The End of the Long Reagan Era
As another leftist who has spent the last decade writing about the rise of the modern conservatism, I agree with Rick that much has changed in recent years in terms of how left and liberal intellectuals approach the Right. It's hard to imagine how we could have any meaningful grasp on politics and society today without taking conservatism seriously. But that said, there is much at stake in how we understand the rise of the Right.
The first attempts on the left to make sense of the unhappy fact that the Reagan Revolution was real and enduring focused on how the left helped bring about its own demise. Much of this self-critical work carried good insights, yet too often it read as an internal story that still treated the Right as a static entity. Worse yet, in many cases pieces of the Right's own account of the 1960s as being too excessive and identity-focused was absorbed uncritically.
Since then there have been works on the Right that are neither condescending nor self-flagellating, and which squarely assess the power and appeal of conservative ideas, affect, organization, and institution-building. Before the Storm is a good example, as is Nixonland. As a result we now have begun to understand what actually has happened politically in these last thirty years.
Nixonland in particular gives us a richly detailed, gripping story of the dramatic shifts in the American political landscape in the 1960s. I really loved reading it, and learned an enormous amount. For the purposes of this discussion though, I'll raise two points of disagreement. The first is that Nixon simply represented and benefited from simply visceral fears and resentments among voters. The second is his claim that what was left after that decade were two distinct camps of Americans staring at each other across smoldering barricades. If anything, Rick's own account demonstrates not how we became an openly divided nation, but how the entire political field would be eventually re-shaped by forces on the Right. And the result was a shift in the very horizon of credible politics in both parties, including the near-complete marginalization of the left. Thus projecting our current political divides back onto the ones which animated that decade potentially misleads while authorizing the demonizations that continue to fuel the modern Right.
The creation of this new political landscape required not just civil war, but the active absorption of diverse elements into a new conservative politics. As I trace in my book From the New Deal to the New Right, conservatives throughout the post-war era on were highly mobile, creative and politically fluid. Actors on the Right and segregationist South continually recombined political positions, reframed issues, and forged new alliances until they achieved substantive political victories. This began happening long before Nixon, but with the help of Kevin Phillips and others, he proved quite adept at it too.
Seen this way, the 1960s looks less uniquely explosive, and less about Nixon himself. White racial resentment over crime, for instance, did not just emerge in that decade. Southern Democrats in Congress had been claiming that civil rights legislation would lead to more black crime and lawlessness since the late 1940s. Republican politicians picked up on this rhetoric in the 1950s - often through wild distortions of statistics about crime. The Goldwater campaign extended this rhetoric, as did Wallace, to embrace demonstrations and riots. What Nixon inherited, then, were not "subterranean resentments" but an openly politicized framing of racial politics.
Nixon was able to go the next step of creating a dominant coalition, but not simply out of conservative rage. Nixon combined conservative and liberal political rhetoric and action ("zigs and zags" as Erlichmann put it) to gain the trust of organized labor, working-class Catholics, and poor white southerners, among others. Nixon aides Bud Krogh and Harry Dent (of southern strategy fame) were even tasked with forming a "Middle American working group" after 1968 to collect data on this group and to learn how to serve it. He envisioned a new political majority (he even eschewed the term "Republican majority") as what Moynihan called a "tory liberal." That Nixonian gesture ultimately begat not only the figure of the Reagan Democrat, but the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council in the late 1980s, which sought to win back the white middle through racialized positions on crime and welfare. Indeed, we can hear its strains today in Hillary Clinton's appeal to hard-working whites even as she opposes another Democratic candidate who is hardly an ultra-liberal by the standards of the 1960s.
Finally, I'm not the first to say it, but I think we might be at the end of the long Reagan Era, with new issues, questions, and framings coming to the fore, and speaking to a generation of voters who have no stake in the issues that stoked the conservative revolution. Much more to say about this fascinating book and what it means for us now, but I've gone on far too long here already.
Conservativism flourished simply because, for the past several decades, there has been no alternative. After the '60s, the left was shackled to a radical, Marxist template that was, like all such models, unworkable and (in this country) unlikely. For all the alleged backwardness of the American unwashed, everyday folk viscerally understood that ideology as vitreous and inflexible as Marxism is no basis for economy or government. They were right; as proof, we have the blood-drenched textbook of the 20th century. Liberals, well... liberals have spent that past 40 years playing handmaidens to the left - when not denying they're liberals.
