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2 Exurbia: Built on paradox and
hypocrisy By Julian
Delasantellis
Throughout history, there
are many examples of brave slaves rising up in
revolt against the unjust rule of their masters.
Spartacus in ancient Rome, Toussaint L'Ouverture
in Haiti, Cinque onboard the slave ship Amistad,
all took up the fight for the human dignity and
freedom the institution of slavery had inherently
denied them.
However, in the United States
in 2007, a different form of slave rebellion is
occurring. Here we are seeing what must be history's
first
ever revolt of the masters against their slaves.
You need not hire expensive pollsters or
focus groups to ascertain the mood of the 20-30%
of the US populace that make up the
hard-right-wing base of the Republican Party. All
you have to do is follow the ever more vigorous
policy undulations of former Massachusetts
governor Mitt Romney, a candidate for the 2008
Republican presidential nomination.
This
is a man who frequently changes his policy
positions on key issues, such as access to
abortion, gun ownership, gay rights and marriage,
and the role of religion and faith in public
discourse, to match those of the Republican base.
Indeed, if he were told that the base questioned
his commitment to the "war on terror", you might
expect him to attempt to prove his bona
fides by immediately sending five sons for
internment at Guantanamo Bay. Therefore, it
should be no surprise that Romney has announced
another "adjustment" to a previous policy
position, this time on the politically hot-button
issue of illegal immigration. Previously, he sided
with the "moderate" (in US political terms, at
least) ruling-class-favored position of allowing
illegal immigrants a route to legal residence and
eventual citizenship.
For the US corporate
class, this position is particularly attractive,
since in essence it makes available, as Karl Marx
put it, a new "reserve army of the unemployed",
potentially consisting of the entire population of
Central and South America, whose numbers will
drive down the wages of the US working class.
Now, Romney opposes the legislative
efforts to promote the amnesty-type initiatives
that he once favored. In the current US political
vernacular this is called a "flip-flop". If you
listen hard enough to the suburban office parks in
Northern Virginia that house the
political-consultancy shops hired by the six or so
other contenders for the Republican nomination,
you can probably hear the busy hard-drive whir of
the video-editing machines cooking up lacerating
television attack ads spreading this charge.
In this, Romney's immigration position has
now moved to match those of all the other major
Republican candidates (with the notable exception
of Senator John McCain, whose isolation from this
Republican consensus is costing him dearly in the
polls). The US right wing is riding waves of
intense, burgeoning anti-immigration bigotry and
nativism, engendered by the massive surge in
illegal immigration allowed by the Bush
administration as a sop to their patrons in the
corporate class.
The Republicans need a
new, emotion-packed wedge issue to define its
political identity as separate from the Democrats,
and they have chosen illegal immigration. It is
infinitely more preferable and favorable for them
than their other choices: a disastrous war in
Iraq, a homeland still not protected from
terrorism, and the daily dizzying variety of
ever-changing political scandals and corruption
that has defined President George W Bush's second
term.
One might find this hostility to
illegal immigration by the US right somewhat
surprising. Perhaps more than to any other group,
including the religious right, it is those very
same illegal immigrants to whom Republicans owe
much of the credit for the run of political
successes they enjoyed up to last year.
It
used to be easy to discern the geography of
America's political inclinations. The closer you
were to an urban core, the more reliably a
Democratic Party voter you were. Cities voted
Democratic, suburbs voted Republican, while the
pure rural vote was shrinking into insignificance.
In 1992, the perception of a new, more moderate
Democrat, in the personage of Bill Clinton,
allowed the party to make big gains in the
suburbs, especially in 1996. Lately, a new US
geopolitical phenomenon is emerging.
Notwithstanding all the pints of Guinness
Ronald Reagan lifted in America's Irish bars, the
cities are just as much, or more, reliably
Democratic as ever. It's beyond the urban core
where the big changes are occurring.
The
once-united suburban vote is devolving into three
discrete groups. You have what is called the
original or inner-core suburbs. These are the
communities closest to the urban cores, the ones
created in the first rushes of urban out-migration
that accompanied the soldiers returning from World
War II. These communities, many now more than half
a century old, are showing their age. Their
schools, their public spaces and parks, indeed
their entire physical infrastructure, are decaying
and in need of significant new public investment.
These communities' votes are trending more and
more for the Democrats.
Just beyond them
are the outer suburbs, their growth dating from
the 1960s to the 1980s. In these communities the
parties split the vote, or the Republicans have a
small edge, depending on the candidate.
It
is out beyond that the real changes in US
political demography are occurring.
Anybody who spent a lot of time flying
over the US knew that, if you were crossing the
continent, or doing much of any travel outside the
Boston/Washington megalopolis, what you saw when
you looked out the airplane window was a whole lot
of unoccupied space. Lately, especially since the
beginning of the real-estate boom of the past
10-15 years, the landscape underneath the
airliner's window has been changing.
Carved out of the northern California
grape vineyards a half-hour before you land in San
Francisco, or into the rolling southwestern desert
long before you reach Las Vegas, Nevada, or into
the patchwork of small family dairy farms 160
kilometers outside Chicago are the newest
experiments in providing a roof over the head of
the American Dream: the exurbs.
If you
look at a satellite map image from the mid-1990s
or so, you'll see that most of these communities
didn't exist, or, if they did, were just 10-20% of
their current size and population. Over this
period, real-estate developers have bulldozed and
built these areas until they are far and away the
fastest-growing residential areas in the US in
terms of both population and geographic size.
In 2004, New York Times columnist David
Brooks, in his book On Paradise Drive: How We
Live Now, described those moving into the
exurbs as people who "don't like the houses
crowded with
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