Suburban Diversity and Economic Inequality: Can the Democrats Meet the Challenge?

...His current book project is called The Suburban Crisis: The Pursuit and Defense of the American Dream...

...I think most Americans feel this way...

...On the eve of this so-called "Republican Revolution," Gingrich portrayed his suburban Atlanta district as the ideal fusion of traditional family values and the high-tech Sunbelt economy, "a sort of Norman Rockwell world with fiber-optic computers and jet airplanes...

...In our neighborhood, we're just regular people," insisted a suburban mother of two...

...MATTHEW D. LASSITER Since 2004, the sixty-two-foot statue of Jesus erected by the Solid Rock Church has stood as one of the most conspicuous landmarks in southern Ohio, located at the midpoint of the fifty-mile corridor of suburban sprawl along I-75 between Cincinnati and Dayton...

...The 2010 passage of health care reform based on the promise of universal coverage, however compromised by corporate lobbying and the lack of a public option, still represents the most important piece of progressive social legislation since the Great Society...

...In addition to several megachurches and Flynt's "erotic boutique," the hybrid suburban/exurban/rural landscape around the Monroe exit includes a giant flea market, an outlet mall, a United Food and Commercial Workers union hall, two prisons, several golf courses, many single-family subdivisions, and plenty of the home and garden stores that flourished during the long housing boom that peaked in 2005...

...The backlash thesis conveys some important truths about the past few decades of political history: Richard Nixon's anti-busing, law-and-order platform...

...Clinton simultaneously signed legislation that deregulated mortgage-backed securities and facilitated the embrace of subprime lending by major commercial banks and other large financial institutions, some of which engaged in practices of "reverse redlining" that deliberately targeted African-American and Latino families searching for the suburban dream...

...But its Pentecostal congregation is also marked by extraordinary racial and economic diversity, including a significant African American membership...

...In Virginia's 2005 gubernatorial election, Democratic candidate Tim Kaine won Loudoun and several other exurban counties through a campaign that promised relief for quality-of-life dilemmas such as "overcrowded schools, highway congestion, sprawl, housing prices, and property taxes" in order to "preserve the lifestyle they sought by moving to the suburbs...

...Phoenix/Maricopa County...

...During the past decade, the Democratic surge in the suburbs and exurbs of northern Virginia has revealed the effectiveness of this DLC strategy...

...The complex's large neon billboard, which flashes messages such as "No God, No Peace," emerged unscathed...

...According to the 2009 National Suburban Poll sponsored by Hofstra University, about one-third of white suburbanites have experienced a recent job loss within their immediate family, while more than half of African-American and Latino households in the suburbs have suffered the same fate...

...In boom states such as Colorado and Virginia, the party has followed the Democratic Leadership Council's admonition that "sprawl is where the voters are" by reaching out to white-collar professionals turned off by the social conservatism of the religious Right and mobilizing the Latino and Asian American voters who increasingly live in suburban neighborhoods...

...The people here have the same concerns that most Americans have—good schools, [low] crime and their economic future," explained an IBM executive who relocated from a similar Dallas suburb...

...Obama carried the diversifying suburban electorate by 51 percent to 49 percent, building on Bill Clinton's success in winning a plurality of suburban votes in the three-way elections of 1992 and 1996, and inverting Bush's narrow victory margins among this demographic in 2000 and 2004...

...the recurring GOP strategy of celebrating the "family values" of the middle-class suburbs by attacking gay rights, feminism, and the urban welfare state...

...For the immediate future, Democratic leaders and progressive pundits ought to pay less attention to the Tea Party movement, which is largely made up of the same types of white Republican activists and affluent conservative ideologues who have always opposed redistributive liberalism, and worry more about how to help the working-class and middle-class families who believe that the Democrats care more about Wall Street than Middle America...

...With the best of intentions, the Clinton administration helped bring on the housing crisis that has destabilized suburban neighborhoods across the nation...

...In 1998, a moderate Republican transplant who headed an anti-sprawl neighborhood alliance unseated the sponsor of the anti-gay resolution by arguing that the religious Right's agenda was diverting attention from critical suburban issues such as traffic jams and school crowding in the built-out county...

...The establishment of an entitlement to health insurance matters enormously in the suburbs—where more than two-thirds of white adults do not have a college degree, where strong unions no longer guarantee many working-class families middle-class wages, where the nation's continued failure to provide subsidized childcare presumes a norm of stay-at-home motherhood that has been fading for decades, where job loss and catastrophic medical costs represent the most common causes of home foreclosure...

...Latinos now make up between one-quarter and one-half of the population of most of these counties, including Las Vegas/Clark County...

...The most rapidly growing exurbs still contain only a small percentage of the total suburban electorate, which is dominated by high-density inner suburbs and diversifying middle-ring suburbs...

