Having had a chance to reflect even more on The Increasingly United States, both in relation to other research and the latest actual politics on daily display, I am convinced that these works have far more in common than in tension. While I used to walk around town with the scholar’s conceit that I was seeing Cities on the Hill everywhere I looked, Daniel Hopkins’s argument is my new intellectual earworm—by the time of this publishing I am sure it is for many more readers as well.
Across our chosen eras and levels of analysis, we differ more in approach than conclusions about nationalized politics. Hopkins’s account is a basically complete assessment of decades of political behavior focused on mass opinions and behavior (obviously a major contribution in our field’s central approach), while I focus on elites, especially those in Congress, in the decades before his story, as the urbanicity cleavage was in its infancy.
This divergence led to a mild misreading of how urbanicity relates to intergroup comity in Cities on the Hill. I completely agree with the authors he cites in his final observation above—that urban mass political life and local politics are characterized far more by division than comity, especially when put under stress. This is the premise of my puzzle about congressional Civil Rights politics, and provides my chapter title “Antiracism without Antiracism”—because the congressional support for Civil Rights during the Long New Deal came from places that were divided on race, both in the streets (where racial codes were enforced through a variety of violent and more subtle practices) and in city halls (where racial subjugation was common in local policymaking and politicking).
To the extent that I am sanguine about how cities help mitigate racial domination, it is not because my neighbors are naturally disposed to racial liberalism; it is easy to see on Facebook that they are not, and I have a hunch that individuals’ psychologies aren’t that different across different kinds of places (Hopkins’ account suggests not). Rather, the disposition toward social peace seems to reside somewhere at the mezzo or elite level, where the elusive city interest is pursued. City elites must at least give lip service to ameliorative and inclusive democratic norms for the sake of good governance (or good capitalism), in part because urban conditions make the threat of unrest more credible and costly, and in part because it will help grease the wheels of everyday interactions in diverse communities (especially relative to rural conditions, under which thorough domination has been more routinely effective). This leads to a challenging kind of coalition maintenance, seeking to include both minority groups and those not committed to full equality. When elites depart from these norms, the city does indeed seem to be a tinderbox (or at least elites believe it to be). If this nuanced contrast does not come through clearly in the text where I try to sort it out (most directly in Chapters 2 and 5), the fault is mine—perhaps lost in the arguing, but important for the argument.
Finally, it is striking to me that our cross-reviews have each noted powerfully persuasive and obviously important recent works by Vesla Weaver and Ryan Enos (among others, including Hopkins himself), putting questions like these at the center of new approaches to perennial American dilemmas. Real-world events both recent and remote suggest that our field would do well to converge on these substantive foci of politics—changes in the national system, the intersection of race and geography, improperly overlooked “exceptions” that can reveal a lot about the whole—which can help explain the polity’s central tendencies, as well as its important granular dynamics.
