Blame Democratic dysfunction on big cities
Why does the sophisticated, hip and “smart” party based in cities, colleges and now the suburbs too – the party of media, culture, and big business – support such obviously bad policies?
The examples are almost too numerous to count: Democrats support policies that reduce personal safety and devalue property like defunding the police and depopulating jails; that reduce economic opportunity through inflation and higher taxes; that crackdown on civil liberties through Covid vaccine mandates and woke censorship; that are either fanciful or actively harmful to American interests through Hamas sympathising alongside open borders advocacy; that undermine national cohesiveness through divisive racial ideology and that hurt the chances of the young through an embrace of teaching unions at the cost of school choice.
This is an increasingly serious problem, even for those who would never usually pay attention to the internal squabbles of their opposing political party. The Left appears to be increasingly rejecting practical policies that make life more pleasant. Ideology isn’t created in a vacuum, of course. Where we live and what we do affect the ways we think; it’s not random chance that the urban Democratic party is imaginative and fanciful while the rural Republican party is pragmatic and traditional.
We can look to Chicago for a perfect case-study of what social scientists call “the herd effect”, which is when people make choices based on what they believe others may choose rather than from their own independent mental thought processes. Chicago is a modern commercial center with high population density – it’s also a Democratic stronghold, suffering under the yoke of poor progressive leadership.
The majority of Chicagoans want what is best for their city, but it is this very majority that might be holding people back. The larger the group, the less each individual matters (for example, a singer’s vocal quality matters more in a quartet than in a choir. In a city like Chicago, your individual voice matters less than it does in a suburb, and much less than it does in a small town. If you can’t impact things, it’s rational to invest less: what you do or think doesn’t seem to matter, so why bother?
Social skills matter in groups or communities of any size, but as the number of social interactions increase, the intensity of each interaction falls and we rely more on appearances to convey information to, and pick up information about, other people. For example, we use fashion to signal to strangers not family members; fashion is more important in the city than suburbs or small towns. By extension, politics is more about fashion in a city – conveying information about us – and less about function than in a smaller community.
Pragmatic problem solving skills are valued among labourers, farmers, engineers, entrepreneurs and doctors; creativity is valued among artists, performers, writers and academics; social skills are valued in management, advertising, law and sales; and conceptualisation is valued in esoteric fields, such as finance, advanced mathematics, and systems architecture. As cities transitioned from the industrial to the post-industrial age, lower margin pragmatic problem solvers were displaced and priced out to the margins of metropolitan areas, as the higher margin knowledge industries that value social over practical skills, conceptualisation and creativity expanded and consolidated in urban areas.
There’s also the reality of wealth. Cities have more tax dollars sloshing around to spend on experimental policies, and typically have more high-net-worth individuals insulated from the consequences of said policies. Again, the fashionable is preferred over the pragmatic.
The Chicago-based M3 Strategies conducted a survey of 345 likely Illinois voters in late April testing differences in how urban, suburban and rural voters make political choices. The political divide in Illinois is stark, and the differences between Chicago and rural Illinois reflect the differences between urban and rural voters in the US.
When asked “Should we support programs that show we have compassion, even if long term data shows those programs to have minimal positive impact?”, 52 per cent of Chicago voters answered yes, compared to 40 per cent of rural voters. Similarly, by a 2:1 margin, Biden supporters believe we should show compassion, even if they have a minimal impact, compared to only 16 per cent of Trump supporters.
Nearly three times as many Chicago voters are happy with the government exaggerating problems or risks for the sake of rallying public support (14.3 per cent v. 5.5 per cent) and, while 60 per cent of Chicago voters prefer candidates who show empathy and kindness, 61 per cent of rural voters prefer a candidate who supports practical policies.
On all of these categories, the suburban voters split the difference between rural and Chicago voters, and downstate urban voters were variable.
So, Urban voters care less about accuracy in politics, are less inclined to decide for themselves, and more interested in showing compassion than efficacy. These factors help explain curious things, like why rational people in cities make bad policy choices, at least until they feel pain from the bad choice. Over the longer term, cities that reject pragmatic policies will become progressively more unpleasant and put our on-going success as a nation at risk.
