The Threat of Suburbia

In 2016, Donald Trump received 62,980,160 votes in the General Election. We often hear that Trump voters correspond to education levels, but that is on true in that aggregate. Forty-two percent of Trump voters, that is 26,451, 667 in the United States in 2016 . . . which is 13 percent of registered US voters, when voter turnout was 61 percent (200 million are registered). If we claim that lack of education is what leads to reaction, then these numbers are hardly convincing. One might discount a million college graduates voting for Trump as anomalous, but twenty-six-and-half million is something much bigger than a mere anomaly. People often forget, based in part on the influence of a media commentariat that is constantly spinning some “working class” theory about Trump and the Trump cult, that the majority of Trump’s votes, raw votes, came out of the suburbs.

The subtext of this “working class” (read: redneck) narrative, a classist pile of steaming excrement that oozes petit bourgeois contempt for actual working class people, is that these people are not only unfit to govern (lacking the key ingredient, which is Education™), they are unfit to choose who governs them. Subtext continues . . . what is required is a continuation of the pre-Trump “norms,” a new word in the mouths of NPR denizens, technocratic governance by the managers of the security state. Note how the entitled Dupont Circle wannabe hipsters of MSNBC are ignoring the disaster that is Trumpanomics—a disaster for most people, not the stock market which is brazenly touted as a sign of economic health—to focus on whether or not Trump is a threat to national security (or national security institutions, suddenly transformed from historic bad actors into our saviors). This is a classic ratchet act, being performed now ever since Nixon. The Republicans throw everything from normal to hard right, then the Democrats catch the ratchet part-way back to the new normal which is now to the right of the old. They work for the rich who are a parasitic class, and the parasite is exhausting the host. The rich have to constantly deepen their parasitism to get the same benefits, and to retain the power that accrues to those benefits.

I am studying Lisa McGirr’s book, SuburbanWarriors—The Origins of the New American Right (2001—but this one has a new preface that ties to the Trump cult), alongside which I would recommend a similar book published in 2006, called TheSilent Majority—Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South, by Matthew Lassiter. These books are to suburbanism (the interdisciplinary study of suburbs) what someone like Mike Davis is to urbanism (the interdisciplinary study of cities). There is even more overlap there, if readers haven’t read Davis—because Davis (who I recommend) writes about Southern California, as does McGirr. What both these books do is provide detailed historic narratives that show how formative of consciousness is the built environment, for one thing (and this is hardly inconsequential), and to describe the development of a political colossus in the US that is coyly called “the middle class.” It all begins in Levittown, as a postwar re-segregation scheme, but for reasons shown in these books, the suburbs are now the majority in the US. For politicians, when they’re happy, you’re happy; and when they’re not happy, they will make you unhappy.

Lassiter shows how the suburb went metastatic in the US South, still squirming in its racial hierarchies. McGirr shows how the Western pilgrims that came from the Midwest and the Arkansas-Louisiana-Texas region and settled into the Orange County, CA suburbs imported a small army of evangelical wingnuts, some of whom proved to be persuasive cult-builders themselves. The Prosperity Gospel started there . . . a perennial favorite among up-and-comers because it showed how God smiled down on rich people, making them even richer as a reward for their faith. Take as much as you can becomes an ethical imperative. Wow, this sells to children, like the candy positioned next to the checkout, so you feel compelled to avoid a scene in public by giving into the now squalling child.

Modernity has infantilized us.

But that’s for another day. In reading McGirr, she shows how this “modern” thing really breaks down; the narrative, that is, that the Trump cult—which includes a goodly number of those 26 million college educated USians—is comprised of know-nothing flat-earther nitwits. They are pre-modern, and-or anti-modern. I can attest to the falsity of this from first-hand experience, as can readers. I know plenty of people from suburbia who voted for Trump. They are also enchanted by and addicted to what I’ll call modern-shit. Go to their houses and behold technological wonders enfolding you in an infantilizing bassinet of entertainment and reassurance and convenience. And these people have degrees, and a lot of them have nice-paying jobs that they’ve come to depend upon to maintain the lifestyle—which is designed in many cases to keep the kids out of trouble. We can miss this, but McGirr explains that the structures of suburbia gave rise to problems with children that the new suburbanites felt compelled to counter through a systematic boundary strategy. Everything becomes about getting the right leg up for your kids, as well as insulating them from all the catastrophes that might befall them if they venture out into the us-and-them world without a net. Church was embraced by the new suburbanites as s key battlement against the danger of the other.

