Surely an honest assessment of the nation's
collective responsibility in creating the contemporary metropolitan
landscape remains an essential prerequisite for grappling with the
spatial fusion of racial and class politics that ultimately produced an
underlying suburban consensus in the electoral arena. If "the problem
of the color line" represented the fundamental crisis of the twentieth
century, the foremost challenge of the twenty-first has evolved into
the suburban synthesis of racial inequality and class segregation at
the heart of what may or may not be the New American Dilemma.
(Lassiter, p. 323)
Lassiter's "dilemma" was that of
racial segregation, segregation which was spatial instead of formal...
segregation which required no White and Negro water fountains. The
court-supported myth that the new segregation is de facto and not de
jure flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In
fact, it is very much like the Israeli "facts-on-the-ground" approach
to the occupation of Palestine; and the condition of the vast majority
of African America remains structurally more colonized than merely
unequal.
But I want to look at another dilemma that has
settled in on the suburbs themselves, and which has pushed the entire
United States into a potentially calamitous conjuncture.
If we
do not understand the suburb - as a system - based on its historical
development, then we cannot understand the post-Apartheid "Sunbelt"
South, which is fundamentally based on the expansion of suburbs, and
with it the expansion of political power in the suburbs. This expansion
of political power would culminate with the 1972 re-election of Richard
Nixon.
Contrary to popular belief, Nixon was not primarily
re-elected because of opponent George McGovern's ardent opposition to
the Vietnam War. By 1972, a majority of the American voting public had
grown sour on the war. The issue that Nixon rode back into the White
House in a historical landslide (McGovern carried only Massachusetts
and the District of Colombia) was busing.
The 50s and 60s
brought two tectonic social phenomena together in a potentially
explosive combination: the Cold War and the Black Freedom Struggle, the
latter of which took form as what is now called the Civil Rights
Movement.
With the post-war collapse of the old Euro-based
colonial order, and the global challenge offered to US influence by the
Eurasian communist bloc, the US found itself having to justify its
domestic policies to the emerging post-colonial world... post-colonial
nations themselves the victims of Euro-American white supremacy.
The
US appeal to a liberal vision of democratic rights - as an alternative
to the "authoritarian communists" (which most of them were,
significantly in masculinist reaction to hostile encirclement) - was
undermined by the de jure system of racial-caste Apartheid that was
practiced in the United States' former Civil War Confederacy.
The
political establishment in the US found itself on the horns of a
historical dilemma. Near-term political ambition, which had to take
account of the South's bank of federal electoral power, was at odds
with Jim Crow as a political embarrassment in US foreign policy.
The
backdrop cannot be overestimated, even though it remains little
remarked in most histories of the era. The average history treats these
two phenomena - Cold War and Civil Rights Movement - almost as if they
were hermetically sealed from one another.
These were more
than merely ideological contradictions. The economic "location" of
African America was such that the domestic economy of the South and the
North was rigidly imbricated with this vast pool of colonial-level
labor; at the same time, access to the post-colonial nations abroad
represented an essential field of "primitive accumulation" upon which
to construct the next upwave of capitalist valorization in the
still-young American post-war system.
Deconstructing Jim Crow
without undermining the economy, losing the electoral South, or making
space for a social revolution would be a perilous and lengthy process.
Lassiter makes a prima facie case that this was accomplished through suburbanization.
Mass
movements and grassroots rebellions compel American politicians to
respond to them. This is a widely acknowledged fact on the left; yet on
questions of voting and mass movements the left generally has little to
say that is more than polemical. Lassiter's work - like that of
"radical urban theorists" with whom he associates himself - is an
important exception.
While there has been much written and
reams of analysis on the Civil Rights Movement, there is a paucity of
critical work on how white America has reacted to that mass movement
with one of its own. Consequently, we generally share a purely
ideological account of politics: Republicans are right-wing, Democrats
are bourgeois good-cops, the two-party system is a ruling class fix,
everyone sits at some point on a continuum from reactionary on one end
to communist on the other, et cetera.
I will acknowledge
demographics; that is, African Americans vote overwhelmingly for
Democrats, white men are more likely to vote Republican, and so forth.
I also acknowledge how racial attitudes (and less often point out how
gender) is a factor in people's political-electoral behavior.
We pay too little attention, however, to the built spatial environment.
The
majority of Americans now live in suburbs; and suburbs have for decades
now had a particular political character and identity. That identity,
and the fact suburban voters constitute the most effective voting bloc
in the US, has more than any other factor facilitated the narrowing of
differences between the two dominant political parties.