Conservativism didn't become truly catastrophic until its intellectual takeover by the neoconservatives - and, oddly, its own ideology trumped its native realism.
May 27, 2008 6:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're probably right to say that the left's decline had to do, in part, with the dominance of a trenchant radicalism, but that's no reason to conclude that "liberals have spent the past 40 years playing handmaidens to the left." On the contrary, they have played handmaidens to the right and, in the process of trying to forget the outrage they rightly felt at that time, abandoned their roots nearly altogether, making it easier and easier to accept a tendentious, conservative narrative of the sixties and their aftermath.
May 27, 2008 7:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not so sure the narrative of the sixties and their aftermath was subsumed by conservatives as much as it calcified in its own myths. There are times when radicalism is the only response to issues, but in the past four or five decades, "radicalism" has been neutered by a kind of cafe society trendiness that loves the drama of its aura without the real-world repercussions of its applications. This disconnect estranges anyone indigent of the privileges required to avoid those repercussions. For instance, the American working class rejects the idea of violent confrontation because the uproar could cost them what little they have, and because this is the class that traditionally has supplied America its soldiers - and they may realize the awful reality of conflict.
May 28, 2008 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
While I don't really think this responds to what I said above, I can hardly argue with what you're saying here. Intellectual radicalism is understandably off-putting to many of those for whom it claims (or wants) to speak. And willful self-sacrifice in politics is certainly not a pretty ideal, but as you say, there are some times when radicalism can be the only response to issues, so I don't think we should swallow so easily conservative (and DLC-liberal) attempts to read out radicalism as something that's categorically unacceptable, especially when right-wing radicals (chickenhawks though they are) are implementing their own destructive policies without the least bit of substantive resistance.
May 28, 2008 1:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hi, San Fernando Curt,
Your account of the post-60s left seems exceedingly narrow, and your account of the Right too natural - even romantic. The left offered a quite diverse set of options in the 60s and thereafter; approaching questions of race, gender, the environment, social class, political participation, and the nature of authority itself from numerous perspectives. Some of this was marxist, most not. Whether any of these options would have been workable can't really be determined, as they were never tried - or got a truncated test-drive as was the case with Johnson's short-lived Great Society.
As for conservatism, it wasn't simply an "visceral" option for "everyday folk" (whoever that is). Conservatives fought hard on many fronts to win over a sizable segment of the electorate, yoking a racial, antigovernment populism to a story about the organic, liberating power of free markets. To this the conservative coalition yoked social traditionalism.
The Right and its ideas triumphed to be sure, but this phenomenon was political, not a visceral form of folk wisdom.
May 27, 2008 7:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
One of the factors flinging the left into irrelevance is its intractable hold on political mythologies that in no way reflect the real world:
"Conservatives fought hard on many fronts to win over a sizable segment of the electorate, yoking a racial, antigovernment populism to a story about the organic, liberating power of free markets."
"Everyday folk", Mr. Lowndes, are people who work for a living, at jobs they mostly don't like, to provide for their families' necessities and to live at the best economic level they can. They were never in the recent past, nor are they today, enticed by a "racial, antigovernment populism".
They favor strong immigration limits because an America filled to the brim with a constantly expanding cheap labor force would depress their wages and corrode their living conditions. They support tax limits on income and property because they enjoy little of both - and want to keep as much as they can of what they earn and own. The desire is eminently human: At this social level, it's a matter of survival. Bucketing along paycheck to paycheck, the margin is slim between living under a roof - or bedding down on a sidewalk. It's just that simple.
There was a time when the left took its message into the mines and factories, into the fields and into the sweatshops; the movement helped convince workers they could intitiate improvements in their lives and, doing so, change the character of the American workday. And they did: Job benefits, an eight-hour day and better working conditions were just a few of the yields for organized labor.
But for the past few decades, the left has stagnated. It is a philosophical bauble for effete academic debate and sappy gasbagging about moments never risked on barricades never stormed. The basic template that would abandon private property ownership for some nebulous state-worker enterprise was smashed against the brick wall of harsh reality decades ago. Simply: It never worked. It exists today only in the minds of the Chardonnay Proletariat.
