The Color of Change

In his most recent column, Neil Pierce reports on the results of a study done by McKinsey, the global consulting firm. The study predicts a continuation and acceleration of the move from rural areas to cities. It is not an exaggeration to say McKinsey sees ongoing  urbanization of the planet.

The upshot?

“Globally, cities are economic dynamos. They typically attract skilled workers and productive activity that triples per capita income over rural areas. With the opportunities that cities bring them, 1 billion people are likely to enter the global “consuming class,” virtually all in developing world metropolises, by 2025. Their activity and buying demands will have a cumulative upward impact of roughly $20 trillion a year on the world’s economy.

On top of that, the cities where the new urbanites live will likely be obliged to double their annual investments in buildings, roadways, water systems, ports and public buildings from today’s $10 trillion a year to $20 trillion a year by 2025. Businesses will have immense new opportunities; it’s reasonable to expect “a powerful and welcome boost to global economic growth.”

So far, so good. But as Pierce notes, all is not paradise. There are substantial challenges lurking beneath the surface good news: where will government agencies get the capital necessary to build the roads and sewers and other infrastructure that will be required? What about the impact on an already stressed environment?

Pierce does not address the social effects of urbanization, but those effects may be the most consequential. There is substantial scholarship suggesting that people who live in more densely populated cities tend to hold different political and social beliefs than their country cousins. Almost by necessity, city dwellers are more tolerant of difference, more supportive of funding for government services (it’s a lot harder to do without such “amenities” as garbage collection and police protection once you’ve left the farm.) There’s a reason that cities show up as islands of blue even in the reddest of states on those ubiquitous political maps.

Not long after the 2004 Presidential election, the Seattle alternative paper The Stranger ran an article titled “The Urban Archipelago,” and subtitled “It’s the Cities, Stupid.”   It’s still worth reading in its entirety–a passionate manifesto about citizenship and cities and the politics of urban America. The essay began by analyzing the 2004 election results and making a convincing case that–as the authors put it–the Democratic party is the party of urban America.

The essay is long and angry, and very partisan, but much of it rings true. I particularly like this section, which outlines “urban values.”

 But if liberals and progressives want to reach out past our urban bases, it might be helpful to identify some essential convictions, thereby allowing us to perhaps compete on “values.”…

So how do we live and what are we for? Look around you, urbanite, at the multiplicity of cultures, ethnicities, and tribes that are smashed together in every urban center (yes, even Seattle): We’re for that. We’re for pluralism of thought, race, and identity. We’re for a freedom of religion that includes the freedom from religion–not as some crazy aberration, but as an equally valid approach to life. We are for the right to choose one’s own sexual and recreational behavior, to control one’s own body and what one puts inside it. We are for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The people who just elected George W. Bush to a second term are frankly against every single idea outlined above.

Unlike the people who flee from cities in search of a life free from disagreement and dark skin, we are for contentiousness, discourse, and the heightened understanding of life that grows from having to accommodate opposing viewpoints. We’re for opposition. And just to be clear: The non-urban argument, the red state position, isn’t oppositional, it’s negational–they are in active denial of the existence of other places, other people, other ideas. It’s reactionary utopianism, and it is a clear and present danger; urbanists should be upfront and unapologetic about our contempt for their politics and their negational values. Republicans have succeeded in making the word “liberal”–which literally means “free from bigotry… favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded”–into an epithet. Urbanists should proclaim their liberalism from the highest rooftop (we have higher rooftops than they do); it’s the only way we survive.

  Let’s see, what else are we for? How about education? Cities are beehives of intellectual energy; students and teachers are everywhere you look, studying, teaching, thinking. In Seattle, you can barely throw a rock without hitting a college. It’s time to start celebrating that…. In the city, people ask you what you’re reading. Outside the city, they ask you why you’re reading. You do the math–and you’ll have to, because non-urbanists can hardly even count their own children at this point. For too long now, we’ve caved to the non-urban wisdom that decries universities as bastions of elitism and snobbery. Guess what: That’s why we should embrace them. Outside of the city, elitism and snobbery are code words for literacy and complexity. And when the oil dries up, we’re not going to be turning to priests for answers–we’ll be calling the scientists. And speaking of science: SCIENCE! That’s another thing we’re for. And reason. And history. All those things that non-urbanists have replaced with their idiotic faith. We’re for those.

