[URBAN NOTE] "America’s long history of trashing ‘New York values’"

[rfmcdonald]

At Politico, Kevin Baker explores the United States' long history of distrusting New York City, of seeing it as fundamentally alien. Long live the cosmopolis, I say!

The nonsense piles up so quickly in this silliest of all political silly seasons that it’s hard to keep up with it. Nonetheless, Ted Cruz’s assertion, in the last Republican debate and again in a television ad this week, that Donald J. Trump embodies “New York values” was a little startling.

From Cruz’s comment sprung a lively debate about what “New York” really stands for. The Texas senator had a ready answer: “socially liberal, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, focused on money and the media.” Trump, in what was undoubtedly his campaign’s finest (and maybe its only good) moment, shot back citing the city’s resilience following the 9/11 attacks. That came as a relief to those us of a certain age, for whom such a use of “New York” has long meant one thing: “Jew.” “The failure to get behind New York is anti-Semitism,” Woody Allen’s character famously said to a disbelieving Tony Roberts in Annie Hall. Fortunately, that thinking seems to be behind us now (though the way this year’s Republicans keep accusing each other of working “with Chuck Schumer of New York” as if they were signing a pact with Satan has made me wonder). Instead, it seems, we’re just liberal, amoral money-grubbers.

Cruz, it turns out, is hardly the first to level those charges. In fact, they have been leveled at New York for about 400 years.

Right from its beginnings, Americans have found this city to be, well, insufficiently American — too polyglot, too licentious and too willing to give up its principles, sacrifice genuine human interaction and let in just about anyone for the sake of making a buck. New York might be “the noonday glory of the Great Civilization,” in the words of Mark Twain, who visited the city regularly and always seemed to have a good time, but it was “a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry … with money fever.”

Over the years, that stereotype has often carried over into politics, offering fodder for insults and attacks. Barring a Trump triumph, only one native-born citizen of our nation’s greatest city, Teddy Roosevelt, will have ever made the White House, and only via an assassin’s bullet. He won reelection, but only against a fellow New Yorker, an obscure judge put forward by the city’s notorious political machine, Tammany Hall.

The truly interesting thing is not just that Americans have long suspected or hated their nation’s greatest city. The same can be said for many countries and their biggest metropolises the world over. It’s what America has most feared about itself — that, much as we continue to scorn the supposed depravity of this town, it continues to seduce us.