Yes: The "everyday folk" turned away. They had to. The left no longer spoke to them. When it did, it was in the form of gob-spit, hogwash insults invoking "racism". It has become a sub-movement, a prattling artifact absolutely convinced of its prescience, heedless of its utter disconnection. The very fact that "populism" seems suspect in your world, Mr. Lowndes, signifies just how out of touch your perspective has become.
May 28, 2008 11:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
The only thing to take seriously is their tactics.
If the economic and foreign-policy results of Nixon, Reagan, GHWB, and GWB are not depressingly obvious to someone, he is beyond argument.
May 27, 2008 8:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not seeing the contradiction. I think Rick's notion of "subterranean" is in relation to the liberal establishment, who were caught off guard by the cultural tsunami on both the left and right. I read Nixonland as an indictment of the blindness of that establishment as much as a narrative of Nixon's rise to power.
May 27, 2008 8:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
"that's no reason to conclude that "liberals have spent the past 40 years playing handmaidens to the left." On the contrary, they have played handmaidens to the right"
I think liberals have done both those things, and perhaps in the most confounding way possible: handmaidens to the social left in academia, and handmaidens to finance in Washington. As a result, there's no real critical discourse available to the broadly educated populace with which to address the latter.
And, if the latter is up to no good for long enough, the left can kiss its social utopian hopes good bye, I feel pretty sure. People get nasty when they're being systematically undermined economically-- it's the "I guess it's your kid or mine" mentality.
However, I disagree that academic leftists are Marxist any more, although they do seem to resort to the rough dialectics of Marxism and apply them to cultural issues. Especially in places like "cultural studies" and English Departments, in whose collective social imaginary everyone apparently exists in a frozen master/slave relationship.
The History Department is better at evading this sort of literalism, possibly because it was never quite so beholden to "critical theory." I'm not sure that more nuanced perspectives are what make it out into the public, however. The radical impression does because a lot of people who encounter it go on to despise it, ridicule it, and go on to tell everyone all about it.
And, yeah, they're probably "conservative." I certainly don't kid myself that all rank and file Republicans are either money managers or illiterate good ol' boys. That would be easy.
May 27, 2008 8:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
JT Faraday, you wrote:
"I think liberals have done both those things, and perhaps in the most confounding way possible: handmaidens to the social left in academia, and handmaidens to finance in Washington. As a result, there's no real critical discourse available to the broadly educated populace with which to address the latter."
Excellent, very perceptive comment.
May 29, 2008 8:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
My view of conservatism is as a useful tendency, a sometimes beneficial brake on change. It is not a philosophy of governance, any more than being a miser is an investment strategy. When people attempt to make something out of it we get fallacies like supply-side economics.
Therefore, there is no content to consider seriously. Is this condenscension?
A certainty is that things change, as populations grow, as people learn new stuff about the world and the way humans are made. So a resistance to change is not a tenable philosphy, only a curmudgeonly attitude, a desire to hold onto one's possesions or beliefs. Precisely because resistance to change allows avoiding evolution of social norms there is a natural alliance beteween social conservatives and the wealthy.
It reminds me of my favorite bumper sticker, which I think captures conservative thought: "Stop Continental Drift!"
May 27, 2008 9:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
The current infatuation with liberal self-examination blurrs the realities, and ignores the false proclamations, duplicitous practices, and supremist machinations of the conservative movement. The conservative movement is better defined in terms of two converging interpenetrating, and brutally obvious metrics. The rapidly increasing structural divide between thehaves (conservatives) and thehavenots (liberals), - and the intentional mangling or deconstructing of language by conservatives and their message-force multipliers and complicit parrots in the socalled MSM.
Is it radical or Marxist to strike firm positions defending civil rights, womans rights, labor rights, gay rights, environmental and ecological responsibility, economic equality, accountability from the government, or to protest against, dissent with, or oppose costly bloody wars and wanton profiteering. If so, then I proudly claim the marking radical and liberal. But none these scurrilous aspersions framed and repeatedly relentlessly by the propaganda and disinformation covens of the conservative movement and their obedient, exceedingly well funded and connected "message-force multipliers, and parrots in the MSM are true. These proclamations and aspersions on the liberal movement, and all things liberal are PATENT LIES. There is no substance or veracity to any of these scurrilous accusations and aspersions.
