Modern cities fulfill the promises of John Dewey and Walt Whitman’s paeans to democracy by allowing ‘democratic voices, ardent dreamers and lawless artists’ to inspire each other. By focusing on practical solutions to the day-to-day problems that affect their constituents, city mayors champion a mode of governance characterized by collaboration and consensus, and the global ties they create offer a more human-centered, applied style of politics than the contentiousness of national legislatures or the bureaucratic talking shops of the U.N. and European Union…