An Edroso Primer on Right-Wing City Hate

Tubby’s DC Grab has a long, ignoble history

Via.

Though I have plenty to say about Trump’s imbecilic takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., most of it I’ve already said. So I’ll quickly run through the hot parts of my Urban Outrage Greatest Hits, “Stars on 45” style, and then wrap up with what little I have to add.

Since the stats showing that crime in U.S. cities, including DC, at historic lows are ubiquitous — so much so that even some of the Prestige Press is reporting them because of Tubby’s Tantrum — it’s worth a look at this bit from “Crime Story” in 2023 about how rightwingers try to counteract these facts with crime-panic bullshit:

This [recent crime-wave-in-Portland] story comes on the heels of a really terrific article at Judd Legum’s Popular Information about how, though government numbers show violent crime going down across the country, news outlets continue to talk as if it’s spiraling out of control. Part of that has to do with the post-Murdoch tabloid tradition of getting attention by claiming crime waves. But much of it is just the modern practice of the prestige press to repeat conservative talking points, despite all evidence, lest they be accused of ignoring (or, worse still, attempting to refute) the frenzy into which conservatives have whipped their readers.

I am not vulnerable to that, so it’s my custom in these HOMICIDES AT ALL-TIME HIGH cases to run the math and say, “hmmm, so the population of Portland is 641,162, meaning 0.01% of the population was homicide victims — similar to the rate in, say, Ron DeSantis’ hometown of Jacksonville, Florida.”

That’s usually when the screaming starts — with accusations that I don’t care about murder victims (a lot of whom are black! WHO’S THE REAL RACIST LIBTARD) and grim warnings that one day I will be murdered and then let’s see how I like it.

I considered this method in action in this 2017 alicublog item about how conservatives who predicted Mayor De Blasio would plunge New York City into a Death Wish Crime Inferno dealt with the large crime drop that he actually oversaw (spoiler: with denial and racism):

With their doomsday scenario in ruins, what’s the play for lawn-order conservatives now? Fox News yesterday:

“Does Trump deserve credit for drop in violent crime?”

Ha ha, of course. But for the “intellectual” take, let us attend the first City Journal hack out of the bunker, Heather Mac Donald:

“Cop critics who assiduously ignored the 20 percent increase in the national homicide rate over the previous two years have suddenly become enthusiastic purveyors of crime statistics.”

Back when you libtards were made out of straw and called I.M. A. Stupid Libtard, you didn’t like statistics! Well, Mac Donald has some stats for you — New York’s safer because it has fewer black people!

“New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime. It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps...”

And by “drug dealers and pimps,” Mac Donald means African-Americans (and she’s shockingly up front about it)…

Part of the conservative need to portray cities as hellholes of crime has to do with their hatred of what they perceive to be cities’ only two significant demographics: non-whites, as mentioned, and effete liberal race traitors. From a 2015 alicublog item on the dreary anti-urban screeds of Joel Kotkin:

Kotkin complains about the collapse of manufacturing — as if it were caused by liberal elitism, not by rampaging capitalism — but seems less interested in giving poor and marginally educated citizens back their traditional employment than in nostalgia for old Archie Bunker types versus the young, black, collegiate crew that has supplanted them. The new-class resentment is so thick I thought at times I was reading a Megan McArdle column.

While I have never seen Kotkin disturbed by the vast gulf in wealth between Wall Street bankers and the lumpenproles, he is very sensitive to inequality now that hippie-commies are in on it:

“This urban economy has created many of the most unequal places in the country. At the top are the rich and super-affluent who have rediscovered the blessings of urbanity, followed by a large cadre of young and middle-aged professionals, many of them childless.”

These childless cadres go for “good restaurants, shops and festivals, not child-friendly parks and family-oriented stores. Sometimes even crazy notions—such as allowing people to walk through the streets of San Francisco naked—are tolerated in a way no child-centric suburb would allow.” You can practically hear his audience gasp at this like simple country folk watching a melodrama of wicked city life.

But, you may finally wonder, why are conservatives so deeply invested, against all evidence, in these dystopian fantasies of American city life? I kinda boiled it down in 2019 in “The Contagion of the Cities”:

This kind of bullshittery is hilariously transparent to those of us who have lived in big cities. But the Contagion of the Cities shtick is not meant for people who know anything about those cities, but for people who live in fear of them, fear stoked by people like Trump (who, giving richness to the jest, is himself a New Yorker). It’s not a fear they seek to confront and lose; they cherish their fear, because it is part of their identity. So they won’t go to cities, or if they do stay near the hotel, not to protect themselves but to protect their vision of America — a country where, if you’re too nice to bums and busboys and immigrants who can do nothing for you and are often not even white, your urban liberal perversity will be punished by Unintended Consequences, while those who know enough to exploit and immiserate such people, and who worship a president who is the king of all exploiters, will inherit the all-white, sanitized, gun-guarded Suburb in the Kingdom of Heaven.

In other words, cities excite conservatives’ worst tendencies: Unreasoning hatred of anyone unlike themselves, seething jealousy of city-dwellers’ many advantages (culture, mobility, nightlife, something to talk about besides wrestling and TV), and (above all, I think) utter incomprehension and astonishment that anyone would choose to live among not just “the Other” but, in fact, any other — that is, other human beings — in close proximity, and are willing to make the sort of compromises and accommodations that people whose apartments are right next to each other and whose windows open onto busy thoroughfares choose to make. Why, they ask, don’t they prefer to live in gated communities and armed compounds? Don’t they know there’s no such thing as society?

The only possible answer, for them, is that the city-dwellers are deranged and must be purged, reduced, stripped of autonomy. This is what Tubby is playing at in DC. The only question is whether decades of social mobility, of kids moving out of the suburbs and seeing other ways of life, has tipped enough Americans to what a stupid, toxic fantasy that is.