On the Fascism of Suburbia
I recently read the article America’s Suburbs Are Breeding Grounds for Fascism. The by-line summing up the gist: "Hate against trans people is rising, but the suburbs are what gives this hate its fervor and popularity."
Overview
This article immediately grabs my attention because it is at the intersection of a number of my interests. To provide a few quick excerpts to get the key points across:
And so it makes sense that these are now the places where fascism grows; that’s what these places were designed for. The suburbs were invented as a reactionary tool against the women’s liberation and civil rights movements... These were explicit goals of the designers: “No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist,” said the creator of Levittown, the model suburb. “He has too much to do.”
...the shape this movement [Trumpism/fascism/neoreaction] has taken is not coincidental; it is in fact the product of the unique shape of public life in America, or lack thereof. Suburbanites do not have town squares in which to protest. They do not have streets to march down. Target has become the closest thing many have to a public forum.
The suburban doctrine dictates that public space be limited, and conflict-free where it exists; that private space serve only as a place of commodity exchange; that surveillance, hyper-individualism, and constant vigilance are good and normal and keep people safe. It is an ideology that extends beyond the suburbs; it infects everything. Even cities, as Sarah Schulman writes in The Gentrification of the Mind, have become places where people expect convenience and calmness over culture and community. What is a life of living in a surveilled and amenity-filled high-rise and ordering all your food and objects from the Internet to your door if not a suburban life? To make matters worse, the people who have adopted this mindset do not see it as an ideology, but as the normal and right state of the world; they, as Schulman writes, “look in the mirror and think it’s a window.” So when anything, even a gay T-shirt, disrupts their view, they become scared.
Thoughts
As mentioned, I kind of eat this post up, because I just absolutely love the intersection of urban design and political culture.
But there are some weaknesses in the article. The idea of suburbia being a concerted top-down effort is being overstated. Suburbanization began in the 1920s at least, and is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Levittown was neither the first nor the only suburban experiment. Undoubtedly, American suburbanization intersected with ideas of race and gender - that is beyond dispute - but we need to question whether it was the driving force.
Pick Paris or Amsterdam or London or a non-American urban centre of your choice, and go a couple of kilometres to the fringes and you almost always find yourself in suburbia. It might look slightly different, but the endless rows of single family homes are a worldwide experience. Take this example from Bangkok, Thailand, which is just as monotonous and cookie cutter as your American McMansion hell:
The fact of the matter is - and I say this as someone who has invested in a non-single family home in a more urban area - a lot of people yearn for the lifestyle of suburbia. The "peace and quiet;" the four walls to call your own, without sharing them with neighbours; the quiet streets; and the big spacious McMansions. When governments heavily subsidise this, whatever the reason for, people are going to jump at the chance.
Because of that, we need to question whether the reasoning of a handful of American urban planners given over half a century ago actually still carries any weight today. Especially when white women working has skyrocketed and neighbourhoods are more racially integrated then ever before.
The original post states that the right wing contrivances at Target, the paranoia, the crime obsession etc is a "product of the unique shape of public life in America." But suburbanization is not uniquely American. Some of the most suburban cities in the world appear in, say, New Zealand and Australia. Over 70% of residential land in my (Australian) city is restricted for single family homes only.
The post also needs to grapple with the fact that American suburbs have actually been trending blue. In 2018, the Democrats saw success largely due to the suburbs. And again in 2020. And in 2022, the Democrats had one of the best incumbent mid-term showings in modern history again because of the suburbs. For all their flaws and faults, the Democrats and Joe "Trans Rights are the Civil Rights of Our Time" Biden are not the ones reflecting lunatics harassing Target staff over Pride merchandise.
The points about suburban isolation and hyper-individualism I really like, and something I find super interesting and compelling. But I think there needs to be more thinking about the diversity or polarisation of the suburbs. Why do some suburbs produce (or attract?) Resistant Lib Wine Mums who show their progressive cred by taking their private school kids to Drag Queen Story Hour, and why do other suburbs produce Qanon spouting miscreants doing the political equivalent of public defecation at a Target?