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Which aspect of late 20th-century life is hardest to explain to a young person? That cars used to rust? That we experienced such a thing as boredom? Or that New York had a conservative mayor?
True, Rudy Giuliani handed over to another Republican in Michael Bloomberg this side of 2000, but the second man had been and would be again a Democrat. No thoroughgoing rightwinger has run the place for a generation, and Zohran Mamdani extends that trend.
The same is true of its peer cities. Paris has not had a non-Socialist mayor since 2001. (The centre-right Jacques Chirac once spent 18 years in that office.) Los Angeles has not had a Republican mayor since the same year, despite a tradition of vehement conservatism in some of its suburbs and surrounding counties that goes back to Barry Goldwater’s time.
In 1987, most British MPs with London constituencies were Conservative. The city swung to Labour as part of Tony Blair’s national landslide a decade later, and never really went back, even as the country reverted to its habitual Conservatism. Yes, Boris Johnson was elected mayor but that was pre-Brexit and many voters chose him as a bohemian diversion. It bears repeating that London wanted Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister: the provinces had to save The Great Wen from itself.
We should expect big cities to be more liberal than the national average. But the gap used to be modest and therefore no threat to cohesion. Some time around the millennium, it began to widen. Perhaps the fall in crime that started in the 1990s freed urban voters to prioritise issues on which their instincts were more leftwing. Or immigrants reached such a critical mass in cities that conservatives, with their nativist bent, could no longer command a hearing there. Either way, the question now is whether metropolis and hinterland can remain this far apart in worldview without pulling at the stitching of the nation state.
The more leftwing cities become, the more conservatives define themselves against them, in turn provoking urban counter-movements of the Mamdani kind. The troubling thing is that both sides have a strong case. Conservatives can cite the dystopian downtowns of some US cities as the natural outcome of progressive politics. Those cities might ask why their fiscal surpluses subsidise distant regions that view them as Babels. The very validity of the passions here suggests there is mileage in the rift between the urban and non-urban worlds.
It is not even a rift that stops at national borders. Sadiq Khan has become a reference point for enemies of multi-culture who live in such famous London boroughs as Palm Beach. Mamdani too might become a global shorthand for an entire brand of progressive politics.
More autonomy won’t fix the problem. The city-hinterland split exists in countries as centralised as Britain, where the mayoralties are young and fairly weak, but also in federal systems. Even in countries where the historic schism is region versus region rather than metropolis versus non-metropolis, cities stand out. Turin and Milan are centre-left atolls in the sea of northern Italian conservatism. Berlin and to some extent Leipzig are similarly marooned in east Germany.
Perhaps this is all tenable. Perhaps I am underestimating the strength of national feeling. I do hope so. Give me the present comfort of a stable country over the pipe dream of breakaway city republics and all the strife these would incur.
I just wonder if the nation state has known this precise kind of internal stress before. Conservatives have always been able to see a Giuliani in New York or a Richard Riordan in LA and conclude that metropolitan life isn’t so alien. Coastal Democrats could in turn point to a reassuring bloc of like-minded people in the interior. (Tennessee was a blue state in the 1990s.) The subsequent “sorting” of the population into ever more progressive cities and a heartland of entrenched right-wingery — each bidding up the other’s extremism — is a new test for the nation state. Were it going on at a time of central budget surpluses, we could spread those around as a balm. But look at the fiscal numbers. Geographic polarisation and material scarcity: that is what nationhood must withstand.
For all their jibes at Marx and Fukuyama, conservatives have a teleology of their own, in which the nation state is the final word in large-scale human organisation. Why should it be? The multinational empire has more historical pedigree. So does the city state. Even some of the most successful countries had to consolidate themselves through civil war.
No one foresees that, but the trend is ominous regardless. The gilets jaunes were an anti-metropolitan movement. A similar spirit infused Washington on January 6 2021. Rural protests disturbed various capitals last year. At best, these two worlds will become strangers to each other. If a conservative-run New York seems remote history, remember that John Major entered 10 Downing Street via a seat on Lambeth council. Would a Tory even think to attempt that route now? One hope for the nation state, I suppose, is that cities and provinces stop short of conflict and settle for mutual incomprehension.
