Country Values vs. Urban Realities?

Act of God means a whole lot more to a farmer whose crops depend on the vagaries of nature than to a shopper in a city grocery store wincing at the rising prices. Excepting the massive-scale corporate farms, individual farmers live very individually off the bounty or the scarcity of weather patterns and supply/demand chains more directly than just about any other category of American citizen. Global demand has been good to our farming community of late. Weather and drought have not.

When you think of the kinds of values you need to endure such unpredictability, when the balance between making a living or losing your farm is often a difficult balance that environmental regulation, water control and import/export policies can push in any direction at any time, you see why voters in these agricultural regions tend to be Republican and conservative. Our very form of government, with two senators from every state regardless of population, leans heavily towns these workers of the land at the expense of heavily urban-populated states like New York, California and Illinois.

Cities by their very definition are complex organisms where division of labor is seemingly infinitely fractionalized, where interdependence is the very basis of urban living and where folks living and working so close together need to be regulated much more stringently that those in more isolated communities “where everybody knows everybody” – where anonymity has its plusses and minuses. Infrastructure and urban services, gang turf wars, concerted criminal activities, massive overlapping of rich and poor and concentrations of wealth and opportunity are vastly different than can be found in the agricultural heartland of America (and even in the towns built to service the surrounding farms and agribusiness).

What is particularly interest then is how Republicans and Democrats address this difference. In his editorial on October 6^th, Kevin Baker analyzed the differences in an astounding piece in the New York Times. His conclusion? That the Republican Party overwhelmingly embraces these “country values” at the almost total exclusion of concerns for urban problems.

He writes: “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. 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…

“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.” NY Times.

But if 4/5 of America lives in and around cities, how do such policies find sufficient traction among urban voters? Back in the late 1920s, the big cities went to the Republicans: places like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit. The GOP seems unconcerned. A strong loss in November could, however, force a change in that focus. “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.” NY Times.

There is much in this presidential campaign about who represents what constituency… the big 47% debate. Despite denials and reversals of statement, the electorate understands that the GOP isn’t particularly sympathetic to the values of the lower echelons of American economic strata. The bigger and unstated issue, however, is the rather clear line of demarcation between urban and rural values represented by the two major parties. It will be interesting to see if folks from those communities recognize the difference, and exactly how the votes would reflect those values.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while going back to earlier values is indeed attractive, it might not be possible in a new globalized economy.