Suburban voters have the highest rates of voter turnout; and they represent more than half the total population of the US.
Suburban life has a number of distinctive qualities that harmonize the political interests of suburban residents. Much lip service is paid by radicals to the role of work in the formation of "consciousness." The emergence of critical geography, which studies the determinants of personality and ideology in the more general environment - in particular the spatial aspects of social development - has added a fresh and, I would argue, critically important dimension to the "materialist conception of history."
A snapshot of suburban life reveals:
•· that we are organized into exclusively residential enclaves that are bounded by a series of circumferential cul-de-sacs;
•· that we are married with children; that we are mostly "white collar" (or aspiring to be white collar);
•· that we work away from these residential enclaves, often substantial distances away, and therefore are absolutely dependent on personal automobiles and the money to maintain and fuel them;
•· that our public lives are divided between these far-flung work spaces, as well as zoned and concentrated consumer spaces; that one's local public school complex is where children spend most of their days;
•· and that the relationships formed by children as well as a common interest in schools are the source of most local social networking (adult relationships are more often formed at work).
The latter is politically significant because political power is organized spatially, with voting precincts at the most local level, followed by various subdivisions, beginning with school board districts. People are dispersed for their work, which no longer then corresponds to locally-consolidated and personally-networked political interests.
David Harvey has written on the global contradiction between the "financial logic of capital" and the "territorial logic of the state," and how there is an incipient crisis in this cross-logic. Following that argument down diminishing fractal scales, I will suggest that there is a cross-logic at work in the continuing evolution of the suburbs, between the territorial (and therefore local) logic of electoral-political practice and the trans-local grid upon which Suburbia is seemingly inextricably dependent.
Lassiter explains in his book that the suburban political identity is threefold: school parent, homeowner, and consumer-taxpayer. I will expand that identity further down; but these are essential to understand because other issues for Suburbia will inevitably relate back to one or another of these aspects of suburban political identity.
The political potency of local spatial concentration (and political debilitations inhering in spatial expansions) is a key issue in any critical analysis of the seeming political malaise of the left, which has been overwhelmingly oriented on economic class as the "primary social contradiction."
When the labor movement was at its most effective in the United States, workers and working class families were concentrated both on the job and in the residential concentrations specifically built to house workers near these points of production. With the dispersion of workplaces, and the even more dramatic dispersion of living space, and the growing non-correspondence between work and residence, many solidarities were spatially disassembled. We then saw a concurrent (and I would argue, causal) free-fall of union density in the US. Certainly, other factors, such as anti-union policies and laws, as well as the dramatic off-shoring of certain manufacturing production over the last two decades, are determinative as well. But union organizing doesn't primarily happen on the job. It happens on house visits. When those houses are dispersed over hundreds of square miles even around a single point of production, that constitutes an exponential increase in the difficulty and expense (in time, energy, and money) of something as simple yet critical as the organizers' house visits.
On the issue of class, the left has traditionally defined class in a fairly limited and mechanical way, as one's "relation to the means of production." While this may serve as some quasi-objective description of one component of class, it is inadequate to get at many aspects of class reality that actually translate into political action... in particular, the "subjective" experience of class, which varies so wildly and is so multiply inflected, that honesty compels us to admit that basic "relation to the means of production" standard is - in any real instantiation - hopelessly reductionist and inadequate.
The experience of class for American Suburbia is largely seen by the residents themselves as something called "middle class." The left is correct to say that this taxonomy obscures certain realities from the people themselves; but at the same time, the perception of the suburban middle class that they are unique is essentially correct. The reason their lives are perceived as different from that of people living in urban US ghettos or Brazilian favelas or factory towns in China is that their lives are different from all those places.
Suburbia is a cyborg. It is a techno-industrial grid within which its human residents are trapped, conformed, dependent units in a vast, entropic feedback loop. It is also - as a whole - dependent on an inconceivably extravagant and uninterrupted inflow of materials from across the globe. Without that uninterrupted inflow, Suburbia will convulse and perish.
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