Conservatives' Vision of an America Without Cities

One Nation, Two Futures?

The formula that emerged from the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections was provocative: The less dense the population, the more likely it was to vote Republican. Republicans appeared to have lost the cities and inner suburbs, positioning themselves as the party of country roads, small towns and traditional values. Though Bush was often mocked for the time he spent on his ranch, sleeves rolled up, gun in hand, the image was widely promoted and became a cornerstone of his identity among Republican voters.

Conversely, it looked like Democrats had lost the country -- that is, until November 2006 when Democrats won decisive victories in the Midwest and Great Plains, often by leveraging their candidates' rural identities against a national Democratic Party that local voters saw as being overly urban, secular and affluent. By November 8, the electoral map looked a whole lot bluer. Yet Democrats could not have won without appealing to libertarian, anti-urban sensibilities.

"Millions of rural people have come to reject the larger framework of urban life," writes public radio reporter Brian Mann in his compelling new book Welcome to the Homeland: A Journey to the Heart of America's Conservative Rural Rebellion. "They despise the liberal modernism that shaped metro culture in the twentieth century and see it as an ideology that is every bit as foreign and threatening as communism."

Voting is just the tip of the iceberg. Antagonism toward cities is an under-recognized, under-analyzed factor in right-wing organizing, but now more and more writers are struggling to understand the rural/urban divide, how it has shaped national politics, and what it means for progressive organizing.

Mann coins the term "homelander" to describe largely white, anti-urban conservatives and says the homeland is a state of mind. You hear the homeland ethos not only in George W. Bush's acquired Texas twang, but in the voices documented in recent books from Mann, Steve Macek, and Juan Enriquez.

"Urban America breeds things that will probably never be here [in Perryton, Texas], but it scares people," Jim Hudson, publisher of Perryton Herald, tells Mann. What kinds of things? asks Mann. "Gay culture," he replies. "HIV sure wasn't bred in rural America."

The City and the Tower

Homelander ideologues of all stripes, from religious to libertarian to neoconservative, agree that cities, like governments, should be small enough to drown in the bathtub. Their hostility has deep cultural roots.

The homelander vision of the city starts with a story in Genesis 11:1-9. When God saw the first city of humankind and the tower its residents had built, He destroyed the tower and confused their language, "so that one will not understand the language of his companion" and "scattered them from there upon the face of the entire earth, and they ceased building the city."

Later in Genesis, God destroys the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah for gross immorality, which many Christians have interpreted as homosexuality. (Classical Jewish texts specify economic greed, not sexuality, as the cause of God's wrath.) Thus begins the Christian history of urban life.

Now let's skip ahead several thousand years, to the birth of the American Republic. "Enthusiasm for the American city has not been typical or predominant in our intellectual history," writes Morton and Lucia White in their 1962 study, Intellectuals Against the City. "Fear has been the more common reaction." Thomas Jefferson described "great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man"; Henry David Thoreau preferred his cabin in the woods to "the desperate city"; in 1907, the Rev. Josiah Strong called the modern city "a Menace to State and Nation."

This is not to say rural politics was (or is) always conservative, or even anti-urban. From the Sierra and Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, rural progressives built a great, creative tradition of civil disobedience, multiracial organizing, and cultural dissent. Yet in recent political history, that heritage was obscured by conservative organizing that promoted a race-based depiction of the city as "chaotic, ruined, and repellent, the exact inverse of the orderly domestic idyll of the suburbs," as Steve Macek writes in his recent book Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and Moral Panic Over the City. In such a view, urban poverty is a natural byproduct of unnatural urban life; it is slack morals, not racism or capitalism, which create the urban underclass and its affluent liberal enablers.