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.
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