- How big-city values, not small-town values, are better suited for governing the nation;
- Recalling Robert Reich’s take on urban vs. rural;
- Heather Cox Richardson on the potential end of a long Republican era;
- A review of a book by an author who wants to impose conservative rule on the nation for the “common good”.
Why are small town values exalted by politicians? Most Americans are in big cities, where the issues of the 21st century are taking place.
Washington Post, Paul Waldman, 13 Jun 2023: Opinion | Forget ‘small-town values.’ We need candidates with big-city values.
He opens by noting the announcement of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum that he’s running for president by bragging that he “grew up in a tiny town in North Dakota” as if this gives him some kind of special qualification.
Burgum is practicing a version of small-town identity politics. “Small-town values have guided me my entire life; small-town values are at the core of America,” he says. “And frankly, big cities could use more ideas and more values from small towns right now.”
The glorification of small towns is a familiar political trope, repeated so often that most of us don’t bother to question it. As one pair of scholars put it, “Rural America is sometimes viewed as a kind of safe-deposit box that stores America’s fundamental values.”
Imagine how refreshing it would be to hear a candidate touting their “big-city values” and explaining how important and useful the things they learned in the city can be. Plenty of U.S. presidents — William Howard Taft, Barack Obama, Donald Trump — came from cities. But they were more likely to extol the small towns they didn’t hail from than to argue that the city is where the tools of governing can also be cultivated.
And,
Imagine how refreshing it would be to hear a candidate touting their “big-city values” and explaining how important and useful the things they learned in the city can be. Plenty of U.S. presidents — William Howard Taft, Barack Obama, Donald Trump — came from cities. But they were more likely to extol the small towns they didn’t hail from than to argue that the city is where the tools of governing can also be cultivated.
And yet the demands of governing favor lessons gained from urban environments.
If you grow up in a city, you’ll learn to navigate a complex world. You’ll deal with people of diverse backgrounds, languages and religions — just like America. You’ll negotiate with their desires and interests, because when you’re all packed together, you have no choice. And you’ll learn to react to change.
That’s one of the central facts of urban life: Cities are and always have been about change. Immigrants come in from abroad, migrants flow in from other parts of the state and the country, and the changing population constantly remakes the city’s politics, its food, its music and every other part of its culture. Even the landscape is remade as old buildings come down and new ones rise up.
I take this veneration of small town values as being aligned with the conservative notion that the past was a better, and certainly simpler, time, one that conservatives strive to revive. It’s a fantasy, of course, and it’s dangerous, because it ignores the majority of the population and the actual challenges that face the country, and humanity, in the 21st century.
Waldman goes on:
In the small town, by contrast, the slow pace of change is precisely what many people value. The rural ethos is saturated in nostalgia, the desire to hold on to or recapture the way things used to be. That nostalgia is often about simplicity, a yearning for a time when the world wasn’t so complicated, change didn’t happen so fast and you could count on life being pretty much the same for you as it was for your parents and grandparents.
Which might be fine for a person to value, but it won’t help you navigate the complexities of policymaking in a dynamic nation of almost 335 million people. For that, you’d do better to cultivate big-city values.
And Waldman makes a key point: that Burgum may have grown up in a small town, but “the most important factor in his business success is probably this: He left.” And concludes,
Democrats are constantly asked why they aren’t doing more to “reach out” to rural and small-town voters, to approach them with open ears and respectful hearts. Nobody ever asks Republican presidential candidates to do the same with urban voters. Maybe if they did, they’d learn a thing or two about the country they aspire to govern.
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This is an ongoing theme, rural American’s nostalgia for small towns and their mistrust of big cities. One of my earliest posts on this blog, from 4 Sep 2013, quoted Robert Reich. I’ll quote him again. How little has changed in 10 years, especially about the goals of the “regressives.”
Why is it that most progressives live in cities and on the coasts where there are major ports, while most regressives live in rural areas far removed from the nation’s major ports and cities? The same pattern holds in other nations and regions of the world. Historically, fascist movements have begun inland; liberal movements, around major seaports and cities. It’s probably because major ports and cities are far more exposed to the rest of the world, and to a diverse range of people and a broad range of ideas, while rural inland areas are more homogeneous and insular. America’s regressives — trying to stop abortions, prevent gay marriages, keep their guns, hold back immigration, militarize the border, limit voting rights, prevent the teaching of evolution, deny climate change, tear down the wall between church and state, and cut safety nets — reflect the values and views of those who are cut off from the realities of the 21st century. Our problem is they have disproportionate political power, and are determined to hold onto it as long as they can.
