Why the Right Lies About Cities

The right routinely tells untrue horror stories about the state of America’s cities because the state of America’s cities—thriving, dynamic, and inclusive centers of culture and engines of economic activity—serves as a dispositive rebuttal of a fundamental right-wing narrative: that “traditional” values (and hierarchies and power structures) are necessary for people to flourish.

If you listen to the American right, our cities are unlivable hellscapes of crime and despair. If you listen to people who live in our cities, they’re actually pretty great. But the right is committed to an argument that without strong churches at the center the community, without strong traditional values, and without a strong sense of one’s place in a “natural” hierarchy, you can’t have a functioning society or a flourishing people. They argue that you need society organized around right-wing preferences for society to function.

But anyone who has lived in a dense and socially liberal city has first hand experience that this simply isn’t true. They’ve seen how strong, supporting, and endearing a culture of diversity, pluralism, religious diversity and secularism, and self-authorship can be.

Thus the right lies about cities, knowing they are the perfect counterexample to their claims. They have to construct a narrative that city culture doesn’t work, and then convince their tribe to believe it. They have to claim that “unity,” by which they mean cultural monism grounded in right-wing values and tastes, is necessary for people to have strong and committed identities, and that strong and committed (and unchosen) identities are necessary for people to psychologically thrive. But life for most who live in cities isn’t a hollowed out sense of self and crushing anomie. Rather, it’s a thriving and overlapping diversity of identities and ways of belonging, among which you can choose, instead of having them forced upon you, against your will and psychological well-being, by power structures and privileged positions of a “traditionalist” monoculture.

If we look at two of the features most indicative of a wholesome identity and culture—happiness and healthy relationships—the parts of the country where these “traditional” values hold the most are those that do rather poorly. Deaths of despair are much more a feature of rural, “traditional” America than they are its cities. And “[r]ural women experience higher rates of [intimate partner violence] and greater frequency and severity of physical abuse” than women in urban areas.

Yes, cities have relatively higher crime rates overall, but density does that. And much city crime is attributable, such as in Denver where I live, to homelessness and lack of sufficient care for those suffering from mental health issues, and both aren’t the result of liberal values, but instead the imposition of specifically conservative cultural values. Namely, NIMBYism (the demand that one’s neighborhood remain static in a particularly reactionary and closed way), the stigma affixed to mental health, and an ethnocentric refusal to allow immigrants to participate in the economy.

The reason right-wing media is so dedicated to pushing false pictures of what it’s like to live in dense and cosmopolitan areas is because America’s cities are the wildly successful alternative to what the right-wing insists is the only possible successful world.