The Tea Party and Trump Waves
I was living with an American woman, the daughter of evangelical Christians and major Republican donors. They had a framed wall-length signed portrait of George W Bush in their entry foyer and had FoxNews, which Rachel termed “the Jonestown loudspeaker of conservative America” running on the television in at least one room at all times. I moved to the US with my beloved in 2010 and continued residing in the US, even after we split up, through 2012. I celebrated Thanksgiving in 2010 at the home of a Tea Party organizer in Fort Worth, Texas. I was living in Kansas City when Rick Santorum won the Missouri GOP primary in 2012. And, from 2002 to 2022, I was part of a community of tabletop role playing gamers centred in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of the locations the America’s conservative and liberal tectonic plates collide.
So I want to make clear that I experienced the dark turn of American conservatism up close and personal, from the Sarah Palin nomination through Charlottesville. And there is no doubt that less dense, less urban, more rural and smaller communities led America’s descent into the various forms of intolerance and woolly thinking that blossomed in those years. Palin’s “real America” was more easily duped by conspiracy theories, more likely to blame outsiders for problems, more inclined to political hyperbole and polarization and grew more suspicious of the rest of America, leavened by all that Koch Brothers money.
But the Tea Party and Trump waves were not especially remarkable. Political scientists and historians expect reactionary movements to come from smaller, more rural, more remote communities, to be concentrated in economic sectors that appear to be in their sunset years. Scholars expect those with less education, residing in less demographically diverse communities to be more prone to nativism, xenophobia and “us versus them” thinking.
What is far more shocking, far more in need of explaining and far more pressing an issue is the way in which it has become the most educated, the most urban, the most progressive who now lead Anglo America’s charge against political pluralism, free speech, scientific literacy, religious tolerance, press freedom and representative democracy.
While history is full of intolerant cities and welcoming, pluralistic small towns, historical moments when rural areas are more culturally and politically pluralistic than urban areas in the same society are rare. Times are rare when educated people are more ideologically inflexible and hostile to new information than those with less formal education. If people are going to be beaten in the street for their unorthodox views, if books are going to be banned, if the places of worship of minority peoples are going to be burned, we expect small towns to commit those sins prior to and more prolifically than the big cities, not the reverse.
Yet, as of about half a decade ago, this is the reality into which Anglo America and much of the rest of the Global North has entered.
The Crisis of Intolerance in Our Cities
When Meghan Murphy, the gender critical feminist journalist, was driven out of her home town of Vancouver, a key moment was the day she left her house in the morning to discover her photo plastered on lamp standards around her neighbourhood, calling her a hate criminal and suggesting that violence against her was appropriate.
During her nearly successful bid for mayor of Ottawa, Catherine McKenney (they/them), then a city councillor, organized a public beating of “Billboard” Chris Elston, the children’s rights campaigner and following his public flogging, threatened a more severe beating should he attempt to return to Ottawa with his “children can’t consent to puberty blockers” campaign.
When the hundredth church arson attacking non-white Christians took place in Regina last month, directed against a Catholic congregation primarily comprising three racial groups, Africans, Middle Easterners and Filipinos, a Conservative motion condemning the burning was shouted down in parliament by members of the overwhelmingly urban caucuses of the Liberal and New Democratic Parties. And when David Eby, NDP premier of BC was approached through back-channels by those seeking stronger law enforcement around church burnings (perpetrators have only been charged in 2% of cases), Eby reacted by announcing new measures, not to prevent hate crimes against racialized Christians, but to criminalize the beliefs of the parishioners.
When the Million March for Children took place last fall and thousands of Canadians turned out to oppose government programs to chemically lobotomize and sterilize children without parental knowledge or consent, rallies were able to take place in rural communities but in urban centres, “counter protesters” did everything in their power not merely to stage their own protests but to drown out or disperse rally participants. Murphy, during one of her brief trips to Canada was charged by counter-protesters attempting to physically assault her. They failed to hit her but still managed to prevent the rally coming off and her from speaking. My comrade Lierre Keith, head of the Women’s Liberation Front, was not so lucky. She was punched in the face at two rallies in the Pacific Northwest while attempting to speak that year.
And as we saw in rallies from Melbourne to Dublin to Vancouver to San Francisco, it is not merely that the police failed to hold back violence against the protesters. Police officers were often shown assisting violent mobs in carrying out their beatings, in some cases being caught on film pointing and laughing as vigilante mobs beat unarmed protesters with fists and weapons.
And this goes beyond organized politics. Vehicular collisions are up. Pedestrian deaths at the hands of drivers are up. Stranger assaults are up. Exhibitionism and other contactless sex crimes are up.
Ancient Alexandria and the Urban Scale Horseshoe
I have long expressed outrage at the dark turn my city and so many others have been taking but it is long past time to go beyond that outrage, that we began thinking about both the short- and long-term factors that are giving rise to this curdling of the cosmopolitan city because there is no single force, no single explanation that can adequately or fully account for what is happening. A confluence of factors has made the increasing intolerance of our cities self-magnifying, as those fearing persecution and intolerance move to smaller, more human scale communities or out of the Global North altogether.
As a historian, the first place I naturally go when seeking to answer such a question is the past: when, in the past, has it been the cities that have led their rural counterparts when it came to intolerance?
