Urban Patriotism

American urbanites should be proud

This is a pretty interesting post from a fellow urbanist on Substack:

We could really use more urban patriotism in the US. The idea that Red Team claims to be the “Real America,” and Blue America just said, “yeah you’re right, and America sucks” instead of saying, “no, we’re Real America,” is the most stupid unforced error.

If you want to talk about America being “Great,” the elephant in the room is the Greatest City in the World (TM), New York. The New York metro area alone contains over 5% of the country’s population. Any conception of American identity, the movers and shakers of the history of the country (and the world!), the “melting pot,” great American literature, and so much more has to go back to New York.

Include the LA metro area and you have almost 10% of the country’s population. LA has been so historically dominant in Cinema that “Hollywood” is broadly synonymous with “the film industry.” Cinema is the quintessential American art form, democratizing entertainment for the masses. The “common man” who couldn’t afford tickets to live theatre could always afford to go to the movies. And through our dominance of film and television, we have culturally dominated the world. People in every corner of the world, speaking any language you can imagine, will connect with Americans over having watched our movies and TV shows.

And so on and so on. City regions are where we establish our economic, technological, and cultural dominance. And those are things to be proud of, not to shrink away from and be ashamed of.

And hey, the natural beauty of our countryside is also something to be proud of. So we should preserve that natural beauty by growing our population in these already-urbanized regions with abundant economic opportunities, instead of bull-dozing that natural beauty for more ticky-tacky exurban developments.

This fellow is making a broad argument along the “liberal patriotism” lines that you hear sometimes: that liberals/the left (broadly/simplifying) have ceded some persuasive power by not championing America in line with their own values, and instead saying America kinda sucks. Now, I don’t think that really describes most liberals. You can absolutely love your county and still acknowledge its faults. If your version of patriotism depends on pretending that things that obviously happened didn’t really happen, then it isn’t real. Don’t love a fantasy version of your country. I think plenty of regular folks who lean to the left understand this.

But that post does track with a point I’ve made before about cities and progressives. For example, I wrote in my piece about Seattle last year:

I’ve definitely been in cities that are more dangerous statistically, and more run-down visually and physically, than Seattle. Heck, lots of places I go shopping and driving around are more dangerous than Seattle. But perception is reality, and while homelessness and the public disorder that can go along with it is not the same thing as crime, it is unreasonable and self-defeating to insist that such problems are essentially inherent in the city itself. That’s an argument for people who don’t like and don’t care about the city to make, not for people who do.

What I’m referring to here is the sense you get from some folks on the left that what lots of people think of as urban problems are just plain old characteristics of cities. I’ve seen people say before something like, if you want a nice quiet, safe place to stroll that doesn’t challenge you, just live in suburbia. There’s that old idea that cities are supposed to be “gritty,” that a little frisson of danger is part of the thrill. The basic indifference you get from a lot of folks over mass homelessness—it’s either round them up and put them in concentration camps or prisons or let them live on the street, so I guess we’ll let them live on the street—is an example of this attitude.

Now that’s one of way of loving and championing the city, I suppose. But it’s actually a rather exclusionary and selfish way. It launders indifference into tolerance. It pretends to care about the working poor and the starving artists, but it really demands that you have a high personal risk tolerance to exist in the city. It raises a mental tax on being in the city. If you’re a single woman, or you have young kids, urban problems are much more problematic.

In other words, in my view, a certain amount of law and order—or just, normal pride that says our streets can be clean and safe and vibrant and diverse and full of energy—is necessary if you really want to champion the city. This does not have to be, and should not be, the kind of law and order that talks about “cleaning up” the cities as if they’re just vast messes, as if they have to be apologetic for being what they are. (On the same kind of subject, I also want to point you this post from Angie Schmitt, a Midwestern urbanist who has some small-c conservative tendencies on these matters.)