I still definitely think that Democrats, progressives, and other lefties need to understand where rural red-staters are coming from, and that assuming they are all neo-Nazis is gross.
But honestly the more I hear the term “coastal elites” and the more time I have to ponder it, the more questions I have about who actually fits under it and who doesn’t. Like I get that people who make a comfortable living making left-wing media are “the coastal elites” but like, is a poor black person in the dangerous parts of DC a “coastal elite” because DC is a big city near water, or not? Are immigrants who work in service jobs and make beans “coastal elites” because they settled in big cities near water?
Like… I’m not saying abandon the shorthand, rah rah rah! But I am saying that it’s actually kind of hard to talk about cities as if they’ve got one kind of person in them.
Yeah, they tend to have lots of Democrats! And that’s a thing, and it’s a reason to legitimately ask both what the cultural divide means and whether Democratic politicians only have the good of certain populations in mind. I am not saying not. At all.
But I also think… part of the reason that the cities are Democratic isn’t posh snooties haw-hawing. It’s because while, yes, some parts of cities are segregated, a lot of the time being in a city means being in close proximity with a lot of people who are not like you and that not being especially weird.
And whether it’s a noble human impulse or a Machiavellian political stunt or something in between, it’s usually the Democrats and not the Republicans who say “That thing? Where people are different and it ain’t no big? We’re the party for that.”
Again, I don’t mean we shouldn’t criticize the Dems. I don’t mean they’re not snooty, whether the pols or the people or, hell, me.
I just mean that living in a city actually isn’t homogenous, and honestly since the election I find myself noticing things more and more that I wouldn’t even have thought about: how many people I see walking around that look different from me, how many people talk with different accents, how many of those people likely make less than the other folks. Etc.
“City people” are not one thing. If we have one party it’s worth asking why and whether that’s good, but… we are not one thing.
(And of course, neither are rural folks, either, though there can be many types of homogeneity in many communities.)
This…misses some important factors, I think.
(Forgive the half-coherent rambling. I am very tired.)
At the very least, I think that everyone – up to and including the most virulently anti-progressive backwoods White Drunk Uncle running on the vapors of distilled-Fox-News stereotypes – acknowledges that “city people” are not all one thing. At minimum, even in that worldview, there are two kinds of city people: Frivolous Snooty Latte-Sipping Elites and their Brainwashed Half-Savage Minority Prole Clients. As analysis goes, this formation, uh, doesn’t get you very far…but it’s important, precisely because it answers questions like “what is the role of poor black people and immigrant baristas in the Hateful Democratic Culture-Smashing Machine?” The White Drunk Uncle, and the thinkpiece author trying to understand him, both pretty much know the answer to that question. And, while (as ever) there are edge cases, usually it’s not hard to tell whether a given urban Democrat is “correctly” categorized as an Elite or as a Minority Prole Client.
Which leads to the uncomfortable question. To what extent is that formulation actually correct, such that we should be using it to understand the dynamics on the American left?
The old not-really-a-joke says: “Southerners are happy to live around black folk as long as they know their place. Northerners are happy to grant black folk dignity and respect so long as they’re nowhere around.” Speaking as someone who lives in Manhattan, this feels…not entirely off-base, even now, even amongst the most Woke. The fact that populations are smushed together in our big cities doesn’t mean that they’re comfortable together, let alone that they merge in any way. It ain’t “ain’t no big,” not really.
Hell, even the Woke White Liberal version of profound anti-racism is not necessarily a thing that resonates with most actual minorities. (We’ve got enough uncomfortable comedy telling us that much.)
Which all adds up to – when people start talking about the “coastal elites” having an agenda or a culture or whatever, there are very good reasons not to assume that they’re folding in everyone who lives in a city. There are, in fact, good reasons to ask whether they’re pointing at a real group. A real group that maybe wields power in Democratic politics beyond its raw numbers, with far-reaching consequences.
[All that said, “coastal elites” is mostly a stupid phrase. To the extent that it’s pointing at a real group, that group has plenty of representatives in Chicago and Austin etc.]
Ah, okay, yes. I definitely think that is a thing. I just… never really got the impression that the people saying “we’re TAKING OUR COUNTRY BACK!!!! wooo!!!” are thinking they’re also taking it back for poor minorities in the cities – the stereotype at least is that the things like welfare and housing subsidies that many city poor rely on are for “lazy out of control people.” So I was smelling tension because… on the one hand, “out of touch elites don’t care for the poor. But on the other hand, “poor people who don’t look like us are lazy, and yet people keep giving them stuff! wtf!??!??!?”
Like, are “the elites” giving stuff to the poor or aren’t they?
I think this circle gets squared with good old-fashioned identitarian tribalism. (Not Just For the Left Anymore!)
If you read any of the million skillion I Went To a Backwoods Republican Town and Talked To Someone essays, you’ll hear some variant of the “Real American” identitarian refrain. “The [Frivolous Liberal Elites] don’t care about us, they only care about the [Minority Prole Clients].” Sometimes this is justified with an appeal to alleged group characteristics – “we’re hard-working and law-abiding, they’re violent hooligans who just want handouts.” Sometimes you find people who don’t even feel the need for that much ideology, who are happy to talk in terms of Our Interests and Their Interests. But the answer is that the elites are giving stuff to those poor.
Which is, empirically, mostly very wrong. Democratic redistributionist policies don’t come with “this only goes to black people in the city” clauses. And yet, somehow, the idea stands. It has something to do with welfare being a toxic idea out in the sticks, with most people having a work ethic that causes them to prefer even terrible soul-and-body-destroying jobs to any kind of straight-up help. It has something to do with a distrust of government that grows out of many red-state state governments being legitimately super terrible. It has something to do with the fact that the very poorest red-state folks mostly don’t vote, and the fact that their somewhat-richer neighbors who do vote often hate and despise them. I dunno. There’s a lot.
I think this is one of the Big Political Problems right now, one of the main things shattering the American people. It doesn’t matter how much a Democratic politician gropes towards Solidarity, how much he promises that he’s going to give nice things to everyone: in a lot of the places that matter, “everyone” is going to get translated as “minority proles in Democrat cities.”
I have no idea what to do about this.