Ezra Klein talks "anti-urbanism" with Reihan Salam

Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute was the guest on the Ezra Klein show on Friday, June 3.  One of the themes was a strand of conservatism that is "anti-urban."  Here's an excerpt from the transcript in which I have placed in bold the words "anti-urban" and key contxt :

REIHAN SALAM: Yes. So populism is an affect, it’s a style, it is oftentimes something that is used by parties out of power, parties in opposition, you know, by out groups in general. When you feel like you’re locked out of power, it is critique, but it’s not always something that represents a kind of constructive political program.

So I would argue that this rival politics that I’m describing could have populist elements, could have populist moments, particularly when it’s in opposition, but more broadly, my thesis is that when you’re looking at the changing center right coalition, when I’m looking at how I think it might change in the future, what I’m seeing is a coalition that is, broadly speaking, ambitious, opportunity-oriented. It’s heavily non-college but it’s a coalition that is rooted in areas that are economically stagnant, and therefore, not as exercised about inequality as they are about stagnation. I think that there is a real appetite for a growth.

So again, this isn’t to say that it’s classic Boomer, Reagan era politics, but I think that some aspects of that normie conservatism actually resonate a lot with these people that I believe are people who can be incorporated into the coalition. And by that I mean second generation Americans, for example. When you look at second generation Hispanics, people of Asian origin, I think that the politics for these groups are very much in flux, particularly for those who are not operating in elite contexts.

And I think more broadly, there’s the sense that something is badly wrong, something is broken in American life, but that the particular prescriptions of the post-liberal or anti-liberal right are not really all that responsive to the concrete quality of life challenges that people are facing. So I guess that would be my big picture. And there are a lot of different ways to kind of cut at this, but I think that there has on some corners on the right been this idea that state power is going to be something that will deliver us from the cultural triumph of the left and I don’t think that’s quite right. I think that when you embrace centralized state power in that way, it can have all kinds of unintended consequences, including consequences that would not be especially attractive to a more pluralistic right.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me ask you about two levels of that that came up there. So what is the level of affect? You described this coalition, this tendency on the right as anti-urban, which I think is true. I think if you listen to how cities, many cities are described by Republican politicians, you think we all lived in Mad Max hell holes, and that doesn’t feel true to my experience, even though of course, there are problems in a lot of these cities.

But there’s an anti-urban affect that then is married increasingly and differently than it has been in some recent years to an openness to redistribution, an openness to using the power of the state to act on behalf of your own constituency, a frustration that Republicans over decades in the voice of this critique put the market ahead of communities, ahead of families, ahead of the working class. And you’re pushing against both of those ideas simultaneously. So can you talk a bit about the anti-urban and redistributive tendencies that you think are maybe over-correcting here?”

REIHAN SALAM: Well, I think that urban is a capacious concept, understood loosely something like 80 percent of Americans live in urbanized areas. So in a way, the kind of anti-urbanism that I was invoking in that earlier conversation is really focused on these big, expensive, cosmopolitan Metropolitan areas that have become so monolithically left that they are a kind of boogeyman for some on the right.

EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, New York, S.F., L.A., Seattle.

REIHAN SALAM: Exactly. And also, part of it is that you see this generational tension that’s mapped onto geography as well. This is a much larger subject, but if you look at America and our experience of immigration, what you see is immigration levels that are not unusually high, but by the standards of American history, they are very high relative to native birth rates, because native birth rates have collapsed. And so what you see is this huge generational disconnect where there are people in aging, in many cases depopulating regions of the country, who look at these big, diverse, immigrant-rich cities and communities and they see something that is not entirely familiar to them, they see something that is very culturally ascendant.

In some ways that, by the way, could even be unrepresentative, but that are culturally ascendant and that feel foreign, and that feel alien, and that feel hostile. So I think that this anti-urban tendency is connected to a variety of other demographic developments and that’s why I think that there are folks on the right who don’t recognize that actually you have an awful lot of potential allies in these places, more than you might think, and it’s one reason why I think a broader breakdown in American politics on both sides of the aisle is what I see as this breakdown of entrepreneurial coalition building, this idea that I actually want to grow my party. You know, when I think about the rival party, I’m not thinking about permanent enemies, I am thinking about a collection of constituencies, some of which might be one over, which is why I ought to be careful about the level of partisan enmity. I ought to be careful about how binary I’m making my agenda.

EZRA KLEIN: You’ve mentioned a few times here and in other interviews that you think there is a turn in the Republican Party towards these antagonisms, this culture war, and we’ll talk about that, but away from what you call “quality of life issues.” What are those quality of life issues, you think, that the Republican Party has been neglecting?

REIHAN SALAM: Well, if you’re talking about the very near term, I think the biggest, most essential, most important quality of life issue has not been neglected, and that issue is crime and public safety. Now, one could argue about how much it is that politicians at the federal level can really do about that. How constructive can they be? But I really believe that the increase in urban violence over the last two or three years is the essential quality of life issue.

To even call it a quality of life issue almost seems to diminish it, but I think it’s incredibly important. And then, of course, there are other issues that are related to questions of practical management about some things that are intrinsically or especially likely to be public sector functions.

This is something you thought a lot about, Ezra, but think about traffic fatalities and how much we take for granted. It’s incredible just the basics of how our cities and communities work.

The housing affordability crisis is so profound that it’s not a boutique issue. I actually think it’s an everything issue. It’s totally essential to the brokenness of American life and of our politics. That’s a quality of life issue where I do think that conservatives have traditionally not had a ton to say about it.

(emphasis mine). 

Read more here.