Will Liberal Cities Leave the Rest of America Behind?

In Virginia the contrasts between liberal areas and ultra-conservative areas of the state are stark, with higher incomes and economic growth increasingly concentrated in urban and liberal areas such as Northern Virginia.  In sharp contrast, in conservative areas of Virginia - largely in Southwest Virginia, so-called Southside and parts of the Shenandoah Valley, unemployment is high and economic activity is either stagnant or declining.  Yet the Republican Party of Virginia continues to favor the policies backed by the conservative regions which would drag the Commonwealth as a whole backward in time and economic progress.  The phenomenon is not unique to Virginia and highlights the contrasts between the GOP policies of "no," obstructionism and reaction and efforts being made in liberal cities to move the working and middle classes forward.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the possibility that liberal cities will leave the rest of America in the dust economically and socially.  Here are column highlights:

The declining ability of the American political order to deliver a steadily rising standard of living to the vast middle and working classes began to show itself in the 1970s, well before most people grasped the significance of what was happening around them. Decades of globalization have been accompanied by diminishing opportunity for those in midlevel jobs; by stagnant wages, especially for men without college degrees; and by the virtual collapse of private-sector unionization.

Standing in opposition to these adverse trends, a wave of newly elected mayors from New York to Seattle has taken office committed to deploying the power of city government and aggressive wage and tax policies to attack inequality and revive social and economic mobility.

These outspoken mayors have generated a growing optimism on the Democratic left that local officials can restore support for government activism. Mayors and city councils, in this view, can lead the drive to improve the prospects and living conditions of those in the bottom third of the income distribution.

Harold Meyerson, the editor at large of The American Prospect, argues in “The Revolt of the Cities” that this insurgency is already in motion. Urban chief executives are raising minimum wages; requiring contractors to hire inner-city residents and to increase pay on municipal projects; backing local union organizing efforts; initiating or expanding pre-K schooling; extending public transit into poor neighborhoods; and requiring police to videotape contacts with citizens.

“They are, in short, enacting at the municipal level many of the major policy changes that progressives have found themselves unable to enact at the federal and state levels,” Meyerson writes. “They also may be charting a new course for American liberalism.”

The political impetus behind this ideological development is the fact that American cities are on the cutting edge of the current demographic transformation of the United States into a majority-minority nation.

Minorities are significantly more liberal and more pro-government than whites, according to survey data from American National Election Studies.

While Meyerson’s political and demographic data is on target, and he accurately describes a movement toward more redistributive policies, there are reasons to be cautious. 

First and foremost, a number of the cities Meyerson points to have exceptional, built-in advantages: major research universities; financial and high-tech corporate centers; substantial and strong artistic and intellectual communities. 

Another way to look at this is that it takes money and resources to become a liberal city. “You can’t be a progressive without prosperity,” Bruce Katz, director of the Brookings Institution’s metropolitan policy program, said in a phone interview.

In their book, “Toward a 21st Century City for All,” John Mollenkopf, a professor of political science and sociology at CUNY, and Brad Lander, a Brooklyn city councilman who represents Cobble Hill, Park Slope and Boro Park, acknowledge the disparity favoring already successful cities.

The larger question is whether the current left-leaning urban agenda is restricted to small elite of well-off municipalities with substantial resources. If so, the cities equipped to finance major enhancements will leave their less well-off counterparts sinking ever deeper in the hole.

Urban America is now on a reconnaissance mission for progressive politics. What we’re still waiting to find out is whether the policies and programs developed in the nation’s thriving urban core will prove to be broadly applicable. Can the new progressive mayors lay the groundwork for a national agenda, or will bold and innovative policy experiments that privilege New York and Seattle fail their disadvantaged cousins like Stockton, Detroit, Buffalo and Baltimore?

One thing that is certain is that the Virginia GOP's policies are not working and will only impede Virginia's progress.  To date, Virginia has moved forward in spite of, not because of the policies of today's GOP.