“While many of these [suburban] activists hailed from rural and small-town backgrounds in the Midwest and border South, it is misleading to characterize their mobilization, as contemporary observers often did, as a rearguard action against ‘modernity.’” (McGirr, 94)

They were leaving small towns to settle in cities. They were separating from their homes of origin as free-ranging employees. They were vigorous boosters of technology, and every awful gadget that came along, as well as vigorous civic boosters. There way of life became a kind of boosterism, which all in all, given their mobility, their separation from roots, and their technological optimism, made them uniquely modern subjects. They epitomized modernity, and were its poster children: white nuclear family with a quarter-acre lawn, polishing their toys on weekends, and dutifully pulling at that salary the rest of the week. Patriotic and church-going because when children grow up in suburbs—speaking as a once-child who spent ten of his first eighteen years living in suburbs—they are bored out of their skulls, disconnected, restless, and always in search of something that feels different from that . . . which is generally something that is unhealthy, dangerous, stupid or all of the above. Structure, structure, structure. If you shuttle your kids to enough “activities” over a period of eighteen years, you stand a good chance of them (1) surviving, (2) staying out of prison, and (3) graduating high school. If you shuttle them enough to get them that far, and you pack away some money and figure out some loans, you can even go to (4) get them a college degree. Sounds pretty modern to me.

What’s modernity? Some would say it’s a euphemism for capitalism, but I think it is an aspect of capitalism that transcends the economic. Speaking for myself, I date it beginning around the sixteenth century. Scattered out over that period, and a little before and after, are all sorts of historic bifurcations, dramatic pivots, in war, politics, trade, industry, art, family, philosophy, and ecology—and this gestation of modernity was all these of a piece. The Disses, I call them. Disembodiment, Disaggregation (and reduction), Disembedding, Disenchantment. It’s more than capitalism, but it sure can’t be separated from capitalism—and capitalism, as process, has proven rapaciously formative of every other aspect of modernity.

Marx’s great counter-narrative, in which modernity passes through capitalism on its way to a peaceful communism, tries to keep the technological goodies—energy slaves, basically—and throw out the bathwater of privatized accumulation. Marx’s critique of capitalism was fully within the larger self-congratulatory post-Enlightenment narrative of Homo faber. Marx claimed Hegel, but the right claimed him, too. The problem goes back at least to Bacon, if we are talking about modernity’s philosophical justification for itself, when Natural Science became the deity of modernity by “killing Nature,” as Carolyn Merchant described the scientific reduction and objectification of nature that opened the way for a far more wanton plunder of the biosphere. THAT is modernity. It still has Charlie Marx by one leg.

We may have mixed up some babies with bathwater and bathwater with babies.

Nowadays, the narrative is that Education™ is our panacea, which shakes out pretty well for those who are the achievers in that low-intensity war which is the Academy (re-read the four Disses above). We shall make the world over in our image.

The “half-life of knowledge” is a notion from scientometrics (sounds pretty modernistic to me). It’s the amount of time in a particular field of scientific endeavor for half of everything formerly believed to be true is proven untrue. Overall, they say around 50 years. This is more generally true about all forms of knowledge, including all the things we “know” right now that are pure bullshit.

Educated men conducted experiments in phrenology. Laypeople didn’t do that. Having an Education™ does not make anyone a better judge of politics than anyone else unless part of that specific education was a study of politics, and even then, Political Science becomes the discipline, or its specializations upon specializations—comparative, international, methodology, et al. Which becomes a course of study for credentials as a technocrat.

A lot of educated men and women supported Donald Trump. Most were from white suburbs. What McGirr and Lassiter want us to see is that this cannot be accurately described without attention to the identity of these people, and in particular their political identity. That political identity is based on the material concerns of this “middle class,” swimming in consumer goods for the time being, but fearful (in acknowledgment of that secretly held knowledge of our own infantilized technocratic dependency) of any sense of instability. Not structural instability, but things that destabilize their grid, their homes, their families. They are consumers, mortgage-holders, taxpayers, and school parents. It is that subterranean fear of instability that makes them so susceptible to xenophobia, negrophobia, as well as hostility to feminism. They are the nine percent, that layer of managers and supervisors and specialists who get extra scraps from the Master’s table. Above them are the one-percent, and below everyone else. If the cord is cut between the one-percent and the “middle class,” the middle class falls into the pit with the rest. This, and not antipathy to modernity, is what constitutes the biggest pillar of the Trump cult—scared out of their wits and compensating by jutting out their figurative chin and putting a giant chip on their figurative shoulder named Trump. It’s a kind of cosmic belligerence, a political “fuck you” pushed out there as a threat.
Remember that philosophical superstar Martin Heidegger was a Nazi.

The Trump cult is not a product of lack of education or even an attack on the God of Science or the God of Progress. To portray this period as such, however, is a very modern form of propaganda.