So let’s get started.
1. “The Conservative Case Against the Suburbs” — Charles Marohn, The American Conservative
The topline assumption in our culture these days is that liberals prefer the cities and conservatives prefer the suburbs and the farmland. Indeed, breaking the 2012 election votes down by county reveals clusters of blue around the country’s major city centers — the “urban archipelago.” The New Urbanism blog recently launched by The American Conservative aims to change that.
And it’s already caused enough ruckus that Joel Kotkin penned a critique on why “suburbia irks some conservatives,” inspiring Charles Marohn to push back this week with one of the most primordial conservative arguments out there — that the suburbs are an example of big-government interference run amok:
America’s suburban experiment is a radical, government-led re-engineering of society, one that artificially inverted millennia of accumulated wisdom and practice in building human habitats. We can excuse modern Americans for not immediately grasping the revolutionary ways in which we restructured this continent over the past three generations–at this point, the auto-dominated pattern of development is all most Americans have ever experienced–but today we live in a country where our neighborhoods are shaped, and distorted, by centralized government policy.Kotkin begins his piece with a reference to Franklin Roosevelt. In the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt pushed for the creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The traditional way of building a home–in slow increments over time, sometimes with an attached commercial enterprise that helped with cash flow–became impossible to underwrite as government officials, desperate for economic growth, used regulation to make the single family home the only viable option for new homeowners. The federally-established Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac followed. The results were rising home ownership and economic growth, but on a very different framework, one where families held significantly higher levels of long term debt.Dwight Eisenhower likewise embraced the capacity of centralized government action to reshape society. The Interstate Highway Act was a grand vision to connect the entire country with a world-class highway system. This undertaking was finished three decades ago, but policymakers found transportation spending such a seductively simple way to create short-term jobs and growth that we continue to expand it aggressively.
As Marohn notes, this national project locked us into systems of living that require American families to spend gobs of money buying houses and mortgages, buying and maintaining cars, and fueling them with gasoline — all gripes liberals could certainly sympathize with.
Marohn also sees the urban-suburban split between liberals and conservatives as a fundamentally unsustainable reaction brought on by this government interference. Creating the suburbs allowed wealth creation to spread out and successful conservatives to segregate away from the cities. Marohn argues that system is breaking down and economic vibrancy is returning to urban cores — leaving people chaffing under sclerotic bureaucracy, regulations, subsidies and corruption — presenting an opportunity for the right to reassert itself. “Instead of abandoning America’s growing urban centers to the left, we must see the inherent conservatism rooted within traditional neighborhood patterns of development,” Marohn says. “These are our people.”
Urban liberals, you have been warned.
2. “Recognizing The Adult In The Mirror” — B.D. McClay, The Hedgehog Review
B.D. McClay has worked and written for a number of conservative publications like The American Spectator and First Things, and now serves as Associate Editor at The Hedgehog Review, a journal on culture. Following up on A.O. Scott’s recent essay in The New York Times Magazine, “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” McClay stepped forward this week to use Richard Linklater’s new film “Boyhood” as an entry point into the discussion.
But as compelling as she found the movie’s structural approach — it literally filmed its actors once a year for twelve years to chronicle the aging process — McClay also found a falseness to the disaffected lives the modern characters, both old and young, fall into. That points to her key problem with Scott’s essay, namely that he doesn’t seem to have a firm definition of what adulthood is. McClay suggests real adulthood does not involve the “facile conceptions” of marriage, bourgeois living or economic productivity. Instead, it means coming into one’s own as a moral actor, and sticking by what one believes to be right even in the face of society’s disagreement, and perhaps even at considerable personal cost:
In art as in life, the real adults are often hard to recognize. Leslie Fielder devotes approximately a page and a half to noir detective fiction in Love and Death in the American Novel, describing the genre as a clumsy translation of the anti-social cowboy into his modern urban equivalent (without ever reflecting on what a significant social change that is). Dismissing Raymond Chandler’s novels as “pretentious,” he overlooks one of American literature’s greatest adults: Philip Marlowe.This is not the Marlowe of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep, who was transformed by Humphrey Bogart into a cool and boozy lady-killer. Chandler’s Marlowe is a loser who lives shabbily and is constantly getting beaten up by the forces that really run Los Angeles. He pursues the truth, but true victory generally eludes him. His drinking is pathological rather than attractive. His relationship with women is fraught.Because Marlowe’s greatest characteristic is his capacity for resistance against corruption and its agents, whether sex, money, or even friendship, he is, for Fiedler, just another boy fantasy like James Bond. But Marlowe really represents a way of life that is neither conformity nor nihilistic rebellion, both of which are ultimately childish choices. His willingness to be a loser, to be a self-aware and self-possessed failure, makes him an adult figure. He is a serious man, of great personal integrity, who acknowledges that he lives in a corrupted world, accepts his own responsibility for it, but ultimately refuses to give in to it.
