Guest post by Ed Stephan
In several of my Carpetbagger comments I have linked to an excellent article by the editors of Seattle’s offbeat paper, The Stranger, titled “The Urban Archipelago” (subtitled “It’s the Cities, Stupid”). It moves well beyond what has become the standard “red-state blue-state” characterization of American politics. A county-by-county red-blue 2004 map like this:
they say
provides a clearer picture of the bind the Democrats finds themselves in. The majority of the blue states–Washington, Oregon, California, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware–are, geographically speaking, not blue states. They are blue cities.
Look at our famously blue West Coast. But for the cities–Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego–the West Coast would be a deep, dark red. The same is true for other nominally blue states. Illinois is almost entirely red–Chicago turns the state blue. Michigan is almost entirely red–Detroit, Lansing, Kalamazoo turn it blue. And on and on. What tips these states into the blue column? Their urban areas do, their big, populous counties.
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.
The article continues with a brilliant analysis of the place of cities, their “urban vision” for the Democratic Party, and so on. It’s really well worth reading. You can see an even more dramatic map of the “blue vote” here.
I want to add just a bit more perspective. Using U.S. Census Bureau data on Population Characteristics, I generated the following chart:
In our First Census (1790) there were only 24 “urban places” (2,500 or more); the largest, New York City, had 33,000 people; only five exceeded 10,000. We didn’t become 50% urban until the Census of 1920. During our “formative century” we were basically a rural nation. Many of our values, even though we live in cities, were hardened during that pre-urban period.
Early textbooks in Sociology were practically built around the “rural-urban continuum”, contrasting the newer urban-industrial life with all those agrarian centuries which preceded it. For all their differences, the work of most of the original thinkers in the field (Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, Marx, Weber) was largely an analysis of the dominance of cities in industrial society.
Things changed by the middle of the 20th century. By the 1950s most analysts believed that new technologies of transportation and communication had eliminated the old rural-urban differences. One article in the late ’50s identified a number of variables (e.g., percent male, family size, proportion over 65, intercounty mobility, proportion nonwhite, female participation in the labor force) which no longer showed consistent variation with size-of-place. By 1967 the prominent American demographer Ralph Thomlinson could write that “rural-urban differences are declining rapidly and threaten to vanish.”
Twenty-five years ago I did a study to test this assertion. Using data from the University Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, I found very strong relationships between respondents’ size-of-place and their degree of tolerance shown toward homosexuality, pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex and pornography. I found even stronger relationships for size-of-place where the respondent grew up. If you’re interested, you can find the details of this study in the American Sociological Review, 1982, 47:411-5.
Which brings us back to the Democrats and 2008. I’m more convinced than ever that we need to begin thinking of ourselves, not as the “blue state” party, or even necessarily under the older “liberal” label (though what I’m saying here doesn’t conflict with that). I think, instead, it’s high time we identify with our Urban Base, in every state red or blue. We should aim to make ourselves the party of choice for every urban place in America.
Urbanites are tolerant (even accepting) of many of the things Republicans brag about hating. We are more tolerant of sexual differences. We do not hate religion, we tolerate all religions (and also the lack of same). We’re probably more willing to tax-and-spend (which is better than bankrupting future generations anyway) because in cities we see the payoff in myriad services every day. In fact, we should be demanding that our taxes be spent in our cities first, with what’s left over going to state and federal governments, still too heavily dominated by antique systems rural over-representation. We’re not un-American, as the GOP would have us, but our urban Fourth of July parades are far more likely include a gay or ethnic contingent in addition to our American Legionnaires and Catholic Youth Organization floats.
We are more connected with other cities of the world than we (or they) are with our romanticized but increasingly fictional rural pasts. Kenneth Boulding wrote a brilliant article, “The City as an element in the international system.” Daedalus, 97:1111-23 (1968). In it he argued that cities, once the refuge from warfare, had become the primary targets of it; he called for realigning our thoughts about cities in their global relations with each other, rather than allowing them to be dominated by out-of-date rural prejudices and policies. The attacks on New York and D.C. in 2001, and this week’s attack on London, add a frightening reality to Boulding’s prophetic essay.
Urbanites are the “real world” driving force in America today, and our numbers of rising all the time. The very word “civilized” derives from “civitas”, Latin for “city”. The Democratic Party should focus on cities, leave the stagnating hillbillies to the GOP, and sigh “good riddance”.