Urban Values

This weekend's New York Times trots out the tired red and blue state-by-state map that communicates so little about the actual divides facing our country. It could be worse though - they could have used that favorite of right-wing boosters, the county-by-county map.

Five years ago, looking back on an election in which his candidate had lost the popular vote and eked out an electoral college majority only through judicial activism, Gary Gregg set out to comfort the readership of the National Review that while “on the surface it would seem that Gore was able to appeal to a broader band of the American electorate…Gore’s votes came overwhelmingly from densely populated urban areas.” One need only pull up the county-by-county map, he assured, to see “only small islands (mostly on the coasts) of Gore Blue amidst a wide sea of Bush Red. In all, Bush won majorities in areas representing more than 2.4 million square miles while Gore was able to garner winning margins in only 580,000.” At best, such an argument represents a specious slight of hand. At worst, Gregg’s argument is a racially coded insinuation of who votes Democratic – those people packed together in those cities.

Unfortunately, that same “One square mile, one vote” mindset, and nearly the same map, were paraded across the media with even greater enthusiasm after the 2004 election. On FOX News, Bill O’Reilly pulled up the map to argue that America is a “sea of red except for the pockets.” On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough claimed the county map showed us to be “a red country.” Newsweek reprinted the map under the title “A Red-Letter Day.” The same blue-state-headquartered pundits who make a living castigating blue staters for their arrogant self-righteousness or apologizing to red staters for being less righteous than the heartland have had a field day with the map. In so doing, they’ve willfully overlooked what we all know to be true: whatever the state, a blue county is likely home to a lot more people than a red one.

Progressives should be winning more votes in those red counties than they did on November 2, particularly given the unpopularity of the agenda for which Bush has claimed a mandate. As Thomas Frank argues, that means counteracting the right-wing politics of aesthetic class – stick it to the elitists by putting prayer in schools – with a revived economic populism which speaks unapologetically to the growing class divide in this country. As George Lakoff argues, that means reclaiming, rather than ceding the debate over moral values and more effectively framing progressive arguments through appeals to shared ideals. And as most everyone has recognized, it would help to have more appealing candidates.

As SNAP's candidates recognize, winning won’t come from running away from progressive values – it will be a consequence of better and more boldly articulating and organizing around them. It won’t come from running away from those urban voters either. Funny that we don’t hear much discussion from talking heads about whether conservatives have fallen out of touch with blue state values. Sad that the person you’re most likely to hear use an expression like “urban values” is Charles Murray, or perhaps some other think tank character better able to hide his racial contempt while warning that “urban values” – street crime, strip clubs, gangsta rap – are spreading virus-like into the bloodstream of mainstream America.

Something in the American popular consciousness, and particularly in the mindset of our supposedly liberal media - maybe racial demons, maybe suspicion of crowds, maybe those much touted "millenial anxieties" over accelerating technological and social upheaval - still holds forth America's rural parts as more authentically American, more pure, more decent than its cities. Otherwise, Bush’s “Heart and Soul of America” tour might have prompted more questions. Otherwise, the county-by-county map might not raise its ugly head.

Progressives considering how to bring more Americans around, and how to bring more of those who would support them to the polls, should look to rural America – but they should look as well to urban America, where voters consistently turn out to support even those left-of-center candidates who too often campaign by denigrating their lifestyles. Urban values are the reasons I want to raise my children in an urban community. A child brought up in a city today in America is more likely to come into contact early in life with children who don’t look like she does or speak the same language she does at home. She is more likely to encounter, and to work with members of labor unions, tenant associations, and community coalitions which organize in her neighborhood for collective change. She is more likely to meet avant garde artists or lesbian parents. She is that much more likely to have personal experience that much earlier of those American values of tolerant co-existence and mutual responsibility growing up in one of this country’s cities, where larger, more diverse, more densely packed groups of people are forced to find ways to work together in proximity and sometimes in synergy. Few of these places vote for conservatives in national elections. The two struck on September 11 are no exception.

Of course, these urban values are rural values too. And the rural values we hear so much about from pundits and politicians are urban values as well. Playing up regional differences in this country – whether by brandishing deceptive maps, by declaring the South a lost cause, or by campaigning against the state of Massachusetts – serves to obscure the real and staggering inequalities in this country. Battling intolerance and inequality became all the more difficult and all the more urgent on November 2, 2004. As we work towards turning the tide on November 8, 2006, the task demands that we find common cause in common challenges faced by working families in every corner of this country, blue, red, and everywhere in between.