They cower in their picket-fence redoubts, festering with race prejudice.
We are at ease in the inner city, they dread being 'mugged'.
They consume vast resources with their SUVs and one-car commuting. We step nimbly from urban pad to office, or cycle.
They are mired in a myth of frontiersman independence. We celebrate New Deal cities, along with Jane Jacobs.
But, honestly, this is just so much anti-working class snobbery: urbane mandarins masquerading as the underdogs.
Most Americans, like most Britons, live in the suburbs. Hate the suburbanites - hate the majority of the country.
You think that the suburbanites are living out a redundant fantasy? One could just as easily say that it is the urban centres that are cleaving to a 19C. model of social organistion.
You are surprised that suburbanites are ill at ease in the City. But how much more ill at ease are you in the suburbs?
You think it is race prejudice that drives people away from the cities. I think it is a prejudice against the mass that leads urban snobs to dump on the suburbs.
Leftists who should know better find themselves alienated from their fellow men and women. Instead of asking what is wrong with the left's outlook that sees itself so isolated, they ask what's wrong with the people that they don't like us. And here's a ready-made answer: they are the 'white flight', suburban enemies of the environment.
And don't cities consume resources? Richard Rogers, head of the UK Urban Task Force says cities are 'the major destroyer of the ecosystem and the greatest threat to mankind's survival on the planet' and 'Cities are producing disastrous social instability that is further driving environmental decline'
The imminent exhaustion of natural resources is an article of faith for the critics. But the growth of the suburbs is a pointed demonstration that on the contrary, natural resources are readily available. Land, gasoline, building materials all dedicated to enhancing people's environment.
Once that would have been something that the left would have supported. Now they prefer to cast themselves as latter-day Tsar's refusing Bread and Land to the masses.
You prefer the New Deal coalition of immigration-fuelled inner city voters? Guess what. Their children grew up and moved to the suburbs. They voted for FDR because he promised to them homes. The Veterans Administraion, the FHA were reforms directed at giving ordinary people a home. They succeeded in raising working people's living standards. That's something the left should celebrate, not decry.
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