Prospects for an Urban Conservatism
Lewis McCrary has an excellent post over at @TAC on what is sure to be the major story in American society during the Age of Obama, the resurgence of the cities over the suburbs. This will surely be accompanied by a suburban crisis on par with the urban crisis of the 60s and 70s, and at the same time be good for rural America as well.
Undoubtedly, the fall of the suburbs and exurbs spells certain doom for the contemporary Republican coalition, if it didn’t have enough problems already. Whether or not there is still a Republican Party in another generation – a question on which I remain stoically agnostic – I think it is clear that the next era’s party of opposition will come out of a fissure in Obama’s coalition.
I see that eventual split being between the constituency of the liberal blogosphere, whose shocking hatred of life has been quoted on a few different occasions in TAC; and the liberal religious milieu which is the core of what passes for a left in this country and which, even if it is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, still is something of a pillar for bourgeois morality.
The latter sensibility is alive and well in the middle and upper classes of urban America, aptly illustrated in a great piece a couple years ago in the New York Observer which called them The New Victorians. Indeed, even the more outlandish manifestations of “retroculture” called for in the admirable article by Paul Weyrich and Bill Lind on “The Next Conservatism” are in many instances adopted by this set.
In politics, as McCrary says, Norman Mailer is indeed an excellent example to hearken back to, and here in New York, that spirit is alive and well in the Independent Democratic Clubs which are legacies of that era – real lefties to be sure, but, if given a chance, might be a force for a positive conservatism as they have been in, say, Vermont.
While John Derbyshire’s argument that the children of the New Victorians in their notorious strollers will grow up to be a white nationalist vanguard may be a stretch, the evidence definitely suggests that they will be a markedly conservative bourgeoisie.
In my patch of the world cities are the last place one would expect right of center politics to catch on. Here are few flies in the Urban Conservative ointment.
1. The increase in urban population I’ve seen is largely due to illegal immigration. Immigrants in general, and illegals from the third world have never been a conservative constituency.
2. Native minority populations are being forced out of cities. But they are just moving to inner suburbs and towns, Forming ghetto ring cities and bring their one party boss dominated political culture with them. They’re not going away or changing their ideological orientation anytime soon.
3. In my experience the same people who move back into cities tend to either work for government or non-profit sectors. Some urban pioneers are genuinely Urbanists but that has never been a fertile ground for conservatives.
4. Many American cities have ancient dilapidated infrastructures. This, as well as crime problems drives a high tax regime and a reliance on massive government spending. Typically, urban centers rely on the pockets of states to keep them afloat. For instance, while New Jersey has been at the center of suburbanization, state politics is still dominated by urban political machines. The population of lockstep voters in cities like Newark, Trenton, Camden is still large enough to mandate income redistribution to themselves at the expense of the rest of the population. This is not a situation conducive to the growth of conservative voting in urban areas.
5. One would think that suburban voters would hold to conservative political values, they don’t. My experience with New Jersey and Pennsylvania suburbs is that they are filling up with young urban professionals who bring their city mentality with them, demanding explosive growth in town budgets for education, and infrastructure. They have all the expectations of government service provision with none of the self reliance of country folk. Most work in the New Economy and have the same tired NPR mentality they had before they left the cities. Forcing them back would change nothing. Meanwhile their here complaining about “Those people and their pickup trucks and big families.”
6. The outsourcing of American manufacturing killed the hopes put in the Reagan Democrat phenomenon. The GOP never really embraced them, just used their votes to further their establishment agenda. I do believe that a kind of Tory working class conservative movement was possible. But now that we are on a path to post industrial society with Mexicans doing all the yard work, they are a diminishing segment of the voting population.
Your last few points are well taken, New York may represent one extreme but New Jersey represents the other.
But I think you have the demographic shift exactly backward – its the blacks who tend to stay in the cities or at least move to the lower-end inner suburbs, its the Hispanics who are moving way out to McMansion country as it becomes the new 8-Mile.
Jack, it depends on the city. In Newark for instance, Blacks are indeed moving because after decades of arson and condemnations there is little left to occupy. So they are migrating to the once working class apartment rich towns in the immediately vicinity. In this sense they remain, but in different, adjacen jurisdictions. Also Black big city mayors are quick to demand and get new single family public ally finance housing. This provides them with patronage and keeps at least some black voters in town.
I haven’t experienced American Hispanics in the suburbs so much as illegals who never lived in American cities in the first place.
Of course this may not be the case in other regions.
This para is either way too smart for me or unclear. Does this split relate in any way to Hillary voters vs Obama voters? Who are the “liberal religious milieu?” Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? Methodists and Episcopalians? Not trying to be a prick, I really don’t get what you are trying to say . . .
In answer to the first question, no probably not. I mean mostly liberal Protestants with some Jews thrown in. When I describe this milieu as “the left”, I mean that these are the people by and large who subscribe to The Nation and serve as warm bodies at protests, rather than those who Woody Allen famously described as wandering into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism.
A lot of good stuff here. Remember, the old Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan/Bush II GOP was a creation of suburbia, all over the country not just in the Sunbelt. They needed to turn little farming towns like Farmington, Minn. into exurbs by 2004 just to keep their momentum going. Now these subdivisions are filled with empty houses, their dreams smashed. If there are New Victorians in New York, then there are the same such folks in LA, Chicago, Boston, Phoenix and Charlotte. What better way to rebuild the GOP by taking over all the urban Congressional Districts where the party hardly exists at all, than with such persons and merchant immigrants?
OK, so it’s urban liberal Methodists, Episcopalians, and Jews. Isn’t this kind of a narrow and dying demographic? Dying both in the sense of not reproducing physically and of not passing on the habit of being religious to their kid? Are the warm, young bodies at lefty protests united to religious souls? They mostly seem like militant atheists to me, not that I exactly hang out at protests these days.
If that group split from the D party, would anyone even notice? If the split were to happen 30 years from now, it would consist of three octogenarians deciding that another Pinot Grigio (bought skulkily, late at night, in a brown paper bag, in another neighborhood) sounds better than going to vote, no?
I think the same applies to the constituency of the liberal blogosphere. There are not that many people like that. The Obama coalition is blacks, downscale whites, highly educated whites/asians, and single women, no?
Isn’t the Hillary-Obama split more likely? Or a similar one related to the rising influence of Hispanics? A split coming from whites flipping over the fact that the D party falls from their control (and, of course, not quite saying this out loud)?
Your basic point is right – like the “three legs of the conservative stool”, these groups command intellectual, media, and activist influence, but not votes.