...With more than three million home foreclosures expected in 2010 alone and the national unemployment rate hovering close to 10 percent, the Obama administration's reluctance to place economic inequality at the center of its political agenda is self-defeating—and a broken promise to suburban swing voters in Ohio, Virginia, and other battleground states...

...But the ubiquitous, timeless recitation of white backlash as a catchall explanation for seemingly every Democratic defeat since the Watts riot has also served to shield modern liberalism from acknowledging its own failure, despite decades of income stagnation and rising inequality, to address the fundamental economic challenges facing working-class and middle-class voters of all races...

...Solid Rock Church immediately promised to rebuild what it had claimed as the largest sculpture of Jesus Christ in the United States, while secular critics across America had a field day mocking the tacky tastes and in-your-face religious values of this Middle American exurb...

...There the candidate promised to fight for "policies that invest in our middle class, create new jobs and grow this economy so that everybody has a chance to succeed...

...Reagan trounced Mondale with 77 percent of Cobb's vote in the 1984 election, and no Democratic presidential candidate received more than 37 percent for the next two decades...

...Obama won the inner-ring suburbs by twenty-one percentage points, an expected result given the Democratic base among college-educated professionals and racial/ethnic minorities, but his surprising competitiveness in many newer suburbs and exurbs depended in no small part on a volatile economic climate made worse by rising unemployment, higher energy costs, anger over undocumented immigrants, and the collapse of the housing bubble...

...But in 2008, with unemployment rising and the economy entering a severe recession, Barack Obama improved the Democratic totals by 4 percent in each county, a microcosm of the statewide shift that flipped Ohio from red to blue in the electoral college...

...In their vision, the "New Democrats" could build a suburban majority by combining fiscal moderation with cultural liberalism, the recipe for winning postindustrial economic regions such as Silicon Valley in Northern California and the Research Triangle area of North Carolina...

...The "New Democrats" have easily carried the populous and multiracial innersuburban counties of Arlington and Fairfax in most recent contests, while also competing vigorously in fast-growing exurbs such as Loudoun County...

...Although the Republican Party controlled the suburban vote during the 1980s, partisan allegiance in the suburbs actually has been almost evenly divided since Bill Clinton targeted the "forgotten middle class" during the recession-shaped election of 1992...

...If the history of the New Deal's social welfare programs is any guide, the extension of health care coverage to forty-six million uninsured Americans and the regulation of skyrocketing costs facing tens of millions more will enhance the Democratic Party's fortunes at the ballot box—at least in the long run...

...The ensuing national furor obscured the fact that more Republicans in Gingrich's district labeled themselves moderates than conservatives, with tax cuts and the quality-of-life problems of suburban sprawl far outpacing school prayer or gay rights as matters of local concern...

...Ronald Reagan's opposition to fair-housing laws in the 1960s and affirmative action in the 1980s...

...Barack Obama also exceeded expectations by winning 44 percent of the Cobb vote, primarily because of the county's demographic evolution from almost all-white in the 1980s to 23 percent African-American, 11 percent Latino, and 4 percent Asian by the time of the 2008 election...

...Matthew D. Lassiter is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan and author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006...

...Local activists in the religious Right also provoked a series of culture-war confrontations during the 1990s, most notably a county commission resolution proclaiming that the "lifestyles advocated by the gay community . . . are incompatible with the standards to which this community subscribes...

...This oft-cited statistic generated a substantial amount of alarm that blue-state Democrats could not compete for the young, white, middle-class nuclear families that have long represented the popular embodiment of both suburban politics and the American Dream...

...Indeed, the church does condemn abortion and claim success in persuading gay men and lesbians to abandon the "homosexual lifestyle...

...Los Angeles County...

...The political evolution of the Sunbelt suburbs can even be seen in places such as Cobb County, part of the congressional district north of Atlanta that Republican firebrand Newt Gingrich represented during the 1990s...

...In addition, more poor people today live in suburbs than in the central cities, and a preponderance of suburban households no longer conform to the traditional nuclear family ideal...

...Obama adopted the same approach in 2008, when he reversed Bush's exurban victories by securing 54 percent of the vote in Loudoun and 57 percent in adjacent Prince William County, which now include minority populations of 27 and 40 percent, respectively...

...Obama himself offered a more compelling and nuanced interpretation of the backlash thesis when he clarified his controversial comments about political anger in Middle America ("they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment") by emphasizing that "these voters have a right to be frustrated because they've been ignored" and blaming his own party for not being able to "communicate to them effectively an economic agenda...

...But more than anything else, the inroads the Democrats have made reflect the increasing racial and economic diversity of American suburbia, now home to a majority of each racial and ethnic minority group within large metropolitan areas...

...In 2002, progressive strategists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira highlighted the changing political demographics of the suburbs in The Emerging Democratic Majority, which inverted Kevin Phillips's formula by predicting GOP reversals in the high-growth, high-tech metropolitan regions of the multiracial Sunbelt...

