Posted on 11/19/2004 10:02:19 AM PST by dukeman
It's the Cities, Stupid.
It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. And we are the real Americans. They--rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs--are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers.
.....
If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents. John Kerry won among the highly educated, Jews, young people, gays and lesbians, and non-whites. What do all these groups have in common? They choose to live in cities....An urbanist agenda may not be a recipe for winning the next presidential election--but it may win the Democrats the presidential election in 2012 and create a new Democratic majority.
(Excerpt) Read more at thestranger.com ...
The BLUE STATES will get BLUER and the RED STATES will get REDDER......
Please stay there.
The philosophy of Tolerance in action, folks: "They--rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs--are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers."
Keep up the arrogance, leftists. You'll hasten your own demise as an ideology, and that can come none too soon.
Talk about literally "biting the hand that feeds you"...
Followed by the non-beneficiaries of urban identity politics cutting off trade with American urban areas.
"If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents."
They already have that - it's called the Democratic Party. And its power is on the wane.
They'll tell some morally and genetically inferior being (i.e., someone with darker skin from the "economically disadvantaged" portion of urban America) to step and fetch it, of course.
Food & fuel. I wondered about that, too.
That's what they're advocating.
People have been leaving the cities for the suburbs in droves since World War II. Almost every major northeastern city lost population, some by as much as half, between 1950 and 2000. Those people moved outside the city limits to escape the proverbial "slime grime and crime" as well as the cramped tenement lifestyle.
The suburbs offer something that few in the city can afford: home ownership. A home is one of the most reliable investments people can make. Because the city is not condusive for ordinary poeple to make that investment, they opt to leave for a place where they can.
If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents
Except the self-identity of "sanity, liberalism, and compassion" are only the tribal ideals of the blue city aristocracy, not those of the urban proles, who provide the votes.
It all went south for them when they decided the agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America was more important than the agenda of Middle America.
"People have been leaving the cities for the suburbs in droves since World War II. Almost every major northeastern city lost population, some by as much as half, between 1950 and 2000. Those people moved outside the city limits to escape the proverbial "slime grime and crime" as well as the cramped tenement lifestyle."
The problem here, though, is that many of the people who move from the cities into the suburbs bring their asinine leftism with them. Over time, they change the 'burbs into the same cesspools they fled. Then the conservatives get fed up and move even further out. This cycle is repeated again and again. Has anyone else noticed how the suburbs that originally ringed the large cities are themselves debased, as the degeneration circles just get larger and larger? Cities become uninhabitable holes in the doughnut, with the doughnuts going left.
This trend even occurs an a much larger scale. Consider how the once-great states of Oregon and Washington have been polluted and destroyed by the California crazies. And how New Hampshire is now a dump populated by Boston brahmins. Or how South Florida is being defenestrated by nutbags from New York.
What can be done about this travesty? I wonder...
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