Editor's Notes: A Free Society Is an Urban Society

Liberal politicians absolutely should seek to win over rural voters. Paul Henry Rosenberg wrote for us about potential strategies to do so.

Can We Win Back Rurals?

Rebuilding the Democratic Party in rural areas is necessary to halt the nation’s undemocratic slide.

Liberal CurrentsPaul Henry Rosenberg

Political success requires living in reality. The reality is that rural voters both exist and exercise disproportionate power in our system. Politicians need to court them, even if it's just to "lose by less" in rural districts for statewide races.

But that does not mean that the rest of us, the 80 percent of Americans who live in urban areas, need to pretend that there is something superior about the countryside.

Cities have always been central to the project of liberalism. Without cities, freedom is simply unobtainable.

At Liberal Currents we are big fans of this Rebecca Tiffany tweet (not hidden because she has locked her account):

As I argue in the video, the key thing about freedom is mobility. You can improve your life a great deal by simply leaving a bad situation: leaving an abusive home, an abusive job, a toxic friend group. It can also, of course, be improved by going towards something good: a new, better home, or job, or church, or club. Making new friends.

Producing and keeping the kind of society where as many people as possible can actually do both ends of that is no small feat. It is impossible without cities. Cities have the scale required to have a vibrant and accessible labor market, they are designed for housing at scale (even if we are currently failing to actually use this feature of them), and population density means a density of churches, clubs, amateur sports leagues, and every other kind of voluntary group you can imagine.

Liberal individualism is not the vulgar, "rugged" individualism of American fantasy. The countryside may be lonely, but it too is an entirely collective creation. It takes tax dollars to build and maintain roads, to deliver mail to such sparsely populated areas, to provide reliable weather forecasts that are absolutely critical to the rural way of life. And still you cannot achieve at outrageous per-person expenditures what cities have almost by default. Even billionaires with helicopters are taking a risk when they go into remote parts of the countryside with no hospital nearby, never mind a good hospital.

One of the key paradoxes of modernity is that a free and individualist society requires a strong and capable (and liberal) state. The fundamental error made by libertarians and small government conservatives is to believe we need only sandbag or shrink the government in order to achieve freedom. What you achieve without a strong liberal democratic government is simply patriarchy, insularity, and a high level of private violence.

In cities we come together in enormous numbers to create the conditions of freedom, and to accomplish the greatest achievements humans are capable of. Paradoxically, cities are also the only places we can be truly alone. free from the crushing pressure and all-seeing eye of the small community, where everyone is in everyone else’s business and there is no escape.

Cities are that escape: an escape into freedom, with everything terrible and glorious that that entails.