The Imperial City

People Like Us

And some of us are like them in deeper ways. The biggest reliably Republican voting bloc consists of people statistically almost identical to the elite (that is, the Democrats) who run our media-entertainment-industrial complex: In this presidential election, large majorities of very affluent (63 percent), white (58 percent), married (57 percent) men (55 percent) voted for President Bush. Surely the special antipathy that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity seem to feel for people like Al Franken and Michael Moore derives from a sense of race-class-gender betrayal. And so tens of millions of men must similarly find Franken and Moore—and all the well-off white liberal men who run the media—faintly, viscerally contemptible, the way people on the left feel toward (traitorous) black Republicans like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice. Well-to-do white liberal men are triply traitors to their demographic.

In What’s the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Thomas Frank makes the neo-Marxist case that working-class Middle Americans have been hoodwinked by the Republican rich to care more about “moral values” issues than their own obvious class interests. Maybe so. Probably so. But weren’t all the Democratic voters with household incomes over $200,000 voting against their own economic interests as well? And shouldn’t we presume, therefore, that the $3 million-a-year Manhattan executive’s support of Kerry was no more or less irrational than the $24,000-a-year Kansas truck mechanic’s support of Bush? Thus, another thing we New York freaks have in common with red-state freaks: false consciousness, as Herbert Marcuse used to call it.

So what is it that makes us so different from other Americans of our race, age, income, gender, marital status? The data point to one answer: the city. The factor most decisively distinguishing me from an almost-sure-thing Bush voter is that people who live in large cities tend to vote Democratic. In other words, it is this giant city that makes us weird and irrational.

Or anyhow keeps us weird. Those of us who emigrated from the provinces are here in large part because New York is “out of touch with the mainstream.” When I moved from Nebraska (67 percent for Bush), bourgeois bohemianism was not yet a huge nationwide phenomenon abetted by public radio, the national New York Times, Comedy Central, dozens of ersatz Sohos, and thousands of Barnes & Nobles, Starbucks, and Targets. Would-be hipsters were obliged to leave Omaha. But the comforting Bobo illusion of the past decade or two has now been definitively reality-checked. On November 2, we learned that the diffusion of stylish, civilized taste is not the same as progressive hegemony.

For New Yorkers, this massive dark cloud does have a silver lining. We can now feel special again, and revert to full-bore smugness: We choose to live in New York because we are superior, and we are superior because we live in New York. We can revel in our minority-taste decadence and sophistication, like West Berliners during the Cold War, hunkered down in an island of freedom and enlightenment amid a nation of militarists and squares. And we still control media and the academy: So, Winston Churchill’s truism notwithstanding, at least this history, for the moment, is being written by the losers.

But back to the original question: Should we hate them? A few of them, sure. (Tom DeLay, for instance.) Do they really hate us? Some of them, undoubtedly. (Ditto.) But not most, I think. They don’t understand how we can bear to live in New York (same back at you), but they are fond of us the way they are toward their eccentric, “creative” brothers-in-law and aunts. They don’t hate us: They just don’t entirely trust us.

So is this sectional schism—us (and the other blue-staters) versus them—merely a current version of the age-old, worldwide conflict between urban cosmopolites and rural people? Or the beginning of something more serious? Is it tragedy, like 1860—or farce, like the 1960s, when Norman Mailer ran for mayor on a jokey utopian platform that called for seceding from the State of New York?

Closer to the latter, I think. The chatter about moving to Canada or Tuscany or New Zealand is not serious. But the resentment and confoundedness between their half of the population and ours is deep and reciprocal. And it could get much uglier over the next dozen years, when the blue-state Democratic presidential nominees in 2008 (Hillary Clinton) and 2012 (Barack Obama) are trounced.

A dozen years before the Civil War, Northerners and Southerners mistrusted each other, but secession was unthinkable. We had just fought our first imperial war, invading Mexico preemptively because, the administration claimed, the Mexicans were about to attack us. Impoverished foreign immigrants were pouring into the cities. We were coming off an economic boom and manias for transformative new technologies—railroads, the telegraph, photography. The country was vibrating with the effects of a 25-year-long Evangelical Protestant religious revival—and Protestant zealots were leading the great moral struggles of the day against personal moral laxity and slavery. The right of individual states to define civil rights was becoming contentious, on the verge of a crisis.

Plus ça change. One hundred and fifty years later, the blue states are still mostly blue and most of the reds are still red. Now, though, there are all the new Western states as well, all but a few of them red, and this time it’s the red states, not our blue ones, that have Christian moral fervor on their side. Here in this secular old northeastern city in the chilly late autumn, that is unnerving.

Kurt Andersen’s “Studio 360” is broadcast weekly on public-radio stations nationwide, including WNYC.