Conservatives need to get more sophisticated about supporting the conditions that promote freedom. High density communal living always creates more communists. Look at any election results map. While some communists move to NYC, most of them develop their communism from living there. People living 70,000 per square mile is not the natural state of man. If businesses throw in the towel on $2,000 per square foot high rise construction costs and move to more free areas, their employees and families can learn to live like Americans. Traditional America’s biggest enemy right now is the high rise city. While conservatives don’t support this NY scaffolding law, we should pick a completely different battle.
Large cities have attracted immigrant groups who (ahem) have found it hard to adapt and support themselves, and none of them have been from much of a tradition other than monarchies and other forms of despotism; since the 19th c political machines have had success in building a permanent hold on all the other anti-democratic forces, such as ‘labor’ unions and the Mob (and sometimes that’s redundant).
Truman came from Missouri, which was largely rural in his day, and yet owed his own political rise and career to the Pendergast machine. It’s been written that Truman helped bring him down, but that’s a bit of a story. Truman also was a teaching example for the three kinds of memory — Long Term, Short Term, and Convenient Memory. And he was a rabid single party state Demwit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Pendergast#Downfall_and_the_later_years