As part of our pro-reason platform, we’re for paying taxes–taxes, after all, support the urban infrastructure on which we all rely, and as such, are a necessary part of the social contract we sign every day. We are for density, and because we’re for density, we’re for programs that support it, like mass transit.”

Un-PC as the whole thing is–it would not be unfair to call it a “rant”–there is enormous truth in the essay’s descriptions of urban and rural values. Cities are certainly not Edens–density and diversity bring significant challenges, and plenty of city folks are bigots and worse.

That said, cities do more than drive economic growth. They incubate civilization.

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How Not to Solve Real Problems

In a column about the GOP Convention, E.J.Dionne referred to Chris Christie’s speech,which he dubbed “Rousing, if deceptive.”

Dionne noted Christie’s admiration for his dad. “After returning from Army service,” Christie recounted, “he worked at the Breyers Ice Cream plant in the 1950s. With that job and the GI Bill he put himself through Rutgers University at night to become the first in his family to earn a college degree.”

“Good for his dad. But Christie somehow slid over the fact that it was government — through the GI Bill and by financing New Jersey’s fine state university — that gave the elder Christie his chance to rise. Are we to “sacrifice” the next generation by cutting student loans and even arguing, as is becoming fashionable, that some Americans shouldn’t get the opportunity to go to college?”

This convention’s delusional theme–its insistence that successful people “do it themselves”–has been properly debunked by numerous people; for that matter, it’s self-evidently false to anyone who bothers to spend five minutes thinking about it. As a friend remarked, “Do these self-congratulatory types really believe that people in, say, Bangladesh, are less motivated and entrepreneurial human beings? Do they not understand that you can’t sell goods to other people if those others are impoverished? Do they just not notice their own ‘dependence’ on an educated workforce, public safety and functioning infrastructure–none of which would exist without the government?”

True enough, and evident to anyone who hasn’t totally succumbed to ideological BS or irrational hatred of government. But that shouldn’t be our biggest concern with this particular alternate reality.

The problem with this failure to understand our social interdependence and the extent of the role government plays in our lives is that this particular form of blindness prevents us from fixing things that are broken.

I teach college. A college education is a time-honored tool of social mobility (it certainly helped Chris Christie’s father). When that education is successful, it also opens intellectual doors for students who would not otherwise pass through them. A genuine education that goes beyond mere job training enriches lives and enables human progress.

But the cost of a college education is rapidly escalating; it is becoming increasingly unaffordable, leaving millions of students with massive debt that takes decades to pay off. This is a problem we need to address. But like so many other current problems, we aren’t addressing it, because our energies are being consumed by arguments over the nature of reality.

The problem of rapidly escalating college costs is not going to be solved by cutting the programs that help students pay those costs. As another friend of mine likes to say, “you can’t cure a disease unless you diagnose it properly.”

People who don’t understand the problems–or who see problems that don’t exist rather than the ones that do–can’t solve them. They are not the people who move America forward.

Shaping our Different Realities

Yesterday, in the process of outlining an academic paper, I came across a brief essay I wrote a couple of years ago for the Journal of Religion and American Culture, exploring the religious roots of the dramatically different realities Americans’ inhabit.

With the Republican Convention currently on television, the incompatibility of those realities is hard to miss. And that old essay seems more accurate than ever.

Giving and Taking

The other day, NPR ran a story about a recent study on charitable giving. It turns out that poorer people give a significantly larger percentage of their incomes to  charity than do the wealthy. The report included interviews with people from some especially deprived neighborhoods, and the general import of their responses was empathetic: they knew first-hand how tough things can get, because they had experienced rough times first-hand.

The report made me think of a conversation a few years back with a Canadian colleague. I was curious about the differences in attitudes between Canada and the U.S. when it comes to the social safety net. Here are two countries with immensely similar histories and populations. We watch the same television programs, (mostly) speak the same language, and have remarkably similar popular cultures. Why, then, I asked, are American and Canadian attitudes so different when it comes to the need for programs guaranteeing access to healthcare? Why do the two countries have such different approaches to other social programs?

Her theory was intriguing: Canada is cold.Canada’s early settlers faced an environment that required them to share and co-operate with each other in order to survive. That reality produced a culture that recognizes the necessity and value of interdependence.

