A populist is someone who abhors the metropolis and demands its respect. According to the cultural right, big cities are teetering Babels, lawless and ghettoised, but also wealth-hoarding success stories that look down at the conservative provinces. “You crammed and besieged losers,” this Tom Wolfe-ish attitude to urbanites seems to say, “we are just as good as you.”
All of which helps to explain why some British populists back a foreign president over the mayor of their own liberal capital. The running tiff between Donald Trump and Sadiq Khan is modern politics — closed versus open — in miniature.
But there is more behind the courtship of the visiting president than that. There is foreign policy at work. The British right sees the US as a natural companion in a post-Brexit world. If a no-deal Brexit puts the UK out in the European cold, it hopes to warm its hands on the fire of a fast-growing America.