Let us get this out of the way first. Cities have problems. You are more likely to experience violent crime in such places than in the countryside. Rocketing property prices in larger conurbations – Dublin as much as anywhere – have kicked young people from the lowest rung of the ladder. If you care about noise then you won’t like the noise. Nobody is saying the urban life is not without its challenges.
All that noted, it remains bizarre that the contemporary right is so fixated on the alleged ghastliness of the world’s great cities. You get a lot of that from Donald Trump. Back in 2022 he grouped the United States’ powerhouses into one great mass of apocalyptic decline. “The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crimes,” he said. Milwaukee is “horrible”. Washington, DC, is “a rat-infested, graffiti-infested sh**hole”. JD Vance, Trump’s vice-president, handed out similar treatment to the president’s birthplace. “I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there,” he said of New York.
All this windbaggery became action recently when the American president ordered the National Guard into Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Last week he suggested Chicago would be next. “Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now,” he said. The tourism authorities in those cities must just love this guy.
The right in the UK is similarly down on London. At a recent press conference, Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, threw a challenge to the Sky political correspondent Mhari Aurora. “I dare you to walk through the West End of London after nine o’clock of an evening wearing jewellery,” he said. “You wouldn’t do it. You know that I’m right. You wouldn’t do it.”
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He’s not wrong. I was recently on Shaftesbury Avenue around 10pm and was struck by all the ladies scurrying into armoured cars after exiting Les Misérables lest cutpurses hop on their engagement rings. If night falls unexpectedly on the bars of Soho, revellers in earrings wait inside until dawn before making their way to the Fort Apache that is Leicester Square tube station.
Irish social media is similarly engulfed with paranoia about the desperate state of Dublin. People who seem to have forgotten what the capital was like in the 1980s, an era of deprivation and promiscuous heroin use, bemoan the absence of dancing bears and jolly cockle sellers. There is an industry on Facebook based around the display of old photographs beneath which malcontents can moan about how awful that part of Dublin now looks.
More often than one might like, those comments drift into racism and variations on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, the notion that there’s a scheme to displace white citizens with people of colour.
Of course not everyone moaning about the state of New York, Paris, Dublin or London is from the more populist flanks of the right. Nor are most racist. Moderate conservatives moan a bit. Centrist dads moan some more. So do Marxists. So do anarchists. But the argument that cities are, to paraphrase the 47th president of the United States, rat-infested, graffiti-infested sh**holes is an immovable dictum of right-wing blowhardery.
And it has always been there. At the risk of invoking Godwin’s law, it’s worth noting that Hitler didn’t much care for Berlin – indeed, he planned to annihilate it and replace it with “Germania” – and, at least at first, Berlin didn’t much care for Hitler. If the last US election were decided purely on urban areas, Kamala Harris would have won a victory on the scale of Ronald Reagan’s in 1984.
When we talk about cities we do not mean ivy-clad suburbs or satellite towns. We mean the central hubs where people live busily on top of one another and allow new ideas and fresh cultures to emerge from the creative chaos.
You get a sense of that today from, after dark, the extraordinary energy of Talbot Street in central Dublin, which runs from Connolly station towards O’Connell Street. Bulging pubs. Eclectic restaurants. After a certain hour even the Lidl supermarket buzzes with exotic excitement.
[ Inside a Dublin fast-food restaurant during late-night rushOpens in new window ]
No doubt some people will say they don’t “feel safe” in such places. Maybe they don’t. But those vague words too often convey little more than a suspicion of the heterogenous. These new right-wing movements know that fear is their greatest weapon. The notion that big cities are hotbeds of random violence provides the self-professed strong leader with a handy antagonist against whom he can direct the most malevolent of his energies.
Yet the cities survive. Urban creativity prospers. The young bustle through ancient thoroughfares. A few decades later they move to sycamore-lined outer boroughs and, without revisiting their old haunts, whine that those well-remembered streets have given way to cesspools. Thus turns the sad cycle of life.
