Middle Class
Angst: The Politics Of Lemmings-
Part I
By Stan Goff
20November, 2007
CarolynBaker.net
There is a common misconception
among environmentalists and peak-oilers (I count myself among both)
that cars created the suburbs. The car suburb, however, became what
it is with regard to cars only incidentally. The real motive for the
suburbs was plain garden-variety white supremacy. Cars simply became
necessary to facilitate the spatial segregation that simultaneously
confined African America largely to decaying urban spaces and built
the ‘burbs as white enclaves. It's not that simple any more, of
course. All things change all the time - as we'll see momentarily -
but it was white fear and loathing of the Dark Other that set the whole
process in motion.
The sudden discovery - still
ongoing - that most of us (more than half the US now lives in Suburbia)
are trapped here if and when our private automobiles run out of gas
(or the money to buy it), came after suburbanization was a fait accompli.
This is the stage in any historical process where people begin to indulge
themselves in disambiguation of the past - simplifying what has happened
until it appears that it was predictable all along. Since we believe
this - that things are predictable - we are easily convinced that correlation
equals causation in our reconstructions of history; and we apply those
correlatives that are familiar and comfortable. Ergo, because oil companies
and auto manufacturers participated in the development of Suburbia,
they were the conscious agents of it all along. White environmentalists
and many white peak-oilers are not well-versed in the history of race,
and they have shitty heuristics for understanding how it is constituted.
Not surprisingly, their heuristic
- the equivalent of what we call intuition, or common sense - is that
of Suburbia, which has been the predominant mode of white American thought
since the late 1960s. It is what Matthew Lassiter calls "the prevailing
language of middle-class meritocracy and color-blind innocence."
The City of Richmond's present
pattern of residential housing... is a reflection of past racial discrimination
contributed in part by local, state, and federal government... Negroes
in Richmond live where they do because the have no choice.
-Bradley v. Richmond (1972),
District Judge Robert R.
Merhige, Jr.
We think that the root causes of the concentration of blacks in the
inner cities of America are simply not known.
-Bradley v. Richmond (Appeal,
1972),
Fourth Circuit Court of
Appeals
Highway construction, urban
renewal programs, loan policies, municipal annexations, and court decisions
that re-coded race as untouchable-class, were all instrumental in the
development of Suburbia, and the concomitant development of the Black
ghetto. These practices were not accidental or self-organizing or the
product of "market forces." They were systematic, intentional,
and imposed. When the preponderance of evidence showed in court (Bradley
v. Richmond) that this was the case, the Fourth Circuit established
the official federal position on the matter. "We don't remember
how it got to be this way; therefore we can do nothing about it."
I mention this just to set
the stage for my main thesis. The history of this development is ably
and accessibly articulated in Matthew Lassiter's very important book,
The Silent Majority - Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt (Princeton University
Press, 2006).
The population shift to the
suburbs and the power shift to the Sunbelt economy requires a new metropolitan
framework for political history and public policy that transcends the
urban-suburban dichotomy and confronts instead of obscures the pervasive
politics of class in the suburban strategies of the volatile center.
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.
STAN GOFF
is the author of Hideous Dream, Full Spectrum Disorder, The Military
In The New American Century, and Sex And War. He also manages his Feral
Scholar website and is familiar to many Truth To Power Readers as a
result of his monumental series published at From The Wilderness on
the death of Pat Tillman--a series to which many attribute Congressional
investigation of that event.
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