The great failure if liberalism is not in our idea's or methods which are sound and rooted in the basis of democracy - but in allowing theright and the conservative movement to frame theleft and the liberal movement uncontested in the most negative terms. Liberals today are anti-American, Marxist, lunatics, and spawns of the devil.
Worse the conservative movement is based on duplicitious policies, supremist ideologies and patent lies. Fiscal conservatism? This is the largest most porcine most debt and deficit ridden government in the history of America. Christian values? America attacked Iraq without provocation or legal justification, based on conservative conjure hype, exaggerations, and patent lies, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraq's innocent civilians attempted to maraud Iraq's resources, erected a puppet governmnent beholden to the conservative government commandeering the WH. The socalled evangelical christians who commandeered the conservative movement are not Christians. They are not followers of Jeshua ben Joseph whose teachings are completely anathema to the fundamentalist intolerance biggotry, hatreds, dominionist pipedreams, and greedmongering bruted by the evangelical high priests.
Privatization is a conservative code word for robbing from poor and middle class Americans to feed the superrich.
Intelligent design according to conservatives is godz truth and science is false.
Tyranny is shapeshifted by conservatives into democratization.
Security is the conservatives excuse for dismembering and reengineering the constition.
Patriotism is the conservatives cloak for commandeering kings rights and one party rule, and for sliming our fellow Americans who challenge, dissent with or oppose these conservatives machinations.
Conservatives need to the self examination. I am proud of the liberal legacy. What can any conservative hold as a positive contribution to America, outide hollow unrealised promises, visionary unattainable pipedreams, and patent lies.
Liberals are human being and like all human beings we make mistakes and are far from perfect, - but conservatives are responsible for oceans of innocent blood, wanton profiteering, grotesque disrespect for the rule of law and the Constitution, and a festering swamp of patent lies.
May 27, 2008 11:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here is a question. Suppose "the left" or "liberals" or just plain Democrats were to retreat collectively into their fortress of thought, and develop a plan to be entitled America in 2058: Our Vision. What would the plan look like? If the United States were to take a great leap forward in accordance with the fondest dreams of left-liberal-Democrats, what would be the outcome after 50 years? How different would that society be from the one we live in today? Would anything be changed in any profound way? Would the various goodies just be better distributed? How would that be accomplished.
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about some mealy-mouthed party platform, suitable for an election circa 2008. I mean a statement of what we really want, and what we would do if given the unfettered opportunity.
May 28, 2008 1:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Socialism.
May 28, 2008 6:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program until one day America will be a Socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." Norman Thomas
That said (or quoted), you're probably more or less right. Check out this Foreign Affairs article (by The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner) on Denmark's "flexible" social-democratic consensus, for an idea of what appears to be the emerging ideal for industrialized states.
May 28, 2008 12:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps this will be a good topic for reader post.
May 28, 2008 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
These are all really thoughtful comments. To Andy – you may be right that there is no contradiction between what is subterranean and what is an open political framing. But to me, the former implies something subconscious and therefore prior to politics, while the latter acknowledges that politicall rhetoric and strategy plays a role in producing those feelings. Thus it wasn’t just that Nixon understood those feelings, his party helped create them.
As to JT Faraday’s comments, I agree that there is very little space for the development of critical, oppositional politics for an educated public (hopefully blogs like TPM will help change that!) . But I don’t think the academic left, which is far smaller than one might think, either helps or hinders this situation, except to the degree that it animates the fever dreams of David Horowitz.
To Tom Wright, I don’t think modern conservative thinking and action has been primarily about stopping change. Although religious conservatives resist stem cell research, the teaching of evolution, etc., conservatives generally defend unregulated markets, regardless of the havoc they wreak on human communities and ecosystems. Indeed, key to the Right’s success has been to cast liberals as defensive scolds who stand in the way of unshirted Lockean individualism and capitalist development.
