|
Edited on Fri May-06-05 02:55 PM by AmericanLiberal
Absent some gargantuan New-Dealish revolution to restore wealth equality in this country back to what it was in its heyday, and to restore parity among our three modern macroregions (city, suburb, country), it seems quite clear that the future of American living increasingly will be dominated by the suburbs. This has been the trend of the past 80 years, and barring what I mentioned or economic disaster, it will continue to be the trend for at least the next 20. Hence it seems that any political party that bases itself in winning over huge margins in the shrinking macroregions (city, rural) at the expense of the suburbs, as both parties increasingly are doing, are condemning themselves to a position in the long-term minority ; and that further, these shrinking macroregions are becoming less and less competitive and thus less and less relevant.
The growth of the suburban voter is no accident. Nor is it entirely due to the fact that a progressing people seek a comfortable life in the suburbs. The family will live in the suburbs and want to escape the city and country.
You must distinguish between the family voter and the single voter. The family is the most basic unit of society. You surely know by now I am not a social conservative, so this is no political hogwash. The family is the most basic unit of society primarily due to the rearing of children, presents many rewards but also makes demands, including stability, a decent income, health, finances, a social network, and planning. In short it demands responsibility and health, and in return it is self-perpetuating as children go on to emulate the parents. It is through the family that what we call social capital, in our postmodern day and age, in the absence of socialist cooperatives, is organized. On the other hand, the single voter, while he may be responsible, healthy, and be well connected to society, has no obligation of necessity to do so. He or she is ephemeral, rootless. Risk-taking yes, having more time and energy perhaps yes, younger yes, but she does not reproduce, and her situation is that of a minority.
What does this have to do with politics? Well, politics is an expression of society. Studies of partisan identification, political participation (including voting behavior and other forms of pariticipation), and public opinion all point to the fundamental part played by social context in each of these three political concepts. Social context is not everything, but no durabe political majority can be formed without an underlying social majority, or set of social majorities.
In the New Deal transition period, it was possible to form a coalition of a diverse set of distinct social entities, or sub-societies, within the umbrella of American culture. The industrial revolution generated a balance between the urban (from which unions arose), rural (from which farmers formed a large bloc), and suburban (the as yet Republican minority), a clash between the haves and the have-nots, and had weakened but not yet eliminated a different between geographic macroregions (North, South, West, as opposed to today's economic macroregions based on population density). The New Deal coalition and its reverse GOP coalition operated in kind of a bridge between agrarian and industrial societies; as it was still possible to form a majority out of fragments of America which were mutually balancing.
As industrialization consolidated and we move into the information economy, however, the economic macroregion balance is increasingly being disrupted by the growing dominance of the suburbs; the have vs have-not divide has become disrupted by the growing dominance of haves; the geographic macroregions are dissolving altogether in the face of southern and western development. We are used to thinking of our postmodern society as being more diverse, or heterogenous than industrial society; we have the image of the Leave-It-to-Beaver family that was the paragon of homogeneity, and we have the image of a relatively much more heterogenous society today. This view has been accepted not only in the common mind but by media, academic and government elites. But these post-industrial diversities of economic disparity, race, cultural values, and resurgent individualism mask an underlying counter-trend of increasing homogeneity:
1) while economic disparity has increased, the increase has mainly come due to the rising of a portion of the middle class into the upper middle class and the rising of a tiny minority in the very wealthy. It has come from changes at the top, not the bottom. And changes at the top are inherently log-limited in their form due to diminishing returns. In other words, there was more class warfare in the relatively egalitarian 1940's than there is in the highly unequal 2000's because the 1940's featured mass deprivation, having a car vs not having a car, whilst the inequality of the 2000's is the difference between a Kia and a Mercedes. A "have" in the 1940s might own a car worth $10,000 today; a "have-not" in the 1940s would own none. Today, the "have" owns a $100,000 Mercedes, the "have-not" owns a $15,000 Kia. Wealth inequality has increased tremendously, but the difference in the latter case is actually less when measured from a human perspective.