Suburban voters have the highest rates of voter turnout; and they represent more than half the total population of the US.
Suburban
life has a number of distinctive qualities that harmonize the political
interests of suburban residents. Much lip service is paid by radicals
to the role of work in the formation of "consciousness." The emergence
of critical geography, which studies the determinants of personality
and ideology in the more general environment - in particular the
spatial aspects of social development - has added a fresh and, I would
argue, critically important dimension to the "materialist conception of
history."
A snapshot of suburban life reveals:
- that we are organized into exclusively residential enclaves that are bounded by a series of circumferential cul-de-sacs;
- that we are married with children; that we are mostly "white collar" (or aspiring to be white collar);
- that we work away from these residential enclaves, often substantial
distances away, and therefore are absolutely dependent on personal
automobiles and the money to maintain and fuel them;
- that
our public lives are divided between these far-flung work spaces, as
well as zoned and concentrated consumer spaces; that one's local public
school complex is where children spend most of their days;
- and that the relationships formed by children as well as a common
interest in schools are the source of most local social networking
(adult relationships are more often formed at work).
The
latter is politically significant because political power is organized
spatially, with voting precincts at the most local level, followed by
various subdivisions, beginning with school board districts. People are
dispersed for their work, which no longer then corresponds to
locally-consolidated and personally-networked political interests.
David
Harvey has written on the global contradiction between the "financial
logic of capital" and the "territorial logic of the state," and how
there is an incipient crisis in this cross-logic. Following that
argument down diminishing fractal scales, I will suggest that there is
a cross-logic at work in the continuing evolution of the suburbs,
between the territorial (and therefore local) logic of
electoral-political practice and the trans-local grid upon which
Suburbia is seemingly inextricably dependent.
Lassiter
explains in his book that the suburban political identity is threefold:
school parent, homeowner, and consumer-taxpayer. I will expand that
identity further down; but these are essential to understand because
other issues for Suburbia will inevitably relate back to one or another
of these aspects of suburban political identity.
The political
potency of local spatial concentration (and political debilitations
inhering in spatial expansions) is a key issue in any critical analysis
of the seeming political malaise of the left, which has been
overwhelmingly oriented on economic class as the "primary social
contradiction."
When the labor movement was at its most
effective in the United States, workers and working class families were
concentrated both on the job and in the residential concentrations
specifically built to house workers near these points of production.
With the dispersion of workplaces, and the even more dramatic
dispersion of living space, and the growing non-correspondence between
work and residence, many solidarities were spatially disassembled. We
then saw a concurrent (and I would argue, causal) free-fall of union
density in the US. Certainly, other factors, such as anti-union
policies and laws, as well as the dramatic off-shoring of certain
manufacturing production over the last two decades, are determinative
as well. But union organizing doesn't primarily happen on the job. It
happens on house visits. When those houses are dispersed over hundreds
of square miles even around a single point of production, that
constitutes an exponential increase in the difficulty and expense (in
time, energy, and money) of something as simple yet critical as the
organizers' house visits.
On the issue of class, the left has
traditionally defined class in a fairly limited and mechanical way, as
one's "relation to the means of production." While this may serve as
some quasi-objective description of one component of class, it is
inadequate to get at many aspects of class reality that actually
translate into political action... in particular, the "subjective"
experience of class, which varies so wildly and is so multiply
inflected, that honesty compels us to admit that basic "relation to the
means of production" standard is - in any real instantiation -
hopelessly reductionist and inadequate.
The experience of
class for American Suburbia is largely seen by the residents themselves
as something called "middle class." The left is correct to say that
this taxonomy obscures certain realities from the people themselves;
but at the same time, the perception of the suburban middle class that
they are unique is essentially correct. The reason their lives are
perceived as different from that of people living in urban US ghettos
or Brazilian favelas or factory towns in China is that their lives are
different from all those places.
Suburbia is a cyborg. It is a
techno-industrial grid within which its human residents are trapped,
conformed, dependent units in a vast, entropic feedback loop. It is
also - as a whole - dependent on an inconceivably extravagant and
uninterrupted inflow of materials from across the globe. Without that
uninterrupted inflow, Suburbia will convulse and perish.
The
process of consuming these materials creates the Suburban consequence
of waste. Volcanically growing islands of landfill - so vast that there
is now a global import-export industry for trash, for all that
abandoned technomass; and we live in an ever more micro-toxified
environment.