Finally, to Tony Foresta, it’s great to see vigorous counter-framing in action. I do think, however, that conservatism has appealed to many Americans for reasons that are not demonic. The point, it seems to me, is to analyze closely how conservatives have made their case, and why their ideas have been so attractive particularly to those who stand to lose so much by embracing them. We should also seek to understand the relationship between their rhetoric and their movement-building across the latter half of the 20th century. And we should place the rise of the Right within American political development more generally and ask how it interacts with broader and deeper dynamics such as economic stratification, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchal rule; which can by no means be attributed solely to the Right in America. Pointing out contradictions and hypocrisies is important work, but its explanatory value is limited, I think.
May 28, 2008 1:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, all I can say right now is, what an excellent question.
May 28, 2008 1:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
The socalled conservative platform on its' face has a certain attactiveness. Family values, Christianity, fiscal responsibility, muscular foriegn policy, free market economics, rewarding hard working Americans, keeping the government in check and out of the peoples and industries lives.
The problem is - (and this is the core issue I am focused on shining a searing hot lights on) is that none of these noble supposedly "attactive ideas" have any thing to do with the actual practical applications or the actual conduct of the conservative movement. Family values like closet biggotry and blaming gays for hurricane Katrina? Christianity in the form of biggoted racist intolerance? Rewarding hard workiing Americans by spying on them without due process or any legal justification, and granting them $600.00 tax rebates while increasing their core cost of living outlays by many thousands of dollars a year? Muscular foriegn policy in attacking, occupying and profiteering wantonly from wars against nations without provocation or legal justification? Muscular foreign policy in conducting lawless abuses like sanctioning torture as state policy, and turning the entire world against America? Free markets owned and manipulated by well connected oligarchs practicing malfeasance and in bed with the partisan leadership and then being baled out, or rescued by said partisan leadership when the invevitible bubble bursts? Keeping the government out of the peoples lives by targeting American citizens on watch lists and Core threat programs, and majikally granting abusive, malfeasant or criminal industries immunity?
The conservative movement proselytizes these grand noble ends on TV, but ruthlesslyt betrays each and every single promise and policy in actual practical application and practice. I won't waste time detailing all the patently false proclamations of the socalled conservative movement unless requested, and I think it should be quite obvious that the socalled conservative movement has betrayed it's own platform, - but the larger point is that the conservative movement is based upon hollow promises, supremist policies and ideologies, robbing from poor and middle class Americans to feed the superrich and the predator class and the relentless regurgitation of propaganda, disinformation, slime, and patent lies.
If conservatives actually do the kind of self examination you are hoisting on liberals then conservatives will be forced to confront their own "demonic" and forked tongued ideologies, policies, and practices.
And in answer to Dan K's query - respect for, accountability to, and honoring of the rule of law and the Constitution first and foremost would provide the foundation of the our liberal vision.
Tolerance for all ideologies, idea's, voices, cultures, races, genders, lifestyles, and economic strata.
Some kind of equanimity in the basic structure of economics.
Forceful federal regulation of industries?
Powerful enforcement policies and punishments for abusive, malfeasant, or criminal activities of industry and industry leadership.
A restoration of the Bill of Rights, and government commitment to protecting, honoring, and defending the PEOPLES rights, freedom, protections, and privileges.
Government accountability and a forceful mechanism within the government allowing and affording the people the right to "... petition the government for redress of grievances."
A government focus and mandate on peaceful resolutions to America's conflicts, and an aversion to rabid wild lust for war and warmaking.
A government focus on green technologies and environmental and ecological responsibility.
A government focus on, and commitment to applying America's hypersuperior military forces to actual threats and a nationwide repudiation of wars of choice, or occupations, colonization, or marauding of any other nations resourses for the benefit of industrial oligarchs.
A government repudiation and swift end to the privatization of military and intelligence operations that were formally the purview of the government alone.
A government focus on fiscal responsibility, directed toward reducing debt and deficits.
A government focus on rewarding industries for development of green technologies, and non-oilbased energy sources.
I could go on, but - these are the principle and practices that would define a liberal government in 2058.
Until that time, - "Deliver us from evil!"
May 28, 2008 4:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . how the left helped bring about its own demise. Joseph Lowndes
The "left" was never sufficiently alive in American politics to have suffered a "demise." It has always been a vocal minority -- ineffective unless allied with progressives.
