Here in Italy, the town hall is called the Comune. The word sounds strange to me, amidst a city, for there is little, if anything, of community in any place larger than a village. It occurred to me, the sense of community or lack thereof is one reason city-dwellers are usually Lefties, and country folk on the Right: if we take the following as indicators of the Left:

1. Support for a big government to control as much as possible (child education; what the citizens are allowed to say, eat, drink, read, watch; the health services, etc.)

2. Support for unrestricted, mass immigration from the Third World.

3. Lack of concern for Western civilisation or demographics; indeed, some degree of hostility towards the West.

then cities would naturally attract Lefties, and further encourage these three traits. In a village or small town, there is little need for top-down organisation – everyone knows everyone else, most people naturally cooperate to avoid ostracism & shaming; the group size is small enough that bureaucracy and bureaucrats are unnecessary. In a town of e.g. 200,000 let alone 10 million, organisation takes on a wholly different character & necessity. Extrapolating from the city’s needs, the city dweller tends to think the answer to everything is a government office issuing forms and fines, warnings & adjurations. It is hard, for the city dweller, to accept that there is a limit beyond which bureaucracy becomes cancerous & stultifying; because in the city, things would rapidly disintegrate into Mad Max-style chaos without the police, without the government.

There is no community in the city. A city is an agglomeration of people more or less randomly thrown together, trying to avoid too much contact with each other. The closest one comes to community in the city is the micro-community, e.g. the tennis club, the regulars in their local pub; city dwellers will pay to avoid their neighbours, to have thicker walls, fences, to be able to drive instead of taking public transport. The fantasy of the city dweller is one of isolation amidst variety: to drive through the city in a large car, and if they have to walk anywhere they will immediately plug into an iphone and listen to a TED-talk. For the city man, others exist only to serve or admire him – they are otherwise an inconvenience or a threat.

Without a sense for the community, for the culture (that which underlies civilisation), why should a man appreciate, let alone defend, the West? The community – that slowly-built, nuanced network of relationship & responsibility – is replaced by a large, impersonal bureaucracy; for the meadow, the machine. 

For the city man, community is just an old-fashioned word, a scary Right-wing concept (Blut und Boden). So why object to millions of 3rd-world immigrants? Mohammed and Jamal are willing to work illegally for less than the minimum wage, and so what if crime immediately soars, that’s why you pay more to live in an all-white neighbourhood and drive everywhere in a BMW instead of having to take the train or bus, and eventually you move out of the city altogether because Mohammed and Jamal are basically everywhere now, so you move into a suburb or even into the country and complain about how right-wing everyone is. 

In the city, the only freedom is that of consumption; the city man is free to go shopping, to spend his money in as many ways as the city can dream. He can buy things; his identity is formed not by his actions, by e.g. how well he maintains his property or if he helps his neighbours, but by his brand clothing, his car. In the city, mass immigration merely increases the varieties of consumption, from prostitution to food.

It is telling that for the Leftist, immigration is typically justified by appeal to ethnic cuisine, a mess of pottage. For the man who denies meaning to extended human relationships (extended into time in ancestral respect and care for one’s descendants; extended into space in community), what could possibly have more value than stuffing your face with food? Why not sacrifice a Lebensform, a non-physical form of life, a community comprising not merely those alive today but their ancestors, if you can try a new ethnic dish?

Those who value community recognise that it is a lifeform of sorts, a kind of egregore; not merely a definition of the relations between the physically living, but a definer of their relations and their selves; both a constraint and a blessing; in a sense, even more alive and more precious than the individuals in whom it lives.