Epistemographer

Along with everyone else I know, I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened on Nov. 2, and how to move forward after it. Leaving aside my tinfoil-hat indulgences and million-to-one fantasies about ballot turnarounds in Ohio, a common theme since I walked into work on Nov. 3rd has been the idea of secession.

Secession, of course, can take many forms: there’s the literal secession of states from the union, which isn’t really a viable option (these graphics aside). There’s the personal secession of moving to Canada or elsewhere, regardless of how difficult that might be in practice. For me, however, the idea I can’t seem to shake is a more theoretical secession, stepping back from the image of the United States of America as a single, unified whole and moving toward a more vision of heterogeneous states tied by a loose and scaled-back federal government.

I’ve been hearing rudimentary forms of this argument for close to two weeks now, ranging from a colleague and I arguing that the best plan would be to cut Red State welfare like farm subsidies to a friend’s vow that she’d stop worrying about abortion being kept legal throughout the country, and that instead she’d simply work to make sure that it stays legal where she lives. This makes sense – we’re all retrenching, moving back to more stable ground after an unsettling defeat, and there’s an element of reactionary anger underlying much of this rhetoric; a sort of “Alright, fuck you, I’m taking my ball and going home.”

The Seattle paper The Stranger has made a similar argument, using the city rather than the state as the unit of analysis:

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; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; 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.

The thing that makes their manifesto required reading, however, is the fact that this secessionary rhetoric is funneled into constructive action. Leaving aside a few cheap shots, this essay is the clearest, most straightforward statement of my values that I’ve seen in recent political discourse. I’m an unabashed urbanist, and would love to see the Democratic Party embrace this philosophy explicitly.

Some choice excerpts after the jump…

In cities all over America, distressed liberals are talking about fleeing to Canada or, better yet, seceding from the Union. We can’t literally secede and, let’s admit it, we don’t really want to live in Canada. It’s too cold up there and in our heart-of-hearts we hate hockey. We can secede emotionally, however, by turning our backs on the heartland. We can focus on our issues, our urban issues, and promote our shared urban values. We can create a new identity politics, one that transcends class, race, sexual orientation, and religion, one that unites people living in cities with each other and with other urbanites in other cities…

Above any other advantage, the new urban identity politics solves “the vision thing” for the Democratic Party. No longer are we a fractured aggregation of special interests or a spineless hydra of contingent alliances—we are a united front, with a clear, compelling image and an articulated system of values. Up until now, the Republicans have been winning the image war. When you think of “America,” you imagine a single-family dwelling with a flag in the front yard and acres of corn waving in the background. It’s an angry red fantasy. But propaganda is flexible, and audiences are pliant. Urban politics opens up a whole new visual vocabulary to be exploited by TV advertising, and it’s a vocabulary rich in emotional content, particularly after September 11. This is the era of cityscapes, rapid transit, and crowds of people. Political advertising can no longer pander to nostalgia about the yeoman countryside—we must embrace our urban future…

Even people who don’t live in cities look to urban centers for a certain image of America. The nation identified with New York City in such a visceral way on September 11 not just because Americans died there—Americans died in a Pennsylvania field and in Northern Virginia too—but because the New York skyline is a stirring image of American prosperity and achievement. It symbolizes the motivation and spirit of the American people, the wealth of our nation, the thrum of diverse cultures, and inexhaustible cultural creativity. Cities inspire us; they speak to our hopes and our passions. Small towns diminish us; they speak of lost history and downscaled dreams. The Democratic Party should compete on our own turf, change the terms of the debate, and give the American people heroes to believe in—as well as enemies to revile….

But if liberals and progressives want to reach out past our urban bases, it might be helpful to identify some essential convictions, thereby allowing us to perhaps compete on “values.” Identifying and articulating our core convictions, as opposed to compromising and downplaying them in search of some kind of non-urban appeal, might actually attract voters in exurbs and rural areas who understand the importance of cities to the national economy. But even if it doesn’t, ours is a superior way of life. Wherever people choose to live in this country, they should want to live as we do.

So how do we live and what are we for? Look around you, urbanite, at the multiplicity of cultures, ethnicities, and tribes that are smashed together in every urban center (yes, even Seattle): We’re for that. We’re for pluralism of thought, race, and identity. We’re for a freedom of religion that includes the freedom from religion—not as some crazy aberration, but as an equally valid approach to life. We are for the right to choose one’s own sexual and recreational behavior, to control one’s own body and what one puts inside it. We are for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness….

Unlike the people who flee from cities in search of a life free from disagreement and dark skin, we are for contentiousness, discourse, and the heightened understanding of life that grows from having to accommodate opposing viewpoints. We’re for opposition.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 14th, 2004 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.