1/Wow hack pundits will thunder clichés RE “urban elites,” “identity politics,” & Salt of the Earth “middle Americans” ‘til the end of days.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
2/Never mind Trump/Kushner/Bannon/Guiliani/all apparatchiks=city slickers selling bill of goods to base they transparently disdain as rubes.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
3/City people recognize these men. *They* are urban depravity personified. Rapacious/selfish/dissolute/hypocritical. The dregs.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
4/Trumpian rural populism, what a hoot. Trump can barely stand to leave midtown. Doesn’t want to move to White House. DC is a cowtown to him
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
5/Trump 1999: “I’ve lived in NYC in Manhattan all my life. My views are a little different than if I lived in Iowa.” https://t.co/IgJTyKhVx8
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
6/Every pundit who rattles on RE “elites” has big city address. They self-flagellate to assert “common touch.” "I'm not in the BUBBLE!"
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
7/“The Bubble.” “The Real America.” Garbage that those who should know better gobble up like prime rib.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
8/The insecurity and inadequate critical faculties of left-center “thinkers” has done a lot of damage in this country.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
9/Pundits are so invested in myths of urban inequity & middle-American authenticity, they inhabit a moral bizarro world.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
10/They deify rural whites as AUTHENTICALLY American while patronizing them as simpletons incapable of higher reasoning/Enlightenment values
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
11/White supremacist prejudice *itself* confers holy glow on rural whites. Ennobling evidence of authenticity, untainted by cosmopolitanism.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
12/Meanwhile to espouse values of pluralism is to betray yourself as an elite whose “Americanness” is suspect. An inhabitant of The Bubble.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
13/The only authentic working-class is the white working-class. Whites are The Folk, with all the nobility that idea confers.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
14/It’s like these pundits all have Grant Wood postcards taped to their laptops.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
15/Working-class people of color? Come again? Who they?
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
16/Of course these clichés aren’t just mawkish, they’re pernicious.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
17/All authoritarians sentimentalize the rural heartland and rail against urbanity.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
18/Nazis: “blood and soil.” Mao: Cultural Revolution/Down to the Countryside.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
19/In the U.S. we have our our weird anti-urban traditions. Sodom & Gomorrah clichés resonate with the country's deep Protestant traditions.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
20/Meanwhile anti-urbanism among American educated ruling-class stretches back to the Founders.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
21/George Washington, 1791: “The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded.”
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
22/Thomas Jefferson:"The mobs of great cities add just so much to support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.”
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
23/Jefferson romanticized the ideal of an agrarian republic: “Those who labor the earth...the chosen people of God” etc. etc.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
24/Of course this didn’t stop Jefferson (or Franklin, who voiced similar convictions) from living it up in the fleshpots of Paris.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
25/The Trumpian anti-urban playbook hits on two familiar fronts.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
26/The broadsides against “Urban elites,” the media, "political correctness," Wall Street, etc. of course carry ancient anti-Semitic echoes.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
27/Then there’s the Nixonian/Reaganian anti-black/Latino racism. “Their neighborhoods are hell”; “You will get shot”; etc.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
28/The fact that journalists and even some academics are suckers for this con boggles the frickin’ mind.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
29/Btw nonsense about “coastal elites” is exploded by glance at voting map. Every major city blue. Urban counties in TX & GA among bluest.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
30/The geographic divide is urban vs. suburban/exurban/rural. Not “coastal” vs. “heartland” or, G-d knows, “elite” vs. “real American.”
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
31/As for the vaunted "patriotism" of middle-America: well, urbanites are quantitatively more patriotic.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
32/Cities carry a disproportionate federal tax burden.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
33/Where are the cris de coeur about the parasitic Heartland?
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
34/The electoral college disenfranchises urban voters. City-dwellers’ votes count less.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
35/Remember that the GOP are opportunistic city-lovers. When there’s terrorist attack they will press NYC to their heaving bosoms.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
36/Cities have all kinds or problems. Chiefly inequality & racism. No good to replace myth of The Noble Hinterlander w/its opposite number.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
37/Urbanities need to push back against the BS. Loud, aggressive civic pride should be the order of the day.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
38/Stand up for your town & its values over/against Trumpism. Don’t let the demagogues or their dopey enablers talk shit.
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
39/P.S. Mike Pence would get booed at the VFW Hall in my neighborhood. Trust me. THE END
— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) November 21, 2016
The first person who replied to Rosen recommended our 2004 "Urban Archipelago" feature, calling it "one of [his] go-to pieces" on the subject.
