Republican Party Archives

By Emily Whalen

“Have you ever lived in the suburbs?” New York City Mayor Ed Koch asked in a 1982 interview for Playboy magazine. The interviewer had asked the famously witty Koch if he would ever consider a gubernatorial campaign for the state—if Koch won the race, it would mean a move away from the Big Apple and to the governor’s mansion in semi-rural Albany. “It’s sterile,” Koch continued, “It’s nothing. It’s wasting your life, and people do not wish to waste their lives once they’ve seen New York!”

Koch’s bluntness likely closed the door to a potential governorship, despite his popularity among urban constituents. During Koch’s long tenure as mayor (1978-1989) most Americans harbored distinctly anti-urban attitudes, preferring the serenity and monotony of suburban life over the clamor and chaos of the “greatest city in the world.” In fact, as Stephen Conn argues in Americans Against the City, the story of American anti-urbanism—a generalized distaste for the dirt, diversity, and disarray of the city—stretches across the nation’s history. According to Conn, since the end of the Civil War, the American political and physical landscapes have been deeply interrelated. Where and how we live shapes our political attitudes and expectations. Focusing on the material, social, and cultural elements of living habits inside and outside the city, Conn argues that the anti-urban strain in American culture—manifest in the growth of suburbs and decentralized cities—relates directly to a mistrust of centralized government. Progressives in the 1920s saw the dense cities of the Northeast as workshops where the problems of governance could be perfected. Yet by the end of the Second World War, that optimism had faded. Cold Warriors and their successors on both ends of the political spectrum tried to reclaim their independence from big government by rejecting urban life. Conn links the decline of “urbanity” (a sense of collective responsibility and tolerance) in modern politics to this national decentralization—the “hustle and bustle” of a true city provides “lessons in civility and diversity” that once enriched our political process. As Americans fled to suburbs, urbanity—and civility—plummeted.

new_york_city_aerial_view_1919 — New York City in 1919 epitomized the benefits and problems of urban life (via Wikimedia Commons).

Beginning with Frederick Jackson Turner (whose 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Conn describes as “a Mid-Westerner’s revenge on…an overbearing East Coast.”), Americans have been skeptical of cities. Conn examines how a sense of exceptionalism convinced many Southerners and Westerners in the late 19th century that urban centers like New York City and Chicago posed a threat to American values, like ruggedness, self-sufficiency, and independence. Furthermore, city-dwellers at the turn of the century faced real problems, such as unsanitary living conditions, corrupt political machines, and overcrowding. Yet the solutions that urban-skeptical reformers offered didn’t address these issues; instead, most of these projects aimed to push people out of cities. The problems of the city, according to people like Benton MacKaye, arose from the density and variation of urban life and would not follow Americans into nature. MacKay designed the Appalachian Trail, the 2,200-mile hiking trail extending from Maine to Georgia, in 1921 in the hopes that city-dwellers would follow it out of the urbanized Northeast and, after finding a more wholesome existence, never return.

appalachian_trail_heading_to_double_springs_gap_from_clingmans_dome — The Appalachian Trail (via Wikimedia Commons).

As suburbs proliferated across the nation, Conn argues, they sustained “decentralized cities,” where whites and other privileged groups left urban centers at the end of the work day and returned to homogenous housing developments. “Most suburbs,” Conn explains, rather than developing a unique culture, “functioned to reject the city while simultaneously taking advantage of it.” Decentralized cities like Albuquerque, NM relied on federal government spending for growth, largely for maintaining and constructing roads, despite the anti-government attitudes of their citizens. Other decentralized cities in the Midwest, like Columbus, OH, embarked on “urban renewal” schemes in which the living history of the city fell victim to commercial development. In 1979, city leaders demolished Columbus’s historic train station to make way for a convention center and parking lot. “Beyond expressing their contempt for trains,” Conn argues, “those who ordered the building torn down expressed their contempt for Columbus’s past.” Dismissing the benefits of city dwelling, and the importance of a city’s history, anti-urban sentiments poisoned most urban renewal schemes of the late 19th century.

800px-union_station_mural_by_gregory_ackers_columbus_ohio_1987 — This 1987 mural by Gregory Ackers depicts Columbus’ historic Union Station. In 2014, new construction on the lot blocked the mural from public view (via Wikimedia Commons).

Conn looks at many cities across the country in his history of anti-urbanism, including a place familiar to Texans: Houston. Houston city leaders refused to accept federal zoning requirements throughout the 20th century, even when it meant passing on attractive funding opportunities that would enrich public governance and culture. During the Cold War, Houston’s elite saw nefarious designs behind the push for federal zoning laws. “Zoning was part of a transitive property that led straight to Moscow: zoning = planning = government interference = Stalinism,” Conn relates. Affluent, white residents believed that the free market, not public regulation, would solve Houston’s successive housing crises. Yet, because housing areas were largely segregated by color, privileged Houstonites ignored the problems their poor and marginalized neighbors faced, all while undermining public programs designed to improve general welfare. The elites “simply could not acknowledge that the ‘market’ does not function the same way for all Americans.”

Houston also serves as an example of how modern “gated communities” attempt–and fail–to cultivate the vibrant urbanity lacking in decentralized cities. Communities, Conn demonstrates, are just as much about exclusion as inclusion, and the gated oases of suburbia represent “exactly the opposite of city life.” The gated communities suggest “a society where social ties have frayed, where we simply do not trust each other and do not even want to make the attempt.” That exclusion—in Houston, as in Greenwich, CT—often follows racial and socioeconomic lines.

aerial_indian_creek_near_dallas_6039814731 — Sprawling suburbs, like Indian Creek outside of Dallas, characterize many cities of the American Southwest (via Wikimedia Commons).

