[National Review] On the menu today: The possibility of another wave of Americans moving out of the big cities, the likelihood of some future pandemic further down the road, and how the Red America—Blue America divide is likely to be altered when we emerge from this crisis.
THE COMING DE-URBANIZATION OF AMERICA
Yesterday on my work Facebook page, a reader asked, "Why is it that the places Covid-19 show up the most are in Democrat controlled areas?" As much as I’d like to believe that all the troubles in the world can eventually be traced back to Bill de Blasio, I responded, "Probably because ’the places it shows up the most’ are large densely-packed cities with a lot of international and domestic air travel and high use of mass transit, where Democrats have been winning elections more than Republicans for at least a generation and in many cases several generations."
You can split red and blue America in a lot of ways — race, age, religiosity — but arguably the strongest factor is geography. The "Big Sort" that Bill Bishop described has been at work for two decades. Sure, there are conservatives and Republicans who live in big cities and inner-ring suburbs, just rarely in the numbers that could make a difference. And there are progressives and Democrats who live in rural areas and exurbs, but again, rarely in the numbers that could make a difference in elections.
Kevin Williamson has noted that conservatives often don’t even try to persuade city-dwellers of the value of their ideas, and lapse into a casual to overt contempt of life in the big city.
Meanwhile, it is not hard to find examples of urban progressives looking at rural America with a combination of contempt, disdain, pity, smug superiority . . . heck, it’s not hard to find urban progressives who see suburbanites as somehow inferior and worthy of scorn, never mind residents of small-town America.
At some point the coronavirus crisis will end, but one of the extraordinarily difficult lessons of this ordeal is that the catastrophic scenarios that sound like something out of science fiction can happen in real life, and that the vast majority of us are at the mercy of fate in these scenarios. As mentioned last week, whichever way SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans — a lab accident, wet markets, exotic-animal trader, a farmer using bat guano for fertilizer — it can happen again with another virus. Right now, as you are reading this, all around the world, scientists are working on dangerous viruses and pathogens in biosafety-level four, three, and two labs. Almost all wet markets are still open in China; all around Asia, the often-illegal trade in exotic species continues with minimal impediments; and farmers all around the world continue to use guano as fertilizer, prompting human beings to go into caves, and risk exposure to viruses that no human being has ever encountered before. Those viruses will probably be less deadly and contagious than SARS-CoV-2. But someday, humanity could encounter one that is even worse. |
