City Mouse and Country Mouse

It was in a most appropriate place that I found my first book by Ayn Rand, the objectivist libertarian and unapologetic apostle of egoism and capitalism. She remains a key influence on antigovernment, anti-collectivist fiscal conservatism, and her ideas were a dominant influence on me for at least a decade in my youth.

As an 18-year-old, I found the underlined and dog-eared book Atlas Shrugged in a pile of junk left in a long-abandoned logging complex on a remote and uninhabited island in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, about as far from urban America as one could get.

I grew up in Alaska and was working at the time for the U.S. Forest Service. I learned from fellow forest service rangers that the timber operation had been hacked out of the wilderness by a solitary man of heroic proportions. I could see from what he left behind that he must have fancied himself another John Galt, the lonely hero in Rand’s novel. Galt, Rand, and, presumably, the unknown logger had contempt for cities and crowds, and more fundamentally, the very idea that throngs or masses or “mobs” of mediocre people ought to have any democratic control over the fortunes, or conduct, or individual aspirations of the heroic capitalist masters of the universe.

That was 40 years ago. Since then I’ve spent enough time in every region of the nation to have a feeling for how important geography is in shaping philosophy, culture, and politics. Spending 30 of those years reporting and writing about politics and government for newspapers has added even more map consciousness to my thinking.

Urban America is progressive and communitarian, while rural (and to a lesser extent suburban and exurban) America is conservative and individualistic. Where you are has a lot to do with who you are, and this has been a fact of mankind going back to ancient Greece and Aesop’s story about the country mouse and the city mouse.

Lots of ironies and paradoxes abound in the generalizations about these different kinds of mice. There is, of course, a fairly direct correlation between population density and ideological and cultural differences. Even in conservative states, the densely populated inner urban cores vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Even in liberal states, rural folk tend to vote Republican.

Alaska is long behind me, and I now live near the geographic center of one of America’s larger metropolitan centers. I have evolved from libertarian to progressive and now am the leader of a Minnesota-based think tank that advocates for ample public investment. We favor restoring higher state income tax rates to pay for investments in education, transportation, and health care. The great jurist and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, and I think Minnesota ought to become a little more civilized.

Progressive groups like mine tend to draw support from urban populations. One of our challenges is finding and persuading more people in Greater Minnesota to see things the way we do. But to the charge at hand: here are a couple of pieces of advice for conservatives who want to make inroads in urban America and Minnesota.

I’m sincere in hoping that you conservatives succeed. Your side and my side need to work together and make friends on each other’s turf in order to move forward. I realize that some of this advice boils down to “Don’t be so conservative.” So be it.

Cities are disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant. Consequently, ill-concealed attempts by the Right to stoke resentment of immigrants in recent elections was a huge, long-term tactical mistake.

Almost 25 years ago, at the 1984 Republican convention in Dallas, I asked a very influential and intelligent Minnesota conservative what he thought Ronald Reagan’s biggest shortcoming was. He quickly responded that it was the inability of the Great Communicator to communicate with African-Americans and other racial minorities. He was right, and in a nation that is fast becoming much more colorful, this ongoing failure eventually will be lethal for conservatives.

More important, I think, conservatives have hurt themselves with sustained resistance to even modest increases in public investment for vital, economy-building assets like public education and mass transit. The United States has the lowest taxes and the lowest level of investment in human capital among the industrialized democracies, and Minnesota as a state is becoming merely average on both measures. Cities, in particular, can feel this disinvestment and the “no new taxes” mentality behind it.

Conservatives need to understand that putting real and substantial new tax dollars, for example, into helping students achieve and decongesting cities is a sound strategy. In other words, conservatives who want to be taken seriously in the cities need to do more than “frame” things differently or put a smiley face on their agenda. They need to say things differently and also back up their words with money.