Duncan Black: The Evolution of Republican Suburban Tribalism

Our moddern-day Indiana Jones, Duncan Black, ventures out of Center City Philadelphia into the jungles beyond PennWynne:

Eschaton: Suburban Tribalism: The evolution of Republican antipathy towards cities has been interesting. It used to be mostly racial, but now I can "amuse" myself reading people on the internets simultaneously decry cities as places where the "animals" live (how they label African-Americans) and the playgrounds of rich entitled white liberals.

And Kevin Baker equips himself with machete, gun, and camera and ventures into Tampa:

Republicans to Cities - Drop Dead: The very word “city” went all but unheard at the Republican convention…. 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.

The very few sections that address urban concerns contain similar complaints about cities’ current priorities — not to mention the very idea of city life. The Republican platform bitterly denounces the Democrats for diverting some highway fund money to Amtrak and harrumphs that it is “long past time for the federal government to get out of the way and allow private ventures to provide passenger service to the Northeast corridor. The same holds true with regard to high-speed and intercity rail across the country.”

The Obama administration, the Republicans conclude damningly, is “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.”

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…