers of destructive ideas”. Therefore, it’s good when they fail.
Republicans hate cities for a lot of reasons. The most important one is that cities shatter the Conservative fantasy of individualism and externality-free existence. Residents must constantly coordinate their plans and desires with those of millions of other people, and most of these people don’t share ancestry or religion. This experience is interpreted by many conservatives as evil. It either repels them from cities to chase the mirage of individualism, or it forces them to transform into people who can handle collective and cooperative mindsets.
A second reason Republicans hate cities is that residents of cities talk to eachother — or as Dennis Prager might say, they spread messages to eachother. While a rural Republican learns about incidents of police brutality from the comfort of a couch and through the lens of a TV show, city dwellers hear these stories second-hand from their friends and neighbors, or experience them in person. This makes them more sympathetic to the issues that Republicans don’t want to discuss.
The third reason Republicans hate cities is because unlike cohesive worldviews which can be summarized in the philosophy books that Conservative intellectuals love to cite, cities are extremely complicated and messy. They serve as stages for the full range of the human experience — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and the full range of the human experience is often coarse and grotesque. Conservatives are famous for calling on us to submit to their platonic ideals, but as we walk city streets and mingle with the brokenness of our society in subways, busses, and encampments, our high-mindedness is smothered by the brutality of our material universe. We can either run from this ugliness, or we can learn from it.
The successes of cities rebuke their detractors. Messy — and yes, violent as they are — they are still the epicenters of trade, wealth, and most of the good things humanity has achieved. They’re still absolutely vital for the opportunity and community that migrants, minorities, and the marginalized flock to, not necessarily because they want to, but because they have to.
The collapse of a city means more than the loss of bragging rights or another viral click-bait article. Population losses are without fail preceded by damaging social disasters and body counts. The diasporas of failing cities experience the stress of building community from scratch. Survivors of urban collapse are forced to make their homes in the ruins of their social fabric.
The final reason Republicans hate cities is because they can’t figure out how to be elected in them. But is it really such a mystery as to why that is?
There’s no denying that American cities are sick and that many people who are Democrats are to blame. The reality that city dwellers still prefer these corrupt leaders to any Republican says more about Republicans than city-dwellers.
Grotesque as cities can be, they’re less grotesque than the people who applaud their failure.
