Why Are Cities Usually Liberal?

I've been searching for some time for an article I read once, wherein the author speculated that living in a city could actually cause people to be more liberal/Leftist in their thinking.  I haven't located that one as of yet, but did locate a couple of others that discuss the phenomenon, and possible reasons, to at least some degree.  These aren't new, but I think they are interesting, so sharing:

What Explains The Partisan Divide Between Urban And Non-Urban Areas

44,356 viewsNov 15, 2012, 06:30pm

Mark Hendrickson Former Contributor

Last week’s election results have given Republicans, Democrats, and political observers plenty to ponder. Various pundits have commented on the increasing importance of identity politics—that for many American voters, who they are and what they are, demographically speaking, predetermines which party they vote for. To the “who” and “what” factors, there is a third factor that seems just as important: where they live.

When looking at maps of the United States showing red for counties where the Republican candidate received more votes and blue for counties where the Democrats won, one can’t help but be struck by the predominance of red. Basically, the urban metropolises are Democratic blue and the vast expanse of most of the rest of the country is overwhelmingly red. If presidents were elected by acreage rather than by head count, Republicans would win national elections by landslides.

Look at it another way: take Philly out of Pennsylvania, the Big Apple out of New York, the Motor City out of Michigan, the Windy City out of Illinois, Cleveland out of Ohio, Milwaukee out of Wisconsin, St. Louis out of Missouri, etc., and a lot of blue states would instantly be red. What explains this pronounced and hugely significant partisan divide between urban and nonurban areas?
One obvious explanation for the overwhelming Democratic majorities in big cities is the Curley effect with the corresponding concentration of Democratic constituencies like welfare recipients and unions, but there is more to it than that. The Curley effect has turned once-vibrant cities into economic basket cases, but what, then, can explain the perennial dominance of Democrats in such thriving, prosperous cities as Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco? Why do affluent, white-collar, highly educated citizens in these cities tend to be liberal and vote Democratic?

Sociologists could have a field day with this question, but the explanation could be something as simple as the fact that people who live in cities are relatively insulated from how difficult and challenging it can be to produce the food, energy, equipment, devices, etc., that comprise the affluence that urbanites enjoy. In their urban cocoons, city-dwellers take for granted the abundance and availability of the economic goods that they consume. For instance, many well-to-do, educated urbanites see no downside to supporting stricter regulations and higher taxes on energy producers, because to them, energy is something that is always there at the flip of a switch (except during the occasional hurricane, as some New Yorkers recently discovered). Life in the city for affluent Americans creates the illusion that all they have to do is demand something and—presto!—it will be there when they want it.
Affluent denizens of our metropolises see no inconsistency in supporting the Democratic jihad against “greedy corporations” and “the rich” while also expecting their every whim to be supplied, often by those same corporations and successful entrepreneurs. This is because they are removed from some of the harsher daily realities of life that confront those who are on the front lines of mankind’s ongoing economic struggle. They have forgotten that mankind’s natural state is poverty and that strenuous, heroic efforts are required to produce the astounding affluence and abundant paraphernalia of our modern, affluent lifestyles. To use Marxian terminology, urbanites have become alienated from economic reality.
Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter in the “little house on the prairie” stories who later became a globetrotting journalist (even traveling alone to Vietnam to report on the Vietnam War when she was 78 years young) remarked on the illusions that can beguile urbanites long ago. In her 1943 book, “The Discovery of Freedom,” Lane blasted urban greens and liberals, writing:

Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he battles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting diseases and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan God–Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this in human Earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.

Lane perceived that liberals suffer from a self-satisfied delusion about how the world works. Like the ivory-tower academics who enthuse about socialism because they have never experienced the harsh realities of socialism, so today, many denizens of our big cities are afflicted with a “metropolitan blind spot” that causes them to support irrational, ultimately self-destructive policies. Thus, America’s metropolises will continue to be painted blue at every election unless the people there awaken from their smug delusions.

A Tale of Urban and Rural: How environmental factors affect our politics.

By Eric Schnurer Opinion ContributorJuly 7, 2017, at 2:45 p.m.

Just before the Independence Day holiday, I came across an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, "Crowded Places Make People Think More About the Future." It potentially says a lot about where we are as a country right now.

In it, Oliver Sng, a research fellow at the University of Michigan, discusses his paper, "The Crowded Life is a Slow Life." Sng's study found that people in more densely-populated areas tend to be more "future-oriented." These preferences show up even when people are induced to "perceive" they are in a higher-density situation – such as reading fictitious articles about spiraling population growth, or simply listening to recordings of crowd sounds instead of white noise.

