Crisis in the Liberal City

Michie

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The George Floyd protests expose the fault lines in metropolitan America.


The polarization of American life, the withdrawal of liberal and conservative Americans from one another, has generated a poisonous distillation on both sides. In separating into geographic-distinct enclaves, into heartland and metropole, our factions have become steadily worse versions of themselves — deprived of the leaven of perspective, hardening into self-caricature, losing the democratic capacities that a more diverse and fluid political atmosphere can teach.

The poisoning on the right helped give us the Trump presidency, which speaks to the alienation of conservative America from the corridors of wealth and power — the sense across rural and exurban America that our great cities are alien, their inhabitants dangerous, their elites grasping and malign — without speaking effectively to anybody else.

Trump’s administration is Washington-based performance art for Americans who know the capital primarily as a television backdrop, a festival of lib-owning and deep-state bashing — and as of last night, bizarre tear-gas-and-the-Bible photo ops — that doesn’t even try to master the government it notionally runs. His reeling, staggering style of governance — once blackly comic, now deadly serious and disastrous — reflects not just the incapacity of its leader but also the insularity of his coalition, which doesn’t encompass enough of America’s diversity to claim a real democratic mandate or include enough of the administrative talent that it would need to competently rule.

But the riots engulfing America’s cities aren’t just a testament to Trump’s mix of provocation and abdication. They also reveal how the Democratic coalition’s distillation into a metropolitan formation, a liberalism of the “global city,” has created deep pressures inside the liberal coalition, fissures that can widen with the right cascade of shocks.

Continued below.
Opinion | Crisis in the Liberal City