[Patio man, born yesterday, already in revolt against the Pugs, sez Brook's stablemate Caldwell]
[I love the way neoconservative mags always choose a title that implies that there is only one right way to think: the Weekly Standard, the New Criterion, as opposed to normally plural use of criteria and standards]
Financial Times; Feb 18, 2003
A small-town Republican revolt
By Christopher Caldwell
In _Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette_, his new book about the imperilled virtues of small-town America, Bill Kauffman, novelist and former Senate aide, describes how his hometown of Batavia, New York, has been architecturally vandalised by managers in faraway offices.
For curmudgeonly conservatives such as Kauffman, this is a familiar lament. Bureaucrats in Washington, ignorant of the delicate social ecology of outside-the- Beltway communities, wipe out historic houses with plans for "urban renewal", reorganise hitherto successful school systems, and try to regulate who local businesses can and cannot hire. Since Ronald Reagan's first term, Republican majorities have been built on such federal hubris.
Still, something has changed. Kauffman is not crazy about the Washington he fled, it is true. But the managers for whom he reserves his profoundest loathing are the chief executives of the global corporations that have transformed Batavia from Someplace Special into Nowhere-in-Particular. A branch of the Dutch hypermarket Tops has moved in and wiped out every corner grocery store in town. The arrival of the Domino's Pizza chain means the certain bankruptcy of this heavily Italian town's many small family pizzerias.
Of his older neighbours, with their regional accents and their loyalties to the local landscape, Kauffman writes: "The city is no longer theirs. It belongs to Tops and Kmart and Wal-Mart and Genesee Community College (run by credentialled outsiders) and Taco Bell and Time Warner Cable and the Monroe County Water Authority and the Government of New York and Uncle Sam." The two-party system seems to Kauffman a partnership pursuing a common programme: the Democrats will destroy his town through government, and the Republicans will destroy it through business.
Disaffection with "untrammelled" capitalism is rising among America's conservatively inclined, in a way that could mean trouble for Republicans. The suburbs and edge cities where the vast majority of Americans now live - and where "big-box" corporate retail outlets have left their deepest mark - appear to be shifting their political allegiance. Republicans held the suburbs from the moment they were first built until Bill Clinton wrested them from Bob Dole in the 1996 elections.
That defeat could be explained away as the work of an extraordinarily weak Republican candidate, but George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in the suburbs by only 2 percentage points. Given that Mr Bush won southern suburbs by 20 percentage points, that amounted to a Democratic landslide in non- Sunbelt suburban America - the part of the country with a culture vulnerable to being wiped out by mall-builders.
David Brooks, the taxonomist of information-age society, has shown that "Bobos" and others on the commanding heights of the new economy tend to vote liberal - 13 of the country's 17 richest congressional districts are solidly Democratic. But those voters appear to be balanced out electorally by another Brooksian new-economy creature: "Patio Man", the appliance-buying denizen of the outer suburbs, who tends to vote Republican.
Now Patio Man's world is being turned upside-down. One of exurbia's bulwarks, the bankrupt chain Kmart, has undergone two rounds of closures in the past year, wiping out 607 stores and 57,000 jobs. In the world Kauffman describes - communities that had vibrant small businesses before Kmarts arrived - the now-vanished chain store appears as little more than an economic wrecking ball. Even in newer communities, such closures may signal the departure of the only job base the now heavily populated area has known.
This merely adds to the problem of poorly managed growth in these communities. Today, America's most constipated highways are in parts of Virginia, Georgia, Texas and California that were sparsely inhabited two decades ago. Some conservatives are defecting to either environmentalism (Kauffman himself frequently votes Green) or to a more hybrid programme that is part environmentalism and part class-envy (Arianna Huffington, ex-wife of a California oilman and close adviser to Newt Gingrich in his heyday, is now campaigning to restrict the use of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles).
The political fallout of the shrinking suburban and rural economy is still unclear. But it is unlikely to include an endorsement of the untrammelled free market. At the zenith of small-government Republicanism almost a decade ago, voters who were asked to choose between lower taxes and more government services opted for the tax cuts by a margin of two to one. Today, that position barely gets a majority. In the last elections, Democrats were so giddy at this shift that they ignored the war on terrorism and got a well-deserved trouncing. Republicans would be unwise to count on similar luck next time.
The writer is a senior editor of the Weekly Standard magazine in Washington