The Progressive Dream

It is in the cities that the Democrats find their votes. Daniel Greenfield writes about The Urban Tyranny.

The modern liberal would hardly exist but for the various social improvement schemes of the city from the early muckraking photographers taking photos of dirty slum children playing in alleys to the massive implementation of the modern welfare state. The agrarian and industrial obsessions of the left have collapsed. Only the urban obsession with the eternal slums, now likely to be the product of government intervention, rather than slum overcrowding, continues.

It is no coincidence that Obama's big victories came in the city. And it is even quite probable that population density might be a predictor of big government and small government voters. It isn't that urbanites especially love government, but they have come to accept it as a necessary evil and to look longingly for the vaunted reformers to come and save them from the political machines.

The lack of space, physical, economic and structural, in a city makes the lack of freedom into a part of the design. It is second nature to assume that someone must administer those friction zones because there is no alternative.

Urban social norms are evolved to avoid conflict. Urbanites studiously ignore each other or maintain a distant politeness in their interactions. Not noticing other people is the height of good manners. The truly civilized man is expected not to notice uncivilized behavior. Relativism is the expected response to any violation of human norms, but not to violations of any element of the petty codes of urbania. It is very well for a man to strip naked on a train and run from car to car shouting that the aliens are coming, but not to throw his recycling into the trash.

The internet has become the ultimate city, a virtual urban environment flooded with content, shocks, amazes and confuses, while destroying sensibilities and boundaries. It is a multicultural city encompassing the world. And the individual cities are also coming to seem like the internet, networks and hubs, short-lived and purposeless, but somehow hanging on long enough to grab some attention.