I'm not talking about conservatives who simply dislike urban environments or disagree with how cities are governed. Those are perfectly reasonable personal preferences and political disagreements. I'm talking about something deeper: the outright contempt some conservatives seem to have for cities and the people who live in them.
One thing I've noticed is how frequently some conservatives imply that people who live in cities should have less political influence simply because of where they live. And this attitude isn't limited to conservative commentators or voters. Republican politicians have expressed similar sentiments through both their rhetoric and their policies.
Take Missouri, for example. After voters approved a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, a Republican legislator openly argued that three cities—St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia—shouldn't be able to determine statewide policy. But that's how democracy works. People vote, and those votes are supposed to count equally regardless of whether someone lives in a major city, a suburb, or a rural community.
You can see similar attitudes reflected in partisan gerrymandering, where urban voting blocs are frequently split between districts to dilute their political influence, and in voting restrictions that disproportionately affect voters in large metropolitan areas. Some conservatives even defend the Electoral College specifically because they believe it prevents large cities from having too much influence over presidential elections.
Then there's the willingness of Republican-controlled state governments to override policies approved by voters in predominantly Democratic cities or threaten to withhold funding when local governments pursue policies they dislike.
But putting political representation aside, I'm also talking about the rhetoric surrounding cities themselves.
Listen to how some conservatives describe places like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, or San Francisco. They're frequently portrayed as crime-ridden, dysfunctional hellholes that represent everything supposedly wrong with America. Their residents are sometimes treated as though they're less American than people living in small towns or rural communities.
There's also this recurring idea of "Real America," which apparently excludes tens of millions of Americans simply because they live in major metropolitan areas or vote differently.
At its most extreme, the rhetoric almost makes American cities sound like hostile foreign territories that need to be punished, occupied, or forced to conform to someone else's vision of what America should look like. Donald Trump's recent remarks about Iran bombing Los Angeles and San Diego are another example of the kind of rhetoric I'm talking about.
And that's what I find so strange. Cities are major centers of American culture, commerce, industry, education, innovation, and economic activity. They're just as much a part of America as rural communities and small towns. The people living in them are Americans, too, and deserve the same political representation and respect as everyone else.
Obviously, this doesn't describe every conservative, and there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make about how American cities are governed. But there's a significant difference between criticizing urban policies and treating entire cities and their populations with contempt.
So where does this hostility come from? Is it primarily political resentment because cities overwhelmingly vote Democratic? Is it rooted in the longstanding urban-rural cultural divide? Is it a reaction to demographic and social changes? Or is there something deeper going on?
I'm genuinely curious why, for some conservatives, disliking urban politics seems to extend into disliking the very people who live in cities.