>
> On Nov 13, 2009, at 6:43 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
>
> That's not what annoys me. What annoys me is when it seems that the left
>> gives up on trying to convince the suburbs, small towns and exurbs, as it
>> often does, suggesting that suburbanites are natural voting fodder for the
>> right. That is why we have a Tory administration in London now - because
>> Boris Johnson used the 'doughnut' strategy of campaigning in the suburbs
>> while Labour's Ken Livingstone tried to rally the inner city. That is
>> understandable, but ultimately self-defeating. All the evidence is that
>> de-densification is the underlying trend, which no amount of smart-growth
>> has succeeded in counter-acting. If the left gives up on the suburbs, then
>> it gives up on winning. (Sorry to sound like Kevin Philips, but on that, if
>> not on many other things, he had a point)
>>
>
> There are suburbs, and there are exurbs. Older, denser suburbs in the U.S.
> shouldn't be written of by a left, broadly defined. Not at all. But the
> rural areas and distant suburbs/exurbs/edge cities are mostly reactionary,
> and there's no point in trying to cultivate them.
>
> Doug
What is it that makes rural areas reactionary now and hotbeds of radicalism in the early 20th century? Beyond the actual existence of such first-world hotbeds back then generally.
A probably unrelated thought: it's traditional to contrast the organic communities of the village against the synthetic community of the town, but in contemporary America, at least, the relationship is probably the opposite: think of the age, social complexity, and group identification of any of the five borroughs against the sterile individualist utopia of the exurbs.