 

How the G.O.P. Became the Anti-Urban (and Anti-Knowledge) Party

There are many things wrong with today's Republican Party not the least of which is its transformation into a sectarian party controlled by the most extreme elements of the ignorance embracing, objective reality denying Christian Right.  Thus, as a lengthy column in the New York Times examines, today's GOP has largely rejected cities from its agenda since urban areas typically do not buy into the party's anti-knowledge agenda and thinly veiled racism and anti-gay bigotry.   Symptomatic of this reality is that even in Virginia, the more urban cities tend to almost uniformly vote Democrat.  In doing so, however, the GOP and its Christianist/Tea Party base sharply narrow the pool of would be supporters.  Here are some column highlights:

A LEADING Republican columnist, trying to re-stoke her candidate’s faltering campaign before the first presidential debate, felt so desperate that she advised him to turn to cities. 

“Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city — don’t they count anymore?” Peggy Noonan lamented in The Wall Street Journal. “A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings.” 

But the fact is that cities don’t count anymore — at least not in national Republican politics.  The very word “city” went all but unheard at the Republican convention, held in the rudimentary city of Tampa, Fla. The party platform ratified there is over 31,000 words long.

The very few sections that address urban concerns contain similar complaints about cities’ current priorities — not to mention the very idea of city life. The Republican platform bitterly denounces the Democrats for diverting some highway fund money to Amtrak and harrumphs that it is “long past time for the federal government to get out of the way and allow private ventures to provide passenger service to the Northeast corridor. The same holds true with regard to high-speed and intercity rail across the country.” 

The Obama administration, the Republicans conclude damningly, is “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” 

Unsurprisingly, the chairman of the Republican platform committee, Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, is from a state that has no city with a population of 500,000 or more. One of his two “co-chairmen” was Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota, which ranks 47th among the states in population density. The other was Marsha Blackburn, who represents a largely suburban district of Tennessee. 

IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections.   This wasn’t always the case.  During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities.

In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles. With the possible exception of Houston or maybe Omaha, it’s all but inconceivable that Mr. Romney will carry any of those cities.

The Great Depression secured their loyalty to the Democratic Party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the cities showcases for the New Deal — especially New York, under the liberal Republican reformer, Fiorello H. La Guardia. Federal money poured in, but in the end the New Deal was about more than building new bridges or getting people off the bread lines. Contrary to Mr. Romney’s contention that government aid automatically turns people into “victims” and “dependents,” Washington’s intervention turned urban Americans from subjects into citizens who could claim the necessities of life as a right, not a favor. 

Save for mavericks like La Guardia, Republicans had little to add to this battle for the soul of the city. Increasingly, a Republican mayor of a major city became a curiosity. In presidential elections, big cities went Republican only during landslides.  

FOR Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in their Cadillacs. 

But urban living was far from dead. Instead, the American economy began to reinvent itself in cities, as they became cleaner, greener, safer, more prosperous, more fun. As the demographic wheel turned again, both new immigrants and a generation of Americans born and raised in the ’burbs moved back in.  

Today, four-fifths of the population lives in an urban area — the highest percentage in our history. Although the country remains largely suburban, one in 12 Americans lives in a city of over a million people. More than ever, they are stakeholders, owning where previous generations rented, creating their own jobs and opportunities. . . . . Most of these individuals are skilled, highly educated “job creators” for themselves and others — the very demographic that Republicans claim to want to attract. 

Yet the national Republican Party still can’t get seem to get past its animus toward the very idea of urban life. The only place that Amtrak turns a profit is the Northeast corridor — yet all Republicans can think to do is privatize it, along with the local rail lines on which millions of Americans have been commuting into cities to work for as long as a century and a half. Republicans promise to ban same-sex marriage, make it easier for anyone to get a gun, delegitimize and destroy what they mockingly call “public employees’ unions,” and deport the immigrant workers performing so many thankless but vital tasks. 

In short, they promise to rip and tear at the immensely complex fabric of city life while sneering at the entire “urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” There is a terrible arrogance here that has ramifications well beyond the Republicans’ electoral prospects.