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Today’s letter from Heather Cox Richardson (actually posted late last night) addresses another thing that hasn’t change. No matter how much Republicans fret about the growing deficit, they still want to cut taxes, which will make the deficit worse. (This is because Republicans are beholden to their wealthy donor base.)
Not two weeks after threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling because of their stated concerns over the nation’s mounting debt, Republicans are calling for tax cuts. The nonprofit public policy organization the Committee for a Responsible Budget estimates that over a decade those cuts will cost $80 billion as written and more than $1.1 trillion if made permanent. The frontloading in the measure, they estimate, will make it cost $320 billion by the end of 2025.
Some things haven’t changed, but Cox notes that maybe some things have.
It feels like the end of an era. The idea that tax cuts and spending cuts will automatically expand the economy—the argument that Ronald Reagan rode to the White House in 1981—is no longer believable.
Noting the deaths of Pat Robertson and James Watt, Cox sees an era of Republican politics that began with Reagan…
People like Robertson and Watt believed they were at war with those Americans of both parties who approved of the democratic system that had ushered the nation through the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War and had promoted greater economic, racial, and gender equality than the country had ever known before.
That battle to divide the American people along cultural lines in order to dismantle the federal government has, after forty years, led to a Republican Party that has embraced Christian nationalism, abandoning not only the policies of democracy but also democracy itself.
…may be playing out with the decline of Trump and his apologists.
In contrast, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have steadfastly refused to engage with the Trump drama and have quietly worked to rebuild the government that forty years of austerity and ideological attacks have undermined. Their determination to rebuild the middle class has led to strong economic growth, high employment, and now inflation at its lowest level since May 2021. Government investment in new technologies and in returning supply chains to the U.S. has led to private investment of more than $220 billion in the economy and the creation of more than 77,000 new jobs, largely in Republican-dominated states. Manufacturing construction has more than doubled in the past year.
As the architects of Reagan’s revolution exit stage right, Republican calls for more tax cuts are barely making the news, while the traditional idea of government investment in the American people appears to be showing its strength.
“The wind is shifting,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin tweeted today after listening to Haley and Scott backtrack. “Remember: change happens slowly and then all at once.”
Trump fans will insists this progress is not happening and Glorious Leader must be returned to power.
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Here’s a review of a book that further details conservatives’ true goals: not freedom and liberty, but an enforcement of “conservative rules in the name of the ‘common good’.” Conformity, not freedom and liberty.
NY Times, Jennifer Szalai, 7 Jun 2023: When ‘Regime Change’ Means Returning America to an Idealized Past, subtitled “The new book by the political scientist Patrick J. Deneen proposes to replace the country’s ‘invasive progressive tyranny’ with conservative rule in the name of the ‘common good.'”
From the review, this sounds like yet another hankering for a simple, idealistic past (that never actually existed). One that the author wants to *impose* on everyone.
In the introduction, he gives a hint at what’s to come: “What is needed — and what most ordinary people instinctively seek — is stability, order, continuity and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. What they want, without knowing the right word for it, is a conservatism that conserves.”
The confidence (and condescension) is breathtaking, but it turns out that Deneen doesn’t believe that “ordinary people” are up to the task of effecting the necessary change. They have been too degraded by an “invasive progressive tyranny” to yield anything other than a populist movement that is “untutored and ill led,” he writes, alluding to Trump. After spending 150 pages disparaging the “elite,” Deneen goes on, in the last third of the book, to try to reclaim the word for a “self-conscious aristoi” who would dispense with all the liberal niceties about equality and freedom and instead serve as the vanguard of a muscular “aristopopulism.”
And this will take
“The raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism.”
…
There is a lot about “the past” in this book and barely any actual history. He gets misty-eyed reminiscing about the “quiet leadership” provided by “small-town doctors” and a Hollywood that produced movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It all sounds gentle and quaint except when Deneen erupts in demands for an “overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class.”
And the book’s author exhibits the typical black/white zero-sum thinking of conservatives.
Deneen decries what he calls an “effort to displace ‘traditional’ forms of marriage, family and sexual identity based in nature.” Never mind the shoddy thinking that somehow equates pluralism with replacement, as if a same-sex marriage (or, as he puts it, “marriage between two homosexuals”) is something that could “displace” a marriage between a man and a woman. Deneen’s worldview is unrelentingly zero-sum. He says he seeks nothing less than the “renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.”
His ideal society is Christian? Well of course! The reviewer concludes by noting the book’s author’s presumption that he knows what the common good is…
Underneath all the gemütlich verbs lurks a suggestion that some readers may find chilling: a vision of the “common good” so obvious to Deneen that it’s not up for debate or discussion.