I have no idea whether my colleague’s theory is correct, but intuitively, it makes sense. And it helps to explain why people who have so little themselves seem more willing to share what they do have with their neighbors. Hardship reminds us of a truth we sometimes prefer to overlook: we’re all in this thing called life together.

Wealth–not to mention temperate climate–evidently tends to insulate us from that inconvenient truth.

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It’s Getting REALLY Ugly….

In the wake of the firestorm over remarks made by incumbent Representative and Senate candidate Todd Akin, most members of the GOP establishment loudly distanced themselves from him. At the same time, the platform committee was adopting his position–no abortion and no exception for rape or incest. There’s been a lively discussion about the number of Republican candidates and office holders who agree with him but have been too politically savvy to say so publicly. (Yes, Mike Pence, I’m looking at you.)

But ignorant comments about rape and contraception are beginning to look tame. There’s the candidate who recently “explained” that the AIDS virus can only be spread through homosexual encounters–never mind Africa, where the disease is almost entirely a heterosexual phenomenon.

Of course, the use of anti-gay stereotypes and rhetoric is almost a requirement for Republicans these days. Anything short of Fred Phelps-variety homophobia is unlikely to elicit a reproach from the party’s powers-that-be. Ditto anti-immigrant animus.

Race is a more delicate issue. We’ve come a distance (how far is a matter of opinion) since Nixon’s (successful) Southern strategy, and for several years, moderates and people of good will within the party tried to avoid racially inflammatory rhetoric. Those people have largely abandoned the GOP, however, and this election has seen considerable backsliding in that regard. During the primaries, Gingrich and others referred to Obama as “the food stamp President,” and Rick Santorum made his infamous remarks about “blah” people. (“Black?? I didn’t say black!!)

More recently, the Romney campaign has doubled down on a claim debunked by every reputable fact-checker–that Obama has “gutted the welfare work requirement,” and Romney himself has engaged in a little lighthearted birtherism. It’s not exactly subtle. The campaign has clearly determined that they need the votes of resentful whites–racists, to be blunt–if Romney is to have any chance of unseating Obama. If that requires playing to the fears and biases of a voting bloc described as older white men without a college education, why, full steam ahead. (For the record, I doubt that Romney is racist himself–despite the Mormon church’s unfortunate history with African-Americans. I think he wants very badly to be President and is willing to do whatever he thinks will work. His lack of integrity is so profound, it may be worse than genuine racism.)

It’s pretty clear that the GOP has written off the black vote, and the rhetoric aimed at Latinos hasn’t exactly endeared the party to the fastest growing demographic in the country. Then there are the Muslims–granted, a small minority, but one that is culturally conservative and could have been expected to be fertile ground for the party–who have been characterized by numerous Republicans as jihadists and terrorists. The recent, shameful effort by crazy lady Michelle Bachmann to target Huma Abedin, an assistant to Hillary Clinton who is married to Anthony Weiner, a Jew, as some sort of double agent is just one example.

Now we have the spectacle of Arthur Jones, 64, a Lyons, IL, insurance salesman who evidently organizes “family-friendly” neo-Nazi events around Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Jones is running in the Republican primary that will choose a candidate to run against Democratic Congressman Dan Lipinski in Illinois’ 3rd Congressional District.

“As far as I’m concerned, the Holocaust is nothing more than an international extortion racket by the Jews,” Jones said. “It’s the blackest lie in history. Millions of dollars are being made by Jews telling this tale of woe and misfortune in books, movies, plays and TV.”

When I first became active in the GOP, older family members were wary. They warned me that the Republican party had long harbored  anti-Semitic factions, and that history goes a long way toward explaining why so few Jews vote Republican. The party has persistently wooed the Jewish vote, mainly by being more rabidly pro-Israel than most modern Jews, but people like Jones do keep surfacing.

I expect Party “elders” will condemn Jones. But thing about the Jewish vote is this: thanks to our own history and experience, most Jews understand that we are not safe in a society that discriminates against any minority. As long as we see the GOP engaging in anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-black rhetoric–as long as we see Republicans as the party of old, white, heterosexual men unwilling to accord equal treatment even to their own wives and daughters–most of us just aren’t going to vote for them.

The uglier the rhetoric gets, the louder the “dog whistles” become, the clearer it becomes that the GOP has become a party willing to exacerbate some of this country’s deepest wounds and divisions if that’s what it takes to win an election. Members of minority groups understand that when people like that are in charge, no one is safe.

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