The pogroms against the Jews of Alexandria in 38 CE under governor Flaccus are a striking example and one of the few times in Antiquity that urban Jews fared worse than rural Jews at the hands of pagans or, later, Christians. On the occasions that urban communities outdistanced the hinterland in their persecution of Jews and other minorities, up to Germany in the 1930s and 40s, there may be some patterns.
The cities in which pogroms were most enthusiastic and popular (as opposed to being driven from above) tended to have a geography segregated primarily by religion rather than by class. While all cities have tended to experience natural religious ghettoization, this has been tempered by countervailing and competing forces, like occupational and class-based segregation of “unclean” work and workers. The multi-confessional character of industries like butchering, tanning, fishing and logistics produced kinds of residential congregation and segregation that could undercut religious uniformity in an area.
There is also the question of scale. Alexandria was one of the few pre-modern cities with a population that exceeded a million. This scale permitted something highly problematic that Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish intellectual, who leaves us the best written records of the 38 CE pogroms, which he survived, called out in his time.
Philo was concerned that many of his neighbours and coreligionists in Alexandria were falling away from the Jewish sumptuary laws, not keeping kosher, not honouring the Sabbath, etc. This was because, he observed, unlike a Jew in a smaller city, an Alexandrian Jew could experience his identity as a Jew just by rising in the morning and heading out the door. Everyone he would meet that day, everyone with whom he socialized, everyone with whom he worked, everyone from whom he bought something would be a Jew. In this way, living at such a massive demographic scale actually replicated the life of a Jew in tiny village off the Jordan River.
There was no need to maintain behavioural boundaries or to be behaviourally distinct; geography and economy took care of all that for you. And if that was happening to Jews, it was most certainly happening to the pagan majority which held political power in the city, backed by an imperial army and navy drawn from a military hegemon with forty million residents.
I want to suggest that one of the most pernicious elements of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, “Queer”/Pharma Pride, the rise of social media “call-out” culture and various other forms of cultural authoritarianism is the way in which they help to recreate Philo’s Alexandria. Even if people in a workplace have diverse opinions and affiliations politically, they are increasingly required to express identical views in their workplace for fear of losing employment. Progressive urbanites on Facebook routinely see threats from friends and family on their screen, telling them what virtuous political position they must now express in order to be spared public humiliation and ostracism.
In smaller, more human scale communities, complete segregation from those who disagree with you is less feasible. Ideologically recalcitrant people cannot be wholly purged from or cowed within the labour system. The break room in a company in a smaller town is more likely to contain people who express unorthodox political views.
In other words, there is a kind of horseshoe effect when it comes to community size: make a city large enough and it can segregate its way to small-town religious and ideological parochialism, provided there exists a strong enough “us-them” dynamic and an enforcement system with the muscle to back it up.
Purity and Pollution in the Modern City
Key to such an “us-them” dynamics are ideas of purity and pollution. As I have been arguing the past two years, I believe that the class differences between the rural and industrial proletariat and the rest of the population have been magnified to the point where they exhibit the qualities of caste.
I have made my cultural arguments concerning race, economic sector, public health policy and a host of others concerning the amplification of cultural difference and the need to segregate “unclean” persons from the rest of us. Pseudoscientific myths concerning Covid vaccination and transmission, the re-description of unorthodox speech as “unsafe” the repackaging of anti-Métis racism as “anti-racism” and the growing state-sponsored conspiracy industry that labels me a hate criminal and Diagolon a white supremacist terrorist paramilitary have helped to give rise to moments like the East Vancouver anti-Truckism (Terry Glavin’s term, not my own) protest of 2022.
A solidarity convoy was organized in the dying days of the Ottawa convoy to show support for the increasingly nutty remnant of the protest in Ottawa and arrived in Vancouver but the people of East Vancouver were ready with a counter-protest. I asked a friend who supported the counter-protest what they were counter-protesting, given that the convoyists had basically stopped issuing coherent demand. Which of the trucker demands, I asked, were people protesting.
The answer was horrifyingly honest: people were not turning out to protest a political position the truckers were taking. They were protesting their existence as human beings, the fact that they were people who existed and wore the wrong clothes, worked at the wrong jobs, enjoyed the wrong recreational activities and lived in the wrong places. As Glavin had cleverly pointed out with a nonsense neologism, there was no “truckism” to protest.
That is why, when the two groups of protesters finally clashed at First Avenue and Commercial Drive, the truckers, forced to a standstill by the protesters honked their horns and waved their Canadian flags and the counter-protesters chanted “trans rights are human rights!” again and again.
But another way to examine this caste-making is to look at the function of caste within a market economy. Caste had made the Indian economy the most dynamic and productive in the world and, its spread to Europe and the New World, through the creation of “black” and “Indian” (the American kind) as heritable castes, is inextricable from the sustained growth and dynamism we associate with mercantilism and capitalism in the early modern world.
One of the reasons caste makes a market economy more effective is by reserving certain kinds of work for certain castes and constraining the labour supply for that work by rendering certain castes ineligible for it. Truckists cannot simply enter the commissar class simply by obtaining the right training and professional credentials. They must also at least appear to embrace the American space religion the commissars practice, with its veneration of self-harm, special grammar and usage rules, numerous novel holidays, special flags and costume, and complex system of etiquette.
An increasing number of professional degree programs now require the taking of loyalty oaths to the ideology of the commissars as do many workplaces. More difficult to fake than a loyalty oath are official records of regular Covid mRNA vaccinations. And, given the highly urban character of most commissar class jobs, aside from frontline elementary education, there is the matter of urbanization.
It deserves a whole article.