Cyborg: an organism that is a self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems.
Suburbia
is also a spiritual wasteland, a place where the wonder of nature is
desecrated ubiquitously with corporate logos and all the artifacts of
late technological society.
I myself was sitting in my front
yard today, where I have kept an organic garden through a struggle
against the homeowners association. Everything edible except my leeks
are out now, leaving a few pansies, geraniums, heather, and the
toughest of the marigolds. I also have one feral red onion. The soil is
resting and matted with the red clover I planted in early fall. The
breeze was blowing on my face and the apple and birch trees were
dancing. There was a squirrel making circles with her tail on top of
the bluebird house. A wren was on an old Haitian drum. Cardinals and
mourning doves pick in the wheat straw I used for winter mulch.
I
am surrounded by people who never see these things, even though it is
all around them. My grandson and I look at the moon through binoculars
on the front steps at night. No one else here seems to be doing these
things; but they are spending plenty of time buying more technology...
and nowadays struggling to balance the demands of obligatory
middle-class consumption with a growing pre-volcanic debt.
Max
Weber called this phenomenon "disenchantment." Commoditized culture is
manipulative and utilitarian (not to mention highly bureaucratic). One
of the main political identities of Suburbia is commodity "consumer."
Not surprisingly, the one truly integrated space in the US is consumer space... the mall.
It
is this extreme instrumentalism - the old joke about the dog having no
use for anything it couldn't mate with, piss on, or eat - that leads
directly to our loss of enchantment with nature... precisely because
nature is free-of-charge, and therefore without value. Worthless, and
often worse... dangerous... hence, suburban germophobia, hatred of
"weeds," the association of nature with dangerous disorder.
The
post-Freudians called psychic connection to things beyond ourselves
"cathexis." Audre Lorde called it erotic energy, "that power which
rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge."
Commoditized,
instrumental culture has separated us from these deeper, non-rational
psychic connections; and I will argue that inherent in this process of
separation - this disenchantment - is a collective narcissistic
personality disorder (NPD).
I am highly suspicious of the
whole notion of individual personality disorder, but I'll table that
critique here, because NPD can serve a heuristic purpose.
General
guidelines for NPD are (1) grandiose sense of self-importance, (2)
preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, perfect beauty,
idealized love, etc., (3) belief that one is "special" and explicable
only by others who are almost-equally special, (4) obsessive need for
attention and admiration, (5) powerful sense of entitlement, (6)
instrumental attitude toward human relations (using others, or taking
advantage of them), (7) low index of felt-empathy (feigned empathy is
in the repertoire of manipulation), (8) feels excessive envy and
suspects envy of others for him/herself, and (9) displays of
arrogance... there are a few others. Psychiatry says that any five of
these suggests NPD.
Not only are these characteristics not
abnormal in Suburbia - or even the general American culture - they are
cultivated as norms by our ideology of social Darwinism, and
ceaselessly reinforced by commoditized culture through brand-name
status competition, advertising, and the cultural norms of the gender
hierarchy (masculinity and femininity).
Another aspect of NPD,
that is also intrinsic to American Suburbia's worldview, is a
hair-trigger perception of victimization. This is the twin of a sense
of entitlement.
This is the most dangerous aspect of the
Suburban character. Within the intellectual barricades of middle-class
belief in their own meritocracy, any challenge to the myth that
Suburbia is a social outcome of (natural) Market TM forces is conflated
with the Dark World vestiges of propaganda from the Cold War, from the
Negro threat, and now from "terrorism" and the demographic attack of
the "illegal immigrants."
The suburban populism that Lassiter
describes - which emerged as a struggle to prevent school integration
by busing - adopted the color-blind language of Dr. Kings speech on
"the content of their character," and reiterated their claim that their
rights were being violated... the spatial segregation of suburb and
ghetto was rewritten as class, not race, in order to provide Suburbia
what Lassiter calls "color blind racial innocence."
In the
same move, Suburbia flipped the script on the Civil Rights movement,
and claimed oppressed status at the hands of the federal courts
(beginning with Brown v Board of Education). This epistemological theft
was facilitated by the Fourth Circuit's reversal-on-appeal of Bradley
v. Richmond, wherein the real history of urban renewal, zoning,
districting, and transportation policy and planning - which were the de
jure instruments of re-segregation - were erased from juridical memory.
Writings 
Suburbia is also a spiritual wasteland, a place where the wonder of nature is desecrated ubiquitously with corporate logos and all the artifacts of late technological society.
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