Americans Against the City pays close attention to both liberal and conservative anti-urbanism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Conn describes the “hippie” communes and environmental movements of the 1970s as “essentially different versions of white flight” from urban issues. Yet toward the end of the book, Martin Anderson (one of President Reagan’s most important economic advisors) and the New Right bear the brunt of Conn’s criticism. These men largely promoted policies based on the idea that the market is more democratic than public government, while simultaneously benefitting from federal access and funding. Fighting against public spending on services and entitlements, Anderson helped entrench the now-prevalent idea that the government has no “role to play in promoting the general welfare, except as it enhances private wealth.”

Americans Against The City stands as a well-researched and provocative history of the ideas and politics rooted in our physical environment. Conn’s easy writing style and fascinating evidence make the book a pleasure to read. His conclusions resonate with the contemporary moment and offer a new explanation for the fraying political consensus. Suburbs, Conn explains, disconnect us from our geography–disassociating our work lives from our personal lives, our futures from our histories. As a result, although Americans are more mobile than ever, we feel detached from our political geography. This disruption lies at the heart of a creeping polarization in our political discourse, canceling out opportunities for compromise and eroding a sense of collective responsibility. The values of democratic government, Conn reminds us, arose from urban milieux. It remains to be seen whether they will survive in the suburbs.

By Susan George Schorn

The Fascist Revolution: Toward a Theory of General Fascism, is a collection of essays written over a 35-year period and published in 1999 (the year of author George L. Mosse’s death). It offers not a comprehensive vision of fascist ideology, but a succession of views, each through a different lens: aesthetics, fascism, racism, nationalism, intellectualism, and so on. The resulting analytical kaleidoscope is particularly thought provoking to read against the current upheaval in American politics, especially the rage that has fed the Tea Party and Bundy Ranch supporters and is now buoying up the presidential campaign of populist billionaire Donald Trump.

Today’s political dialogue shares some obvious attributes with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, such as the celebration of national identity and an embrace of violence, sacrifice, and brutality. The rhetoric of this year’s Republican primary debates has resounded with such themes. But Mosse identifies two other fundamental tenets of fascism—irrationality and revolutionary activism—that are commonly overlooked, and which have suggestive echoes in the current zeitgeist.

Tea Party protesters walk towards the United States Capitol during the Taxpayer March on Washington, September 12, 2009. Via Wikipedia.

Fascism was inherently irrational, a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, and profoundly anti-intellectual. This irrationality (which Mosse connects, in the case of German National Socialism, to Europe’s late-nineteenth-century embrace of Romanticism), was long ignored by historians as “too outré to be taken seriously.” Yet as Mosse shows, irrationality served an important function in the workings of the party and the ideology. It provided a means for followers to resolve “a very real dilemma: after 1918 the society in which they lived did not seem to function well or even to function at all.” Fascism made an idealist promise to somehow transcend the social instability of the time. The details were purposely left vague, conveniently discouraging adherents from looking too closely at the movement’s methods.

It is intriguing to consider fascism’s use of irrationality in light of modern calls to “Take back America” by processes that range from the improbable (repealing a broadly popular national healthcare policy) to the ludicrous (forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall). A sizeable percentage of America’s electorate, aware that today’s globalized economy does not function well—at least not for them—seems quite willing to suspend rationality and believe such promises. Fortunately, there is scant evidence that today’s promise-makers have either the means or the aptitude to make anything more than symbolic gestures toward fulfilling their promises.

Trump speaks at an Arizona rally in March 2016. Via wikipedia.

Fascism was also, Mosse notes, explicitly revolutionary; an activist doctrine that focused its energy on destroying the existing order and replacing it with something new (though in Germany’s case, the future would be informed by the past). In this way, fascism stood in opposition to conservatism, an arrangement that also resonates strongly with today’s headlines. Witness the consternation of today’s GOP officials, who have lost control of their nomination process and seem to no longer even understand the anger of their own base. But while twentieth-century fascists made devastating use of the revolutionary energy they generated, modern conservative politicians appear caught off guard by voters’ revolutionary zeal, their willingness to destroy institutions in order to bring about the change they perceive as vital to national survival. It is somehow comforting to realize that our politicians are markedly less competent than the fascists in this regard.

And there are other important differences between our era and that, which gave rise to European fascism. Though economic uncertainty is again a factor in our politics, the intense anxiety over “respectability” Mosse identifies as a breeding ground for fascism’s moral code is largely absent today; we are, perhaps, simply more relaxed now. The mistrust of cultural pluralism undergirding today’s pro-nationalist arguments is partly a response to demographic trends that make it all but impossible for those concerns to become mainstream. Our understanding of “nation” has shifted, becoming more diverse. And while the fascist obsession with sexuality, and control of it, has its echoes now, recent attempts to criminalize abortion, birth control, and gender non-conformity have failed at the national level and are likely to be rolled back in the states where they have found purchase. Supporters of such policies are part of a smaller, and shrinking, population.

Still, there are enough eerie similarities in Mosse’s essays to make them rewarding reading for anyone curious about the growth and spread of destructive ideologies—including those presently in circulation.

George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a Theory of General Fascism (Howard Fertig, 1999)

Americans Against the City, By Stephen Conn (2014)

A New Fascist Revolution?

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