The Urbanite: Winning Since 1788
On the importance of a forward-looking vision
We have all seen how populism, and the elitist reaction to it, have come to increasingly define Western politics. Whether in the United States, Britain, France, Italy, or elsewhere, voters of the ethnic majority are increasingly split between the more educated, urban, and well-off classes, who tend to vote liberal/globalist, and the less educated, more rural, and less well-off classes, who tend to vote conservative/nationalist.
The divide between the urbanite and country-dweller is by no means new. I was struck when I read recently that such a divide was central during the battle over the ratification of the new United States Constitution between 1787 and 1788. Broadly, the people of the cities and maritime states favored ratification, while their opponents tended to be back-country farmers and ruralites.
Then as now, class divides were significant. Amos Singletry, a farmer who spoke at the Massachusetts ratifying convention, described the advocates of ratification as follows: “These lawyers and men of learning, and moneyed men that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves.”1
Then as now, the well-connected cities were better able to organize than were country-dwellers. One contemporary observed:
The citizens of the seaport towns are numerous: they live compact; their interests are one: there is a constant connection and intercourse between them: they can, on any occasion, centre their votes where they please.2
Opponents of ratification may have had common fears regarding the new Constitution—notably that it would lead to a corrupt and antidemocratic central authority that would mean “a transfer of power from the many to the few”—but did not themselves have a shared alternative vision.
As Lawrence Goldman writes in his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Federalist Papers:
Some Anti-Federalists [opponents of ratification] merely opposed specific provisions of the Constitution; others saw no reason to revise the Articles. Indeed, it was a theme in The Federalist Papers and a besetting weakness of antifederalism that the opponents of the Constitution could not agree on a rival programme. As Madison exclaimed, ‘Let each one come forward with his particular explanation, and scarce any two are exactly agreed upon the subject’.3
Put these two together and it’s not hard to see why the opponents of ratification lost: 1) a relatively disorganized group which 2) lacked a common vision. At most, such a group may slow or block things for a time, but it cannot block things indefinitely, let alone sustain a positive order of things.
Relative disorganization and lack of positive vision may also explain the travails of:
The Brexit vote, which expressed a clear opposition to the European Union but no alternative vision as such (and, in the event, the Conservative Party proved itself unwilling or incapable of then providing such a vision).
The Italian Five-Star Movement, which expressed opposition to the Italian political establishment more than anything else.
Populists and/or euroskeptics at the EU level in general, who have generally failed to cooperate, have differing ideologies (including both the far-left and nationalists of varying degrees), and cater to quite different “oppositional” sensibilities in their respective nations.
In Western history and politics in general since 1800 or so, economically-advanced cities and nations, and the progressive ideologies associated with them, have tended to win out over less developed countries/regions and their conservative values. And it’s not hard to see why: the developed nations and urban areas are better connected, are wealthier, and have more advanced technology.
Thus, it’s no surprise that the industrial North defeated the slave-owning South in the American Civil War. A major factor was the North’s superior economic and demographic growth: whereas in 1790 the northern and southern states had roughly equal populations, by 1860 the Northerners outnumbered the Southerners by over 50% (18.8 million to 12.2 million).
Nor is it surprising that the United States defeated Japan in World War II. The Japanese may have inherited astonishing warrior spirit from their samurai tradition—it would have been very hard to find as many willing Americans to be kamikaze pilots for example—but the American economy was ten times larger than Japan’s. Even if the Japanese had managed to sink many American aircraft carriers, new ones could be constantly churned out. Scientific prowess can also decide matters categorically, as in the United States’ use of nuclear weapons to force Japan’s unconditional surrender.
This isn’t to say reactionaries and conservatives can’t win in the short term. But unless there is a positive, forward-looking vision, they will inevitably be overrun, sooner or later, by those who both have such a vision and the power (notably technological) to enforce it. The enemies of Napoleon may have defeated him twice and put a king back on the throne of France; the principles of the French Revolution—national self-determination, the rule of law, equality before the law—triumphed all the same throughout Europe over the course of the nineteenth century.
This insight, regarding the power of advanced societies and the need for a positive vision, can help us distinguish real alternative paths from dead ends. Mao Zedong thought China could win the revolutionary war against global capitalism by mobilizing what he called the “countryside of the world,” in effect the postcolonial third world, against the West. As everyone knows, things did not turn out that way and while the Communist Party may still rule in China, it now governs a capitalist society par excellence. Maoism is just one of many third-worldist dead ends which have, from time to time, seduced many young Westerners.
Before the modern era, urbanites did in fact often lose. History is replete with urban civilizations—whether in Rome, the Middle East, or China—which were overrun by virile barbarians, whether these were Macedonians, Germanics, Arabs, Turks, or Mongols. The medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun theorized that as a tribe urbanized, it tended to lose its Asabiyyah—meaning its traditional values, group consciousness, and social cohesion—making it ripe to be conquered by rougher nations.4
Modern technology, industry, and the mass socio-political organization enabled by them decisively changed the equation.
This isn’t say urbanites will always win in the future. For example, it may one day be that the demographics of the Global North—I mean the West and East Asia, increasingly including China—are so bad as to make their societies non-viable.
The foreseeable future, however, belongs to those movements that can combine technical power, social organization, and a forward-looking vision. Those entrapped in vestigial opposition or, worse, the politics of nostalgia, may after all make a career for themselves but are unlikely to have lasting or significant impact. In short, one must be futurist.
Quoted by Lawrence Goldman, in “Introduction” to Alexander Hamilton et al, The Federalist Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xxii.
Ibid.
Ibid., xxii-xxiii. Appropriately enough, the diverse opponents of ratification thought that the sheer size and diversity of American states meant a strong central government was risky:
Anti-Federalists believed that republican government was only possible in small territories with homogeneous populations. Thus to James Winthrop of Massachusetts in the ‘Agrippa’ letters, ‘The idea of an uncompounded republic, on an average one thousand miles in length, and eight hundred in breadth, and containing six millions of white inhabitants all reduced to the same standard of morals, of habits, and of laws, is in itself an absurdity, and contrary to the whole experience of mankind.
In the event, differing ways of life between the industrial North and the slave-holding South could only be overcome by northern domination in the Civil War; but once this was done it seems America was able to build a national identity about as coherent as any large European nation.
The ancient Greeks were haunted by a similar idea of decadence, encapsulated in this saying they attributed to Cyrus the Great: “Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.”