For leaders in search of uniform compliance, cities are inherently troublesome. They are, by their very nature, diverse: It’s cities to which both foreign and domestic immigrants flock, because it’s cities where there’s work. Worse yet, most successful cities foster some level of cross-group tolerance, or even, in the best cases, cross-group solidarity, as a necessary modus vivendi for keeping a city up and running. Partly in consequence, cities develop distinct cultures reflective of their diversity and their urbanity.
That’s why the current generation of our planet’s autocrats often lack support from their nations’ cities. Budapest has never voted for Viktor Orbán; Istanbul is a thorn in the side of Recep Erdoğan. A Muslim Labourite has been mayor of London since 2016, even as no major American city can be found that’s voted for Donald Trump in any of the past three presidential elections.
That said, Orbán has not sent troops into Budapest, nor Erdoğan into Istanbul. As I write, Trump is reported to be considering invoking the Insurrection Act to send the Army into Minneapolis. Whether or not he does, however, the agents of ICE and the border police are already behaving like an army of occupation, seizing people who look suspiciously brown (including, reportedly, several Native Americans) and brandishing and using armed force to cow any Minnesotan who personifies the values of mutual support and family and community preservation regardless of race and immigration-law status—the very values, that is, that hold cities together and make them thrive.
Trump has already made clear that the kind of constraints that have occasionally held Orbán and Erdoğan back from forcefully seizing cities don’t apply to him. In his sacking of the Kennedy Center, for instance, he’s effectively canceled urban culture, driving jazz, opera, ballet, and modern musicals from its theaters unless their practitioners can find some way to affirm his rule. The recruitment material posted by his police agencies, including ICE, is devised to attract white nationalists who are as repelled by urban diversity as both he and Stephen Miller are.
So it’s not enough to equate Trump’s legions to the Gestapo or the Klan. (I’ve done both.) He also is the 21st-century version of Attila or Genghis Khan, heading a horde that is defined by an exterminationist loathing of cities and all that they stand for and promote. Their diversity, their toleration, their culture, their solidarity across racial and other lines—all are threats to the horde’s and its ruler’s autocratic monoculture. On the streets, the horde’s loathing manifests as indifference (at least) to the loss of city dwellers’ lives.
As it is the 21st century, and as we have an 18th-century Constitution, Trump’s impulse for city sacking à la Attila is constrained by laws and customs, but he’s plainly determined to find ways around as many of those constraints as he possibly can. Correspondingly, a good share of the fear he’s engendered all across America has an ancient pedigree: It’s the fear of the barbarians at the gates.