A Republican Party seeking to actively win cities, not just vilify them or suppress their vote, could open the party up to all sorts of new immigrant voters, like Asian and Latino Americans — and maybe even bring back part of an old voting bloc: black people.  

The prospects for any such change don’t seem high right now. But that may change, too, out of necessity. The Republican refusal to contest the cities has left them in a permanently defensive stance in national campaigns. . . . . Republicans increasing their percentage of the vote mainly in aging districts that are losing population. In the meantime, as urban areas continue to grow, they become more and more intertwined with what were once distant suburbs, making “urban” issues all the more pertinent to everyone. 

Republicans may not want to go to the cities. But that doesn’t much matter. The cities are coming to them. 

Personally, I hope the GOP does not wake up to the fact that its anti-city mindset is part of what I hope and believe is slow form of suicide.  One can only hope that the resultant death comes sooner as opposed to later.

John McCain - Reckless and Now Demonstrably Unfit for Office

There are times I wonder WTF is wrong with Americans. By any intelligent objective standared there are few reasons to support a McCain presidency now that McCain has sold his soul to the Christianists and shown himself to be reckless and cynical in making his pick for his VP running mate. In addition to looking like a Christianist nutcase, Sarah Palin lacks any serious executive experience that is one of the alleged reasons for her selection. Just because the GOP mouth pieces keep saying she has it doesn't make it so. A glance at the number of cities in the USA with populations LARGER than that of the entire state of Alaska underscores just how ridiculously McCain acted in selecting Palin as his running mate. There are nineteen (19) cities with populations larger than that of Alaska (10 have populations one and a half times or more of that of Alaska). Locally, Norfolk and Virginia Beach combined have a larger population than all of Alaska. Using McCain's insane standard, the mayor of any one of these cities is competent to be Vice President of the United States. This level of idiocy is truly worthy of the Chimperator and ought to say all that needs to be known. Here are highlights from Andrew Sullivan's take on McCain:

*

What we have learned about John McCain from his selection of Sarah Palin is that he is as impulsive and reckless a decision-maker as George W. Bush. We know this not because of what we have learned about this Pentecostalist populist since she exploded on the scene last Friday morning (and God knows we have learned more than we ever wanted). We know it because of how McCain made the decision. He wanted his best friend, Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate for Al Gore. That pick would have been remarkable for its bipartisan nature, would have impressed independents, and signaled a centrist presidency centered on foreign policy. It would have been bold while not being rash.

*

McCain is in charge of a party that is now, at its core, religiously motivated. Joe Lieberman, for all his political talents, is Jewish, pro-choice on abortion, gay-inclusive, and domestically liberal. McCain faced an insurrection in his party base if he picked him. Without the evangelical base, he wasn't going to win.

*

So last week, McCain picked someone he had only met once before. I repeat: he picked someone he had only met once before. His vetting chief sat Palin down for a face-to-face interview the Wednesday before last. It's very hard to overstate how nutty and irresponsible this is. Would any corporate chieftain pick a number two on those grounds and not be dismissed by his board for recklessness?

*

The recklessness was much more fatal in the new media world than in the old one. In the old media world, the Republicans could try to control the flow of information, browbeat the press and prevent the entire weird family background and series of scandals and rumors of quite incredible events from getting into the mainstream. But those days are over. Within minutes of the announcement, everyone reached for Google. I recommend for starters the two following stories that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News last March and April. Story 1 / Story 2

*

McCain's major domestic issue in the election, moreover, is the economy and the rocky time many middle class Americans are having. . . . It would be very hard to pick a governor in America who knows less about the struggles of most Americans in the current economy.

*

And Palin's edcuation? Six colleges in five years ending in a degree in sports journalism from the University of Idaho. That's the background of someone who could be president of the United States at any moment after next January. Who does John McCain think he's kidding? And what on earth was he thinking? This was a rash, impulsive, reckless pick.

*

If you thought a president who went to war on flawed intelligence with no plan for the aftermath was reckless, then I have news for you. You haven't seen anything yet. Imagine the kind of decision-making McCain has just demonstrated applied to life-and-death decisions with respect to Iran and Russia. Yes, you have permission to be afraid.