The left's proud accomplishments -- regulating corporations, empowering unions, establishing economic safety nets, cleaning up the environment, circumscribing racism and sexism, etc. -- have resulted from historical contingencies which forced or permitted progressive politics -- but again, only occasionally.
Consider New Dealer Rexford Tugwell's famous remark: ". . . practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started." Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," supported the Social Security program. Recall that it was the Democratic Party, the home of the "left," which delayed civil rights for so many years (Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act).
1964 Civil Rights Act: Democrats (46-21); Republicans (27-6)
1965 Voting Rights Act: Democrats (47-17); Republicans (30-2)
It was Nixon who created the EPA and introduced the Comprehensive Health Insurance Act. As John Mitchell said, "Watch what we do, not what we say."
The left has always depended upon the party of Abraham Lincoln, TR, and Herbert Hoover to get anything done. It was the take over of that party by small minded men who resented their betters which doomed the left.
The left has nothing to apologize for.
May 28, 2008 1:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen,
I agree. As I wrote, I am critical of that tendency to explain the rise of the right in terms of the left's failures.
May 28, 2008 2:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
From what I remember about the rise of the right it was similar to the right's current argument, that they are the one's who can keep you safe. There was a time back then that CRIME was deemed as rampant. That the courts were coddling criminals and that the rights afforded to them were emasculating the district attorneys. Also the right harped on high taxes and incompetant government as the cause of all society ails. This wooed many Democrats to the side of the right. Once the right had a majority they went to work demonizing labor and screamed that they were the ones who had "family values" unlike Democrats who were the party of smut. This then started the rise of demonizing "liberal" as a dirty word. How tragic it has been watching it unfold. I am so glad that the "right" has been outed for the greedy, hypocritical, slime on humanity they have demonstrated in a myriad of ways during the Bush years. Let's hope the Democrats can proudly reclaim the liberal label for the greater good liberalism has done for this country.
May 28, 2008 3:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think your critique of Nixonland is very helpful. This book and Before the Storm are wonderful narratives of the New Right and all of its payers, kind of like some earlier thick accounts of the era's liberal heroes (Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters), but it adopts some of the framing that the GOP itself uses, the most important of which is the idea of an inherent polarization in the American between right and left. As you point out, this doesn't explain why the Democrats have moved towards the right over the last forty years or why the liberal side of the polarized world exists mostly as caricature on rightwing cable and radio, but little by way of its own movement culture.
In this context, what do you think of the case for demography--specifically, the shift in population to the Sunbelt and the suburbs after the 940s and the increasing power of suburban swing voters in elections--as one of the key elements in the rise of the New Right? Instead of viewing this as a move to the hard right of Goldwater and Wallace, it's more of a transition towards a suburban center-right where property values, low taxes, and token, as opposed to sustained, racial integration are the norms. This is a crude summary of a good book by Matthew Lassiter titled The Silent Majority (2006).
In this light, the institution building of the Republicans still matters but the changes in where the voters live and how that setting affects their politics mean that it will take more than a simple counter-institution buildup by liberals to make liberalism (a loaded term, yes) popular. The failure of Edwards, who ran on an inner-city as opposed to a suburban platform, and the success of both Clinton and Obama who more or less cleave to the left side of the narrow range of suburban opinion suggests that policy ground won't move nearly as far as the maps of party control might indicate come November.
On the other hand, one could argue that Bush et. al. are way beyond the range of a center right/center left debate and that their departure will be of great value no matter what. The fact that they are in such dire straits now might also be an indication that the suburbs won't tolerate a right that's too far right.
May 29, 2008 9:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
ft, interesting comment. I have long wanted a discussion at the cafe on the implications of residential patterns on our politics. It looks as though the upcoming Book Club discussion on The Big Sort might provide such an opportunity to focus on that topic.
Other sources of possible interest on this topic:
American Metropolitics: New Suburban Reality, Myron Orfield (fascinating for the color-coded maps alone)
The Children in Room E4, Susan Eaton
All Together Now, Richard Kahlenberg
The American Dream and the Power of Wealth: Choosing Schools and Inheriting Inequality in the Land of Opportunity, Heather Beth Johnson
The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America, Xavier N. de Souza Briggs
May 29, 2008 8:32 PM | Reply | Permalink