2) while racial diversity has increased with immigration, racial discrimination, though still existent, and racial segregation, though still existent, is less today than it was in the 1950s and 60s. Thus while there are more different races today, ceteris paribus, race is not as defining as it once was, relatively speaking. Once again, on paper, heterogeneity has increased, but in reality, it has not, due to countervailing homogeneity forces.
3) while cultural values seem to have become more divisive over issues of abortion, the shift of the public attention away from bread-and-butter, every day economic issues to social issues such as school prayer, "decency", religion in government, etc. has undercut the salience of political issues as a whole. Conflict has moved away from real battle over real resources to a simulation, as Lunar I think you pointed out to me over in the off-topic board, modern society is increasingly defined by the image rather than the reality. This undercuts the supposed 'polarization' over social issues because these issues are a lot less tangible and salient to most people. Further, there is evidence the public isn't nearly as polarized as the elites themselves are-- and convince us that we are. The real story isn't polarization but trivializatio.
4) Robert Putnam's 2000 work "Bowling Alone" is supposed to epitomize the resurgence of individualism as a consequence of the postindustrial society and thus provide evidence for growing heterogeneity in our society. The elements of this are that people are no longer as tied to certain social groups like bowling leagues as they were, people now change jobs more frequently, and move around more frequently, etc. But this is not evidence of growing heterogeneity but growing homogeneity. In the industrial age, a person who grew up in a mill town and worked in a factory from age 18 in the same town knew little or nothing else beyond it. He was highly distinguished, highly diverse, comapred to say, a professional working in a city or someone living two states away. In today's more mobile world, people come into contact with more different kinds of environments, different kinds of people, and have more diverse experiences--- diversity which in the aggregate leads to more interactions and hence more homogeneity of the society as a whole!
In fact I would argue that America had the most heterogeneity antebellum, when the south and north were so different that they would actually go to war with one another. They really were virtually different countries. Not today. America has more in common with English-speaking, McDonald's patronizing, surrender-monkey France than the north had in common with the south before 1860. The only place in the world slavery is legalized today is Sudan. Image of Sudan was a U.S. state!
This long diatribe into the relatively heterogeneity of the New Deal coalition, whose cause can be traced to economic processes, and the relative homogeneity and increasing homogeneity of our postindustrial society, leads me to the political conclusion that a majority political coalition cannot be built by either the Republicans or Democrats without an effort to capture the dominant, emergent homogenous culture. This culture is emergent in the suburbs. It is emergent there because people want to live there, because families are there, and because families reproduce themselves and perpetuate, whereas the fringes of society, people who stay single, or those who are elderly, or those inner city minorities or poor whites who can't make it out of their rural home towns, do not self-perpetuate in a way that could, even if all their forces were combined, ultimately challenge the standard suburban family.
Hence, the suburban voter is the bedrock of politics, even more so now than 10 years ago, and even more so 10 years from now than today. Any successful political party must study the suburban voter, his likes and dislikes, the causes and determinants of his party choice, the social context factors that influence his thinking and interest. Politics will continue, in the absence of a crisis such as Sept. 11, to trend towards trivialization, as the human psyche attempts to create conflict to occupy itself, even as society becomes more and more homogenous around suburban social capital, around which the primary institution is the either church or the union, but mostly the former as of now.
The Democratic party, for one, can take no more sure step towards ultimate oblivion and extinction than to drift towards today's anti-suburban, anti-society, anti-social capital wing of itself. No amount of voter registration drives, strangers knocking on doors of unfamiliar communities, college kids trying to mobilize inner city single mothers, will or can succeed as a suburban community of men and women, gathering together at church, and exploiting their social networks, to exhort their friends and neighbors and vote-- for our kind of people! For our values! For our way of life!
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(78 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