McClay also points to Huck Finn as another fictional character who defies the moral assumptions of his society and thus demonstrates true adulthood as a self-governing citizen. (Whereas Tom Sawyer is merely a shallow rascal who will eventually give in and settle down.) McClay avoids politics, but her argument is interesting through a political lens, as embracing the individual as their own moral authority and skepticism of the community’s moral wisdom has traditionally been seen as liberal or leftist impulses. But this is also the age of the Tea Party and the rise of conservative opposition to what they perceive to be a meddlesome population of newly-empowered liberal elites who now set the social mores. Whether you agree with the Right’s analysis on that score or not, it’s clear that who owns the “anti-authority” label these days is contested. “Maybe looking around and noticing that ‘no one is in charge’ is not a sign that there are no adults,” McClay writes. “But, instead, a sign that you are one.”
3. “Institutional Breakdown In A Time Of Ebola” — Andrea Castillo, The Mitrailleuse
It’s Ebola season, and the arrival of the disease has already set off a round of accusations and counter-accusations between the left and right over whose politicians are performing properly, or whose administrative decisions or budget cuts are to blame. But over at The Mitrailleuse, a relatively new blog haven for quixotic conservatives and libertarians, Andrea Castillo produced a piece on Monday with a considerably grimmer and more disturbing analysis.
Writing in a style that can only be described as link-heavy sardonic free association mixed with tech-geek jargon, Castillo moves from her surprise at her own visceral emotional reaction to the outbreak to the remarkable way the disease caught world leaders and major health organizations completely flat-footed. From there, she moves to more apocalyptic musings about how Ebola’s spread could turn the assumptions of a modern democratic society — like the freedom to travel, for instance — into a collision course with one another:
Then there’s [Center for Disease Control's director Tom Frieden’s] baffling justification for allowing continued non-critical travel from Ebola-striken countries to the U.S. While I’m inclined to agree that closing the border would not automatically guarantee an Ebola-free America, Frieden steps on shaky ground when his first two contentions invoke: (1) a vague “right of return” for touring foreigners that immediately trumps domestic health, and (2) an insulting feigned ignorance of the possibility for aidworker exceptions. (To my knowledge, Frieden has yet to alert African nations nearer to danger thatthey’re doing it all wrong.)It is clear that sacred science here is far from settled on Frieden’s side. In 2013,scientists at MIT published research suggesting “that even moderate measures of mobility restriction would be effective in controlling contagion in densely populated areas with highly interconnected road and transit networks,” with the caveat that this was a solely domestic simulation. The hatemongers at the Brookings Institution review the literature on the 1968-1969 influenza epidemic and find that, when combined with proper vaccination and conducive seasonality, the benefits of travel restrictions can exceed the relatively minimal costs and urge that “policymakers should not be too quick to rule out their implementation… in certain pandemic situations.” Previous CDC research in calmer times notes that “throughout recorded history, travel has been a major factor in the spread of disease” and calls for enhanced “border interventions” to control outbreaks.But maybe this time is different. Today’s CDC may have good reasons to allow unfettered travel from blighted nations tempered only by limited screenings of dubious efficacy at five U.S. airports, but the ones provided so far ain’t so. Ifonly for the administration’s own sake, public health officials should provide evidence-based reasoning for their decision to forgo basic travel restrictions, lest the fever swamp theories swirling in comment sections of high-level conspiracies to preserve open border purity (and secure millions of reliable Democrat votes) be allowed to gain dreaded credibility.Come to think of it, the priorities laid out by Secretary of State John Kerry in a press conference last week — that “[w]e need airlines to continue to operate in West Africa and we need borders to remain open” — did smack of a revealing non sequitur. Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist at Columbia University,decodes for the rest of us: “It’s partly a philosophical choice.”
In other words, exactly how robust are those “philosophic choices” going to be when Ebola is the thing we’re staring down?
Now, calling this “apocalyptic” is appropriate. In statistical terms, Ebola remains one of the last forms of death human beings in general or Americans in particular need fear. In all likelihood, the country will never face the sort of choice Castillo lays out. But her essay nonetheless comes with a certain primordial punch. There’s been a good-deal of understandable cheering for the reductions the world has achieved in poverty, war, violence and the like. But a long-standing conservative argument is that institutions that allow this human flourishing are artificial in the best sense; achievements of human intention that cancrumble if left undefended or not properly maintained. The fears that Ebola has already conjured up suggest modern liberal society’s peace and rationalism hang by much thinner threads than we usually like to think.
Original Article
Source: thinkprogress.org/
Author: BY JEFF SPROSS
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