Having grown up in California, and having spent the first decade of my adult life in Chicago, I came of age with what seems fair to call a healthy suspicion of New York’s supremacist pretensions.

In some areas, like finance & journalism, sure, New York was unbeatable. But for anyone unblinded by NYC’s hypnotic self-regard, it was obvious that the most exciting and interesting work in many fields—tech, fiction, medicine, poetry, even restaurants—was happening elsewhere.

If you could see that, it was almost hilarious to watch the lengths New Yorkers went to persuade themselves that they really did have the best of everything. The chauvinism that Saul Steinberg gently parodied was and is still very much in effect.

The origins of that chauvinism are obvious, and its effects were alternately hilarious and infuriating. (The latter mostly because NYC’s stranglehold on publishing and journalism meant that everything that happened everywhere else had to be weighed on the city’s thumbed scales.)

Though I’ve lived in NYC for 8 years now, I’ve always been wary to call myself a New Yorker. One reason is that I was shaped by Chicago’s little-brother, chip-on-the shoulder attitude toward NYC, and liked the freedom of perspective that offered.

Another is that I came here in my early thirties, with my Bildung years behind me. I wasn’t running away from anything, and wasn’t looking to NYC to give me a platform for a new identity.

And finally, while I recognized that a city that ran on money was not big on these sorts of scruples, I always felt like being a New Yorker, or at least the only kind of New Yorker I was even theoretically interested in being, was something you couldn’t buy but had to earn.

The reason I bring all of this up, of course, is Bret Stephens. His latest column is a vivid reminder that the worst sort of New Yorker is not the one who believes that nothing that happens outside the city is worth a second thought.

Instead it’s the person who, while enjoying all the trappings of power and prestige that come with living in the metropole, would seek to convince the rubes in the provinces (whom he cannot actually stand) that he is on their side.

This is a very old con, of course, but it remains mystifyingly effective. (Or maybe not so mystifyingly: people everywhere want badly to feel like they matter, and—as a certain real-estate developer from Queens discovered—a person able to exploit that need can go very far.)

At this point it’s almost too obvious to note to just how offensive—not to mention dangerous—Stephens’s shtick is for anyone who actually cares about the world outside New York City. The advice in this latest column might very well get people killed.

But what surprised me, reading it, was how defensive it made me feel about New York. I bow to no one in the pride I still feel for Chico, my California hometown, which was renewed all over again after it got hit hard by the Camp Fire a year and a half ago.

And yet watching how New York has handled itself these past—what has it been, six weeks? six centuries? —has been nothing short of astounding. It wasn’t news that the city was better and deeper than the worst of its stereotypes; that has always been true.

But the way the people of this city have held up under these truly terrible conditions feels like a miracle. It’s frankly inconceivable how someone who lives here, let alone someone with a perch at the city’s preeminent newspaper, couldn’t see that, unless he chose not to.

Anyone who actually cares about the well-being of the rest of the country should know this: if there are, as Stephens suggests, such things as “New York rules” when it comes to handling COVID, you would be profoundly lucky to find yourself in a place that decided to play by them.

What we’ve seen in New York lately is what citizenship, in the best sense, looks like. And you would think that a person like Stephens, who professes to care deeply about “civility,” would see this city as a model for the rest of the country, as a whole and in its several parts.

But no, for him it’s a chance to play the contrarian spoiler, to stoke the old culture-war divisions at precisely the moment the country most needs some semblance of fellow feeling literally to survive.

Well, as my compatriots in the greatest city in the world might say: fuck that guy. It’s not always true, but right now I’m convinced that New York is the best America has to offer. I feel very lucky to live here, and can’t think of another place I’d rather be.