[Vision2020] How the G.O.P. Became the Anti-Urban Party

[Art Deco]

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October 6, 2012
How the G.O.P. Became the Anti-Urban Party By KEVIN BAKER

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<http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/09/18/time-for-an-intervention/>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<http://www.gop.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/2012GOPPlatform.pdf>ratified
there is over 31,000 words long. It includes subsections on myriad
pressing topics, like “Restructuring the U.S. Postal Service for the
Twenty-First Century” and “American Sovereignty in U.S. Courts,” which
features a full-throated denunciation of the “unreasonable extension” of
the Lacey Act of 1900 (please don’t ask). There are also passages
specifying what our national policy should be all over the world — but not
in one American city.

Actually, that’s not quite true. Right after “Honoring Our Relationship
With American Indians” and shortly before “Honoring and Supporting
Americans in the Territories,” the Republican platform addresses another
enclave of benighted quasi-citizens: the District of Columbia. Most of what
it has to say is about forcing the district to accept school vouchers, lax
gun laws and the fact that it will never be a state. It also scolds the
district for corruption and “decades of inept one-party rule.” Only a city
would get yelled at.

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. Philadelphia was dominated for
decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally — both parties had
highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a buffoonish Republican
mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the city during the ascent of Al
Capone. 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. And that’s
due in good part to the man Hoover defeated, more than 80 years ago.

The rise of Alfred E. Smith to the top of the Democratic Party confirmed a
sea change in American life. Smith was not simply the first Catholic to
lead a major-party ticket. He was also a quintessentially urban candidate,
like no one who has ever seriously contended for the presidency before or
since.

Born in 1873 on Oliver Street, on the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown, he was
forced to leave school after the death of his father. He never went back,
toiling at the Fulton Fish Market for $12 a week. Elected to the New York
State Assembly by Tammany Hall’s political machine, he worked his way up to
speaker, then governor.

In Albany, Smith pushed through some of the most important social
legislation in our history. Yet everything about him remained unacceptably
“ghetto” to much of America: the way he dressed; the stogies he smoked in
public; his heavy New York accent; and the way he enjoyed singing old
Bowery tunes while enjoying a beer with the boys.

It was almost as if today a candidate from the projects — a high-school
dropout who still dressed in hip-hop fashion and liked to occasionally drop
in to a club to D.J. for a couple of hours — were to become a serious
presidential candidate.

“To hundreds of thousands of old-stock Americans, Smith might just as well
have been Jewish or black,” the historian Lawrence H. Fuchs wrote. New York
“meant night life, short skirts, prostitution, Jewish intellectuals and the
Union Theological Seminary.”

In an openly bigoted campaign, Smith was
assailed<http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/when-a-catholic-terrified-the-heartland/>in
millions of coarse, anti-Catholic pamphlets and handbills; even a
Methodist bishop viciously attacked his “Romanism.” He walked away from the
race a bitter man and the cities went with him. By 1930, over 56 percent of
all Americans already lived in urban areas.

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.

In so doing, it began to shrivel the urban political machines, though it
would take decades before they disappeared completely. The cities, which
had been places of horrible suffering during the early years of the Great
Depression, became alluring again, attracting a dynamic if volatile new mix
of the rural poor, black, white and Hispanic. By 1950, almost two-thirds of
all Americans lived in urban areas.

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.

This didn’t seem to matter in the postwar years, as demographic trends
began to shift sharply away from the city. Newly prosperous whites and
eventually blacks pursued the American dream out to the suburbs. The urban
industrial base left too.

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. The very idea of the city seemed to be a thing of the past, an
archaic concept — so much so that Gerald R. Ford seriously considered
letting New York go bankrupt in 1975.

