Helen Rittelmeyer was disturbed by the hostility to urban life on display in St. Paul at the Republican convention:

I was among those who found it slightly chilling to see America’s Mayor get his William Wordsworth on, and only slightly less chilling when the sentiment was expressed by speakers whose cosmopolitan credentials were less obvious. Has the Republican party really drifted so far towards ruralism? Assuming that conservatives want to frame this election as a question of us versus them, does it have to be that us and them?

What I found more troubling is the ease with which these personifications of Eastern urban elites (e.g., Romney, Giuliani, Thompson–who is today as much of a small-town Tennessee boy as I am the President of Nicaragua) play to the crowd’s dislike of coastal and urban elites.  As a political matter, this pandering is simple demographics: even in otherwise fairly conservative states, cities tend to be the stronghold of those with liberal, progressive and centralist politics, as they have been since Bolingbroke and Jefferson inveighed against the corrupting effects of cities on the political order.  The GOP’s main target audience does not live in cities, but in rural areas, small towns, suburbs and exurbs.  “Red” states are typically less urbanized than “blue” states, which helps to reinforce this pattern of support.  One can lament what you could call the populist turn on the right, I suppose, and as the resident anti-democrat I am more sympathetic to this complaint than most, but if it is possible to have an urban conservatism, and I think it is, it is also possible to have an aristocratic populism that respects and takes seriously the interests of rural and small-town America.  A mistake that we often make, myself included, is to imagine that all populists are hostile to all forms of elitism and that elitists must necessarily disdain anything that can be dubbed populist.  This sort of opposition makes no allowance for Bolingbroke, Jefferson or Jeffersonians, and so does not hold up very well when put to the test.  As we see in the case of the phony populists, their deployment of rhetorical anti-elitism is really just a mechanism of diverting attention and advancing the interests of other elites under the cover of defending the very Middle America they are exploiting.  

Just as I don’t think anyone can actually be cosmopolitan according to its original meaning, I don’t think “cosmopolitan conservatism” is possible, either, so Ms. Rittelmeyer gets off to something of a bad start when she frames the dispute in terms of cosmopolitanism vs. ruralism.  Properly speaking, the cosmopolitan–if such a person could exist for very long without going mad–has no loyalty to any particular polis, and this would include megalopoleis such as L.A., New York and Chicago, and if there are urbanites who have no loyalty to their own city they are simply bad citizens and not world-citizens.  If the difference is between mentalities–the broad versus the narrow–it is not at all clear that most urbanites come out looking very good, since there is something quite narrow about disdain for rusticity that has defined urbanites throughout Western history, and it has made them fairly homogenous.  Urban conservatism, on the other hand, does not strike me as impossible, but it is likely to be very different and possibly irreconcilable with the conservatism of the places where most self-styled conservatives live.  This is a matter of conflicting interests and conflicting habits.  The weird display in St. Paul is the result of a party that draws heavily on urbanites for its leadership, but which also still relies heavily on rural, small-town, suburban and exurban people to vote them into power. 

The shamelessness of the utterly phony populism of Romney and Giuliani is what is most galling about Republican theatrics, since the same people who will pander to the small-town and suburban voter as the embodiment of American character are busily at work promoting the policies that seek to uproot people and transform their towns beyond all recognition.  Phony populism of this sort is another form of condescension, the patronizing sort that treats Middle Americans as pets to be trained and conditioned to respond to the right signals, and what it will never do is allow anything remotely resembling a populist agenda (i.e., an agenda that actually serves the interests of the majority of the people) to gain purchase.  What is so discouraging about the promotion of Sarah Palin is that it appears to be an effort to use a small-town American to blind a majority of Republicans to the policies promoted by the GOP that are antithetical to their own interests and it is working.