Hot sauce

DURING last year’s mayoral race in Nashville, Megan Barry was accused of being an atheist; she duly went to church for a laying-on of hands. But if Music City remains traditional enough for politicians’ faith to be a sticking-point, it is sufficiently liberal to have installed Ms Barry, who as a councillor conducted its first same-sex wedding, as its first female mayor. Her experiences suggest a possible strategy for Democrats elsewhere, as well as the frictions they may experience.

One has been with the Republican supermajorities in the Tennessee capitol, around the corner from her office—part of a widening stand-off between left-leaning southern mayors and conservative legislatures. In 2011 Nashville was involved in an early tussle over protections for gay and transgender people; this year a state bathroom bill like the one that ignited controversy in North Carolina failed, but a measure letting counsellors turn away patients on the grounds of “sincerely held principles” was passed. That cost Nashville at least three convention bookings, Mayor Barry laments, gently noting that the state relies on the city’s success, too. There have been disagreements over guns in parks (which the city was forced to allow last year), a putative rise in the minimum wage (nixed) and a plan to reserve 40% of work on big public projects for locals (ditto).

Overall, though, visitors and migrants are undeterred. By Ms Barry’s count, 81 people move to Nashville every day. The foreign-born population has risen from 2% in 2000 to 13%, a contingent that includes America’s biggest Kurdish community. “What a gift!” she says hearteningly of the 120 languages spoken by pupils. The city has escaped the Islamophobia that has erupted in other parts of Tennessee; the failure, in 2009, of a bid to make English Nashville’s sole official language seems to have squashed nativist sentiment.

Still, unsurprisingly, the boom has created its own tensions, such as rising housing costs and, say some, an exacerbation of racially tinged inequality. Critics on both left and right question the city’s generous business incentives, not least a $1m bung for a fifth series of the country-music drama “Nashville”, despite its transfer from ABC to the cable network CMT. Ingrid McIntyre of Open Table Nashville, an interfaith advocacy group, worries that the “whole workforce is being pushed out”. Homelessness is conspicuous; the poverty rate is a stubbornly high 20%. “I liked the old Nashville,” Ms McIntyre says. Justin Owen of the Beacon Centre of Tennessee, a free-market think-tank, reckons the city’s subsidies are “creating a lot of the problems it claims it needs to solve”. Everyone moans about the traffic.

Ms Barry defiantly cites a swelling budget (up $121m without new taxes), rattling off housing and job schemes the extra cash is paying for. As for those incentives: “If anybody ever says to you, ‘Should we have a TV show and name it after your city?’, say ‘Yes’.” She thinks this “special sauce”—social liberalism and business-friendliness, yielding an electoral coalition of honchos and hipsters—can work for other urban Democrats. Perhaps, though not many enjoy the same helpful mix of tourist attractions, creative industries and universities. At least while the good times roll, though, it seems to go down well in Nashville.