“The top ten metropolitan areas, including Seattle’s, generate an astonishing 90 percent of the US GDP, and 88 percent of its employment. The modern economy would collapse without them. Without this kind of economic power, you don’t have an Idaho, or a Wyoming, or a Montana. You don’t have a billionaire class. Yet cities are now under violent attack from the GOP, the party that represents the ruling class, because they’re too blue, because they have policies that are supposed to protect the rights of immigrants, and so on. Yet ICE has only one mission: make the lives of city people miserable. This is the paradox of all American paradoxes and it has seemingly backfired.

“ICE is now facing resistance from the deeper city, from the community, from networks of care, from nurses, one of whom it killed…

“What ICE has done is actually strengthen, rather weaken, the bonds between urban dwellers. Indeed, the social meaning of the city, which…is still massively underrepresented in state and national politics, has become more pronounced. This is not to say modern cities are perfect. We have a heap of racial, housing, and gender issues to work through. But many of these problems come from the market of the modern city. What we are seeing now (in Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Minneapolis), and what must continue…is the movement toward the stabilization of urban fellow feeling and, eventually, its expansion into state and national politics. The Dems, in a word, are failing our cities. Now is the time to change that.”