Quartz: Very broadly, what role could mayors play over the next four years; both in terms of effective governance, and in standing up for citizens who may be alienated or discriminated against by the next administration?

Barber: Cities are going to become the most important, constructive alternative to a Trump agenda.

Over the last 10 years we have already seen a powerful emergence of cities as primary spaces for progressive and majority action, for the protection of diversity, for dealing with immigration to the US, higher minimum wage, gender relations and so on.

This is not something new. We were already witnessing the devolution of authority and power and moral authority as the result, even before Trump, of the breakdown of national governments. Whether it’s Brexit, or right-wing governments in Poland and Hungary, or anti-immigrant feeling in France and Belgium and Holland, or a crazy man in the Philippines violating civil rights, or Brazil with no national government at all. The election of Donald Trump is obviously a further sign of this kind of dysfunction. He is somebody who is in fact an enemy of national governments, an enemy of the intervention by the state on behalf of justice, redistribution, etc.

In the US, our check against the abuse of power has been the separation of powers. The problem is when one party occupies all three branches of government as they do…the horizontal separation of powers is no longer an adequate check. But there is also a vertical separation of powers, called federalism.

I believe the vertical separation of powers is going to play an important role because in fact the blue parts of the American map are urban. It’s not East and West coast…it’s urban versus suburban and rural. Take climate change, for example—an area where cities have a very large role to play. About 80% of greenhouse gas emissions come from cities and cities also control about 80% of GDP. They can do a lot to combat climate change, whether or not Trump undermines the COP21 agreement.

In practice, how could “sanctuary cities” defy a Trump immigrant deportation scheme?

The deportation force comes into New York and says “we’re deporting these people,” and the New York Police Department and the state police refuse to cooperate, and refuse to arrest people to protect them. That’s a fairly radical thing, because there you have a confrontation between national and local law. But you don’t want to forget these fundamental facts: the majority of Americans live in cities, the majority of Americans voted against Trump, and the majority of wealth is generated in cities.

This is a majority in the places where it lives and works insisting on its rights! Insisting that on the one hand it will do things the federal government fails to do, and on the other hand that it may refuse to do things that it regards as unconstitutional that the federal government tries to do. The second is more radical and dangerous and difficult, but it’s possible. The first is completely possible and legal, and there’s nothing Trump can do about that at all. Trump can’t say, “I’m against a national minimum wage law and therefore I’m going to stop Los Angeles from having one.”

Can can we expect mayors to actually confront the Trump administration?

They can and will—some already are. And more importantly they need to do it together. It will therefore be through the US Conference of Mayors, through our new Global Parliament of Mayors, through organizations like the C40 Cities that work on climate change. One by one, they’re not very strong. But when cities act together and pool their resources, their populations, their majorities, they become very strong indeed.

A number of cities have already banned fracking, for example. You might say, “Well, fracking doesn’t happen mainly in cities.” Well, some does and it’s a symbolic thing. But now imagine that 6,000 American mayors all together say, “There will be no fracking in our cities.” That could make a Trump administration’s national strategy to do massive fracking much, much more difficult.

Who would you expect to be the likely leaders of a movement like that?

I would expect the larger and more influential the city, the larger the population and its resources, and therefore, the more likely it would be affected by new federal policies that are inimical to, say, equal marriage, to minimum wage, to immigration. I think they will speak out.

Already, Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York has a program that gives unregistered, undocumented immigrants the right to apply for a New York ID card and use it, even though technically they’re illegal. In Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti is another visionary, powerful mayor, Mayor Kasim Reed in Atlanta, Mayor Marty Walsh of Boston. I think you will find that, not because they’re brave—although I think they probably are—but because it will be in the interest of the democratically elected leaders of what in fact is a majority of Americans who voted against Trump. This is a place where you can have legitimate, democratic dissent, but more importantly, legitimate, democratic action on behalf of progressives—whether or the federal government wants it.

Of the 20 biggest US cities, only Fort Worth (Texas), San Diego (California), and Jacksonville (Florida) have Republican mayors. Across the whole US, the more densely inhabited the area was in the 2016 presidential election, the more likely it was to vote Democrat.

 

What’s more, cities are “the one institution today that still works, where government functions, where trust levels are double the levels of other institutions,” says Benjamin Barber of Fordham University, an acclaimed social scientist and author of If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities.