White Suburbanites Vote Republican, Stun Nation

(Revised on 26 January)

Even though I was born in Boston, I spent my early years in the town of North Andover, in northeastern Massachusett’s Essex County. Full of greenery, winding roads, old cottages and a Congregationalist church, it is also home to not a few ostentatious houses and parking spaces. A quasi-rural part of Greater Boston, North Andover is classic New England exurbia. Pickup trucks were a regular part of the landscape. Although my family might have struck outsiders as classic Bay Staters during the Dukakis years—Greek-American liberals with a Volvo (and Dad’s a professor to boot)—pickup trucks were a regular part of my landscape. Thinking back to North Andover today, I’m not at all surprised that 64% of its voters supported Scott Brown. My big question isn’t why they voted for Brown, but why North Andover doesn’t follow the rest of America’s exurbs and vote red more often.

If the Brown election was exceptional, it was only because Martha Coakley fashioned a uniquely unlikeable self-image. As Cheneyesque Brown’s views on torture may be, Coakley’s rudeness was much more alienating to the Massachusetts electorate. Brown’s better-fashioned image made it easy to overlook the venality of his platform, and American voters have often favored persona over policy. Brown’s anti-tax message was interpreted by Bay Staters as representing “fiscal responsibility”—what better way to reduce the deficit than by not spending the money to reduce it and blocking efforts to reduce the cost of Medicare? This inability to do subtraction is a well-entrenched aspect of American political economy. People in Massachusetts, it turns out, are Real Americans^TM after all.

Thus we have the panic amongst the Democrats about losing “Middle America.” As noted above, North Andover certainly looks Middle American enough. Did I forget to mention that North Andover’s almost 95% white? As Reagan sppechwriter Peggy Noonan opined observed of Brown, “He’s a regular guy, looks like an American.”

Now we’ve hit something. Although this doesn’t explain why North Andover usually votes blue, demography might be part of the reason for the Republican turn in less urbanized areas in Massachusetts—and for the exurbs’ conservatism nationwide. The New Republic’s Thomas B. Edsall quotes Robert Powell, a sociologist (appropriately enough) at Harvard: “New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’” This is a familiar story to any urban geographer and historian—Chicago is the classic example. Edsall argues that white “hunkering down” is responsible for the emergence of the Tea Party movement as a national force. “The demographic transformation of the country and the birth of multicultural America have made this group extremely status anxious—an anxiety that the recession obviously heightens.” Even if we don’t accept Edsall’s argument that the anti-health care backlash is rooted in the fear of a transfer of wealth and benefits from white to non-white communities, the geographical implications of the Massachusetts vote are obvious: Massachusetts already pays for its own health care—why should it pay for other states’?

Even when people “hunker down” in a city, though, urban density makes juxtapositions inevitable. Obviously there’s tension (which sometimes erupts), but proximity also has a way of breaking down barriers between groups. In a city, a conversation between a Greek-American, a Uyghur-American, and a Cambodian-American is completely possible (as a matter of fact, it happened in Cambridge last summer). Cosmopolitanism is more likely in the polis.

When we deal with statewide and nationwide politics, however, different patterns emerge. It’s hard to breach ethnic barriers when communities are separated by the interstates and where random encounters are limited to the mall and supermarket. As the de facto segregation of the northern urban areas demonstrates, this has been an issue for over a half-century. The internet doesn’t make things any better—as Cass Sunstein argues in Republic.com 2.0, hunkering down is worse on the internet than anywhere else.

Older, white voters were among Brown’s strongest supporters (pdf). The country is changing into something unfamiliar, and they are discomforted by it. This is not necessarily active racism, , but rather a vague sense that things should continue to be as they are. Of course Massachusetts has a strong history of active racism: the last person who held “the people’s seat” was pelted with tomatoes by his constituents over school busing, in very urban Boston no less. Such racial conflicts led to the spatial segregation we have today. So it takes more than an urban zip code to be a cosmopolitan—it requires stepping out of one’s perceptual shell in order to view to world in a broader way.

Brown’s victory does nothing to change the broad demographic trends that are reshaping the country. Whites will no longer be an ethnic majority, and almost a fifth of our citizens will be foreign-born. It is our generation’s task to redefine Middle America as the meeting place between peoples, not the provenance of one race and history. Not only does our nation have great potential for cosmopolitanism, it has great need for it. If Americans decide to hunker down, whatever challenges facing the nation as a whole will go unrecognized, and whatever satisfaction that comes from crouching with our own kind will be false comfort at best.