"In more densely-populated countries," Sng wrote, "we saw less sexual promiscuity, lower fertility rates, higher preschool enrollment, and a greater societal emphasis on planning for the future versus solving today's problems." These country-to-country differences carried over to U.S. states, where people in more densely-populated ones "married later, had fewer children, and were more likely to attain a bachelor's degree and participate in retirement savings plans."

This resulted in a chart plotting states by future-focused thinking against population density – and what looks like a pretty strong correlation. In fact, the graph itself – with future orientation at the top and density on the right – almost looks like a distended map of the U.S., with the dense, future-oriented states in the top-right Northeast and sort of petering out toward the upper Midwest, with the more present-focused, more sparsely-populated states starting at the lower middle and sprawling out across the southwest.

All of which made me think about these not-so-United States these days.

In the last year or two – not coincidentally, just at the time educated liberal elites, comfortably in the ascendance under Barack Obama, began to recognize the growing backlash from who became Trump voters – there's been a surge of research finding a genetic basis for liberal and conservative political predispositions. Essentially, this research claims, liberals tend to be more analytic and reflective, more open to new experiences and different cultures, and generally smarter, more fun and more likely to enjoy Thai restaurants – all the things liberals pride about themselves.

Meanwhile, the studies comfortingly confirm that conservatives are genetically inferior in intelligence, ability to reason and learn from new experiences, and willingness to study abroad or vacation outside Florida. One can only imagine what liberal reaction to such studies would be if they'd found genetically-rooted mental deficiencies, or inherited preferences for, say, soccer, on the part of racial minorities or women – but the results have been embraced by progressives with the smugness of, well, the kind of progressives that those troglodytes out there love to hate.

But the Harvard Business Review piece (which, of course, seemed more interested in whether companies could "exploit these tendencies in, say, consumer marketing" or use them to boost worker productivity) suggests that maybe the differences that have so polarized our country politically are not so much nature as nurture – less genetic and more geographic. Sng himself actually touched on this point, in a broader, non-political way, in his very first answer in the interview. Tying his theory about population density into standard biology, he noted:

Humans pursue a slower life-history strategy than other animals do, but there is variation among us, and while some of that may be genetic, we've also evolved to respond to our environment. In crowded places, where there's arguably greater competition for resources, we might feel we need to invest more in ourselves and our kids to succeed.

I'd suggest that, in "crowded places" – or, more generally, in metropolitan as opposed to non-metropolitan areas – there's a wide range of things we might feel differently about. The need to regulate people's behavior, for instance: It doesn't matter as much if your neighbor chooses to play loud music – or shoot off his guns – if your neighbor lives five miles away instead of in an apartment directly underneath yours. Scholars of state formation, such as Francis Fukuyama, have shown that differences in community size have a great deal to do with the historical development of governance mechanisms: "States" as we know them only come into being once population density reaches a point where not everyone can essentially know everyone else and social mechanisms thereby work to keep communal behavior in check; as I've noted here before, one effect of the internet is to "shrink" the world community back down to a 7-billion person "global village" in which socialized policing and norm-enforcing is once again possible, leading to the slow, steady replacement of government regulation with dispersed "regulatory" systems like the rating of Uber drivers and eBay vendors.

The basic point is this: Environmental factors – like community size and density – not surprisingly affect the strategies organisms (like, say, people) adopt, not just for "life-history," which Sng studied, but also for every other aspect of dealing with their interactions with others. This includes fundamental questions about how to structure those dealings – centralized or decentralized, coercion by law or through social ostracism – and issues that flow from these such as taxes versus charity (our densely-populated liberal areas rely more heavily on the former, more rural communities on the latter), attitudes toward crime and terrorism, receptivity to immigration and trade, regulation of business activities or firearms, in short virtually everything.

This isn't exactly news: Cities and their hinterlands have had markedly different social and economic attitudes – because of markedly different social and economic realities – going back to the very first politics of the Greek city-states. Sng's research indicates that, whatever one's genetic predispositions, different environments engender different attitudes.

Which may mean that, if we are to remain United States, and celebrate many more holidays of shared nationhood and shared values together, we will need to learn better to accept that the other side may be coming from a different place on major issues not because these other Americans are evil or irrational, but simply, well, coming from a different place.

Interesting, and there is logic to this idea.  The article I can't locate was better, and addressed the issues more, pointing out as well, if I recall correctly, that living in close quarters, as do so many in the bigger cities,  isn't natural, and could have a profound effect on how people think. 

Here is another link with some discussion of the issue, that you might find interesting:
Why Are So Many Big Cities In The United States – Liberal?

Here is one discussing crie rates in liberal vs. conservative cities:
Crime Rates In Liberal Cities Shockingly Higher Than In Conservative Cities

Well, tell me what you think.  If you locate other articles, lease link them, and feel free to invite others to join in the discussion!  Don't forget to recommend, too.  If you haven't followed the blog yet, maybe take a moment and do so!