The Emergent Urban Anti-progressivism

President Biden’s appeal for unity in his inaugural address was a welcome invitation to end “this uncivil war that pits red versus blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.” The challenge for Biden, of course, is to show that his administration can lead by example in pursuit of this goal.

Nowhere will this challenge play out more than in America’s cities. His campaign’s urban policies — from affordable housing to education to worker pay — together with his recent flurry of “racial equity” executive orders on January 26, were all drafted according to the familiar Democratic playbook. But urban voters seem to be reading off a different script.

In fact, one of the most interesting and underreported outcomes of the 2020 presidential election was an emergent urban anti-progressivism — or at least, that’s the best way to interpret what happened. After a season of protests and urban unrest against the backdrop of a pandemic, a sizeable percentage of city dwellers, ranging from small-business owners to working-class public-school parents, seemed to have had enough of the urban status quo.

Democrats have puzzled over why Biden did not perform as well in cities as expected, and conversely, why Trump seemed to overperform in them. Overall, Biden won major metro areas, but his slippage compared with Trump’s gains was notable.

Trump gained in every borough of New York City except Staten Island (where he was already a favorite) compared with 2016, recording a gain of 12 percentage points in his share of the total vote in the Bronx and 9 points in Queens. He improved his margin by more than 18 points in largely immigrant and working-class assembly districts encompassing Elmhurst, Corona, and Jackson Heights. New York City as a whole swung toward Trump by 7.6 points between 2016 and 2020, more than any single state swung in the election, as Trump picked up support in 58 of the city’s 65 assembly districts. Compared with 2016, he gained votes in cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit, the latter of which gave Trump 5,000 more votes than in 2016 and Biden 1,000 fewer than Hillary Clinton won. As pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has noted, even though Joe Biden won major metros as expected, closer scrutiny of a number of blue cities reveals blue doughnuts: As Democrats increased their command of the suburbs, their hold on inner cities weakened.

No one expected this, and there certainly isn’t much about Donald Trump’s policies on trade, immigration, tax cuts, or conservative judges that explains it. It seems obvious instead that in the age of COVID and violent protests, progressive cities overplayed their hand. When you ask your residents to pay too much for subpar housing, pledge to defund the police as crime soars, and force parents to do things they thought their taxes paid teachers to do, you shouldn’t be surprised at the backlash.

In a unique case of unintended consequences, protest organizers’ focus on racial injustice drew attention to crime and inequality in ways that undercut progressive goals. Calls to defund the police backfired because urban residents actually like it when their streets are policed. Decrying inequality shone a brighter light on how especially progressive cities have cruelly priced out low-income residents by catering to wealthier jet-setters. And closing schools for politically charged reasons left lower-income parents at home with children when they needed to be at work. The media overwhelmingly covered the agitators and focused little on those whose lives were most negatively affected.

Calls to defund the police, for instance, were extensively covered by the media while counterarguments, at times voiced by progressive black city leaders, received less attention. Yet black and Hispanic Americans are more likely than whites to say they want police to spend more, not less, time in their neighborhoods. Perhaps this is why, whatever their leaders may have said publicly, most cities did not defund their police departments. Only two large cities (Boston and Los Angeles) cut their police budgets while increasing their general budgets, and the cuts were minuscule. With the exception of Austin, Texas, which truly slashed its police budget (and set off some serious political tumult) while keeping its general budget level, cities that cut their police budgets generally did so amid overall cuts to the entire city budget. Even Minneapolis, where city-council members pledged to abolish the police department after George Floyd was killed there, resorted to smaller cuts than expected after reckoning with reality. Among cities that swung toward Democrats in the 2020 election, more than half maintained or increased their police budgets. The truth is, despite the Left’s rhetoric, urban residents and leaders know what happens if you shrink your police force or its ability to do its job. Even though Joe Biden does not support defunding the police, the more forceful opposition to the idea came from Republicans.

Urban unrest in 2020 also drew attention to inequality in our cities, which in turn spotlighted the problem of housing unaffordability — a problem that is worse in America’s most progressive strongholds. Housing, as Charles Blain of the Urban Reform Institute notes, is the main driver of cost-of-living variation from one place to another, and yet progressive leaders pile rule upon rule, despite studies showing that regulations drive up housing prices and hurt low-skilled workers. Exclusionary zoning abounds in places such as San Francisco and New York, as left-leaning residents have noticed. Fed up, they are leaving in droves for more affordable and flexible places such as Nashville or Denver. Biden’s first executive action on housing, an anti-discrimination order that was part of his administration’s social-justice agenda, exemplified a common progressive tone-deafness to the problems urban residents care most about right now.

Meanwhile, teachers’ unions have used school closures in urban districts as a tool to make a range of unrealistic political demands, leaving lower-income parents juggling work outside the home with homebound children. The education establishment assumes that urban parents will obsequiously follow its lead even as Democratic-primary voters, and especially black Democrats, support disruptive reforms such as expanded access to charter schools.

Despite their growing frustration with their urban overlords, residents of America’s cities are a comparatively positive and aspirational lot. About two-thirds of urban residents think America’s best days are ahead, according to national survey data from the American Enterprise Institute, a greater share than in the suburbs, small towns, or rural areas. People in metro areas are more likely than people in non-metro areas to believe that anyone can start and build a business. And yet, while city dwellers are more likely than suburbanites and heartland residents to trust anchor institutions such as the local news media, they are the least likely of all geographic groups to say they trust their local political leaders.

All of this suggests that there is a growing awareness in our cities that urban leaders are making policy decisions that run counter to the aspirations of city residents. Since many of its domestic policies are designed with urban residents in mind, the Biden administration should pay careful attention to what is happening on the ground in our cities, lest they overplay their ideological hand. It is far too early to say that the growing gap between progressives’ ideological agenda and real-world urban needs creates an opening for Republicans, whose internal crises are boiling over at the moment, but the current urban situation does suggest that center–right ideas provide an opening for policy entrepreneurs with the will and imagination to do things differently — things that actual urban residents have been hoping for.