A few readers suggested Salt Lake City. I don’t think that works. Salt Lake City is a fairly conservative city compared to LA, NYC or San Francisco, but my sense is that it’s pretty liberal given the context of Utah. Rural Utah is more conservative than urban Utah. Others suggested the Vatican. I like that. But we can all see the problems there.
A couple interesting emails:
The claim becomes plausible if you translate “conservative” to “Islamist,” because it might parallel the situation in Europe, where moral movements emerged from the cities, i.e. Worms in the 1520s, or Zwingli’s Zurich, or Paris in the 1790s, or nationalists and commies and fascists everywhere. Ditto for U.S. racial-equality activists in the 1850s and the 1960s.
This self-lobotomizing definition of conservative as ‘anyone you don’t like’ is a commonplace among the chattering-class, which uses it reflexively to as a catch-all Zionists & Islamists, North Korean communists & Newt, people who don’t like sex classes for children and people who distrust government regulation, etc.
This childish refusal to see any distinction between Newt and an Ayatollah, however, is great for you and me, because it automatically blinds chattering-class people to reality.
Thanks for the book.
And:
How about Boston during the Colonial period/early republic? All that Puritanism must have stifled cosmopolitanism and liberalism a great deal. You might not call them reactionary, since the puritans were radical christians. But they were conservative in the value they placed on religious homogeneity.