How the G.O.P. Became the Anti-Urban Party

[xchrom]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/republicans-to-cities-drop-dead.html?ref=opinion



A LEADING Republican columnist, trying to re-stoke her candidate’s faltering campaign before the first presidential debate, felt so desperate that she advised him to turn to cities.

“Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city — don’t they count anymore?” Peggy Noonan lamented in The Wall Street Journal. “A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings.”

But the fact is that cities don’t count anymore — at least not in national Republican politics.

The very word “city” went all but unheard at the Republican convention, held in the rudimentary city of Tampa, Fla. The party platform ratified there is over 31,000 words long. It includes subsections on myriad pressing topics, like “Restructuring the U.S. Postal Service for the Twenty-First Century” and “American Sovereignty in U.S. Courts,” which features a full-throated denunciation of the “unreasonable extension” of the Lacey Act of 1900 (please don’t ask). There are also passages specifying what our national policy should be all over the world — but not in one American city.

[KG]

1. AutoxchromDURec

[tama]

2. Interesting

The urban-rural divide is as old as civilization, and the problem remains unsolved. Russian revolution went wrong from the beginning because of that divide and urban technocrats not trusting rural population to feed them if given freedom, but tried to control them with horrible consequences.

What was interesting to find out that suburban areas of Detroit are now returning to small farms by people left (mostly) in peace to do what people do.

In terms of dependence hierarchy, rural primary production is not dependent from secondary and tertiary production, it's the other way around. Primary production is dependent from ecosystem of which it is part. Urban forces of secondary and tertiary production have power to destroy ecosystem and primary production (as they are doing), but that is self-destructive as they depend from them.

These most basic facts are not to be understood as support for right wing rural policies, which mean support and return to feudal aristocracy. Progressive rural policy means land redistribution, right to access to productive land for all people, and transforming urban centers more self-sustainable.