Summer in the City

Ben Wildsmith

Has the concept of patriotism ever been so unmoored from the actual nations its proponents claim to champion?

On Tuesday, Donald Trump ordered the National Guard into Washington DC and announced the federal takeover of its police force. The president described his nation’s capital in apocalyptic terms. ‘Caravans of mass youth’ are ‘rampaging’ through the streets, he claimed. Its streets have been ‘taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals’, as well as ‘drugged out maniacs and homeless people.’

In a characteristically unfocussed speech, Trump related these scenes to his upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, claiming that lawlessness in the capital city was an embarrassment for him on the world stage. ‘If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty and they don’t respect us,’ he warned.

Nightmare

The statistical backdrop to this is that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low. The Mad Max-style nightmare described by Trump simply isn’t happening. DC has crime and a homelessness problem, in common with virtually every city on earth, but things are improving.

Recent crime figures in London reveal a mixed bag of policing outcomes, with some categories improving and others deteriorating. Populist figures on the right, however, such as TV personality and aspirant Mayoral candidate Ant Middleton, insist that the city is ‘lost’.

There are various explanations as to why the political portrayal of cities is so charged and often at odds with the evidence. One is that people who live outside of cities are traditionally suspicious of them. Politically, this is fertile terrain for insurgent politicians who can point at a lawless, immoral dystopia and tell people that it is where their leaders come from. This is how the term ‘metropolitan’ became pejorative.

Racism

A nastier subset of this type of politician can marry suspicion of urban values with racism. Both Washington DC and London are governed by mayors who are people of colour. Trump and Middleton both know that sections of their support are happy to conflate apocalyptic tales of moral decline with the ethnic makeup of cities and their leaders.

If you search for Sadiq Khan on social media, it won’t be long before you come across the term ‘Londonistan’. Despite being born in Tooting and living his entire life in the city, Khan is relentlessly smeared as disloyal and foreign. By extension, the city he governs can be portrayed as an infiltrated and corrupt cuckoo in the nation’s nest.

This sort of rhetoric has been common on the far right of politics forever. Now, though, with Trump in the White House, we are seeing it deployed to entrench power rather than to wrench it from the establishment. Accordingly, troops are being deployed to cities, and the police are being co-opted as political enforcers. The scaremongering and racialised rhetoric of fringe party meetings and, latterly, social media enclaves, has become the governing philosophy of the world’s most powerful nation.

Silence

History will not be kind to political leaders around the world who have acquiesced to Donald J Trump’s vision without objection. Silence in the face of naked authoritarianism has legitimised it for politicians who are increasingly reaching for its tools to remedy their inability to persuade the public. As we watch David Lammy palling around with JD Vance, a supposed free-speech absolutist, we notice their silence as protesting pensioners are manhandled by police and criminalised as terrorists.

For authoritarians, cities are always a problem. People exist in them side-by-side, talking to each other and observing the reality of others’ lives. The fictions that ruling classes send out to the provinces are harder to sustain in the questioning chatter of urban society. When that dissenting noise starts to be silenced, we should all wonder why.