In Washington DC, the Democrats are still in trauma. With all branches of government, from the White House to the Congress, in Republican hands, thousands of staffers are being let go. “It’s like the local steel mill has closed,” moped one Senate aide. Meanwhile, they watch in slack-jawed shock as president-elect Trump’s transition team mix humiliation with farce, corruption, bluster and incompetence. No wonder the Chinese president has decided 2017 is the time to turn up to Davos and pronounce the end of Pax Americana.
Amid the gloom, it is America’s cities on the hill that still provide the glimmering light. From Los Angeles to New York city, progressive mayors have badged their metropolises “sanctuary cities”, determined to resist Trump’s hard-right Republicanism. Just as Sadiq Khan announced “Open London” after the Brexit vote, so when it comes to immigrant rights, minimum wage legislation and the abolition of Obamacare, the cities are set to take a stand.
On Friday morning, Rahm Emanuel, the brilliantly pugnacious mayor of Chicago, and former White House chief of staff, told me that, as the grandson of a migrant, he would not assist Trump’s attempts to entrap undocumented children, but instead continue to support them through his community college programme. “Administrations may change but our values and principles when it comes to inclusion do not.” Rahm has reduced poverty and rebuilt Chicago’s riverside, and he’s not going to let Trump tear that down. On climate change, he has already struck a deal with eight Chinese cities to work together to bring down emissions.
It is leadership needed now more than ever as, on both sides of the Atlantic, the centre-left coalition is fracturing. Thursday’s Sleaford by-election only confirmed the fact that progressive politics is being rent asunder by a growing divide between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas – and post-Brexit Labour, like Clinton’s Democrats, doesn’t have the language or politics to speak to rural, small-town England.
In Britain and America, it is cities with higher levels of educational attainment, standards of living, employable skills and open, cosmopolitan cultures which voted to remain in Europe and for Hillary Clinton as president. In contrast, non-metropolitan areas with historic manufacturing economies, poor school results, low incomes, high levels of manual jobs (easily subject to automation) and a more hostile attitude towards immigration voted Republican and out of the EU. In the words of the Brookings Institution think tank, victory by Trump, the quintessential New Yorker, “would not have been possible without the influence of rural areas and smaller metropolitan areas”.
Since ancient Rome, large cities – with their experts, elites and foreigners – have been the object of populist fury. In Britain, the Brexit vote was closely connected to a broader sense of hostility towards London. In America, the big cities’ disregard for the flyover states and middle-America norms drove the Trump vote. Globalisation has exacerbated these cultural divides, with the urban embrace of technological disruption and immigration often at odds with a non-metropolitan respect for stability and less obvious admiration for the pace of change. The US presidential election proved as much a battle between communitarian and cosmopolitan identities as a traditional left v right struggle.
Yet, at the same time, the American public also gave a huge vote of confidence to US cities. In Columbus in Ohio, Seattle and Los Angeles, residents approved more than $180bn in additional taxes to spur ambitious transit plans and regeneration schemes. In fact, there is a lot of interest in the British experience of “city deals”, with their block allocation of central funding to metropolitan areas. For this is the conundrum that Trump faces: if he wants to deliver 4% growth, then he will have to engage with Democrat cities. The United States’s 388 metropolitan areas generate 91% of its gross domestic product and hold the key to “make America great again”.
Where Trump and the city bosses might agree is on the need for more infrastructure expenditure. For Rahm Emanuel, urban infrastructure spend is the most effective tool to promote equity and productivity. Similarly, the mayors are not against a reform of the tax code to promote innovative forms of metropolitan finance and urban bonds.
But, in truth, the space for consensus is small. Quite rightly, sanctuary cities are gearing up to battle Trump’s coming assault on social housing, clean air, public schooling, minority rights, affordable health care, and economic justice. But if metropolitan America is going to win the broader war, then it will need to look to its own sense of cultural superiority. Perhaps only when Beltway insiders can understand the loss of a real steel mill to communities in the midwest will the Democrats enjoy a national revival.
Tristram Hunt is the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central
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