This probably cost Ford the 1976 election — much as Mr. Romney’s opposition
to “saving Detroit” may yet cost him this one, thanks to all the votes of
auto-parts workers he stands to sacrifice in Ohio. Tragically, once-great
cities like St. Louis or Newark never fully recovered from postwar
deindustrialization. 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. Traditional liberal bastions
like the Upper West Side of Manhattan are now filled with the owners of
co-ops and condominiums worth hundreds of thousands, even millions of
dollars. Over 140,000 New Yorkers in all — or nearly 4 percent of the labor
force — work out of their homes. The percentages are even higher in Los
Angeles and Chicago. Most of these individuals are skilled, highly educated
“job creators” for themselves and others — the very demographic that
Republicans claim to want to attract.

Some have managed it. The Upper West Side voted for the re-election of both
the businessman Michael R. Bloomberg and the former prosecutor Rudolph W.
Giuliani. Over the past 25 years, cities like Indianapolis, San Diego and
even Los Angeles have elected — and re-elected — Republican mayors.

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.

There wasn’t so much as a mention of cities in the debate on domestic
issues the presidential candidates had last week. Nor did the Democrats
have much to say about cities at their convention in Charlotte, N.C. They
didn’t have to. Politically, Democrats don’t have to say anything about the
urban experience; they embody it. But in too many cities this allows them
to keep running corrupt and mediocre candidates.

Mr. Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg — both Democrats turned Republicans — saw
their opportunity in displacing these tired party satraps. Between them,
they embraced exactly the sort of “Chinese menu” variety of policy choices
that Americans say they prefer. Between them, they backed tough
law-enforcement tactics and strict gun laws, supported gay rights and major
real-estate developments, opposed smoking in bars and a “living wage.”

Other Republican mayors have scored similar successes around the country.
Susan Golding, the second woman and first Jewish mayor of San Diego, was a
pro-gay-rights, pro-affirmative-action executive who also built that city’s
first homeless shelter — and cracked down on crime while creating “one-stop
shopping” for new businesses seeking permits.

The dynasty of Republican mayors begun by Richard G. Lugar in Indianapolis
had a prophetic champion in the Buffalo congressman Jack F. Kemp, who tried
hard to provide Republicans with a potential urban agenda when he was
secretary of housing and urban development under the first President Bush.
Mr. Kemp insisted that the party denounce racism and pioneered urban
“enterprise zones” — there are over 800 of them today — and even tried to
extend the idea of the urban stakeholder movement to the residents of
public housing projects by allowing them to buy their own homes.

“This is my way of redeeming my existence on earth,” Mr. Kemp once told a
group of reporters. “I wasn’t there with Rosa Parks or Dr. King or John
Lewis, but I am here now, and I am going to yell from the rooftops about
what we need to do.”

THE potential for change, should Republicans start shouting from the
rooftops about cities, is enormous. Constituencies change parties — and in
America, parties change constituents, opening them up to the concerns of
others, because of the need to form broad, national coalitions. 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.

At a moment when Republican Party’s “dog whistles” are more racially
pitched than ever, this may sound crazy. Yet one got the impression this
election season, for instance, that Cory A. Booker, the mayor of Newark,
would like some new place to turn. Mayor Booker has battled valiantly
against the sclerotic, black political establishment in his own city as
well as outside white indifference. A Mayor Booker who had someplace to go
besides the Democratic Party with his city’s votes would be immediately
empowered as never before.

Republicans in turn could show on a very human level that they are more
than the mere radio ranters who constitute so much of what urban voters get
to hear of the right wing. They would have to vie for votes in a manner
that reflects urban realities instead of fantastical theories. Imagine a
serious, practical discussion of educational reform or mass transit,
instead of more heavy-handed attempts to demonize teachers’ unions or
privatize the rails.

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. This
can’t continue. The courts have already struck down many voter suppression
laws, and the party’s 2008 presidential results read like an actuarial
table, with 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.

The old antagonisms between cities and suburbs will give way to cooperation
over everything from where to build the next airport to how to combine
municipal services to how to spread the wealth cities generate. And for
that matter, over half of all minorities in metropolitan areas — including
African-Americans — do not live in the inner city but in surrounding
suburbs.

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

Kevin Baker is the author of the “City of Fire” series of historical
novels: “Dreamland,” “Paradise Alley” and “Strivers Row.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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