...We want to invest ourselves in our families, and we don't want to be taxed to death...

...Between 2000 and 2005, the ten fastest-growing counties in terms of total population (not percentage) increase were all located in the booming Sunbelt region, especially in the metropolitan Southwest...

...In 2008, Barack Obama carried six of these ten counties and ran very competitively in the traditional Republican strongholds of Maricopa and Orange...

...It remains to be seen whether Democratic policies can counter the nation's long-term trends of increasing economic inequality and working-class downward mobility...

...The bipartisan bailout of Wall Street to the tune of $700 billion (and counting) encapsulates the socialization of corporate risk in modern American politics, as the federal government continues to subsidize the profits and then cushion the losses of companies deemed "too big to fail...

...Cobb County's white-collar migrants "believe big cities have failed," Gingrich explained, but they "still believe—and are working toward—the American dream of owning our own home, raising our families, giving our children a better life with safe streets, and a future built on self-reliance and hard work...

...But the hype over the GOP's success in mobilizing "family values" voters in the white exurbs obscured more than it revealed about contemporary suburban politics writ large...

...A Common Cause expose of "white-picket welfare" revealed that Cobb received more federal dollars per capita than any other suburban county in the nation except for Arlington County in Virginia (home of the Pentagon and the CIA) and Brevard County in Florida (NASA Space Center...

...Viewed from the highway, Solid Rock looks like a prominent exurban base for the GOP's mobilization of white evangelicals in the nation's long-running culture wars...

...The county's population tripled between 1970 and 2000, with almost two-thirds of the arrivals born outside the state of Georgia, and Atlanta trailed only Phoenix for the nation's highest rate of metropolitan population growth during the 1990s...

...This year, the icon, tagged with such nicknames as "Touchdown Jesus" and "Drowning Jesus," provided an even greater spectacle when a lightning strike burned it down late in the evening of June 14...

...The Obama campaign conspicuously held its final campaign rally in Manassas, Virginia, in the heart of the Prince William County exurbs...

...The suburbs of the 100 largest metropolitan regions, according to a Brookings Institution analysis, now include 78 percent of white residents, 62 percent of Asian Americans/Asian immigrants, 59 percent of Latinos, and just over half of all African Americans (up from 43 percent in 2000...

...In the lead-up to the 2008 election, many on the Left doubted that a Democratic ticket could appeal to enough white voters in Middle America to capture key battleground states such as Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina...

...Sunbelt conservatism appeared ascendant nationally by 1994, when the GOP took control of Congress under the leadership of suburban Republicans from fast-growing states such as Georgia, Texas, and California...

...These rapidly diversifying exurbs provided a microcosm of the Obama breakthrough in winning three of the South's largest states—Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida— in large part because of gains among Latinos, Asian Americans, and middle-income households experiencing financial strain...

...Such pessimism reflected a deeply entrenched backlash narrative (popularized most recently by commentators such as Thomas Frank and Paul Krugman), which holds that Republicans have exploited racial backlash and manipulated the culture war trilogy of "God, guns, and gays" to fool working-class whites into voting against their real economic interests...

...Solid Rock's unusual heterogeneity reflects the mission of co-pastors Lawrence and Darlene Bishop to build a "cross-cultural" church that operates prison ministries, runs a home for pregnant teenagers, and has even produced a film called Segregated Sunday in which God's love bridges the cultural gulf between a bluegrass and a hip-hop musician...

...In the 1990s, its "American Dream Commitment" program pumped $2 trillion into the private housing market to increase rates of homeownership among racial and ethnic minorities, low-income families, and recent immigrants—thus accelerating an unsustainable bubble economy...

...The Obama administration's initial $75 billion home mortgage modification program reveals the continued privatization of economic risk for too many ordinary households—a plan based on the largely ineffective approach of providing incentives to encourage voluntary action by banks rather than mandating debt relief or issuing a New Deal-style moratorium on foreclosures...

...His narrow 2.4 percent defeat in the suburbs of Orange County, the former conservative bastion that launched the careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the 1960s, reflects the demographic transformation of a county that is now one-third Latino and one-sixth Asian American...

...Houston/Harris County...

...During the Gingrich era, Cobb County gained a reputation as a bastion of religious right extremism and as a poster child for the double standards of anti-tax, big-government conservatism...

...George W. Bush twice carried each of these solidly Republican counties by wide margins, including 70 percent in Warren and 66 percent in Butler in his 2004 reelection, a time of national obsession with the pivotal swing state of Ohio...

...Since the early 1990s, the party has reinvented itself as the fiscally responsible ally of Wall Street corporations, the champion of Silicon Valley technologies, and the defender of "soccer moms" in upscale suburbs...

...Like most stories set in the suburbs, the saga of Ohio's oversized Jesus confirms some stereotypes but challenges many others...

...and the suburban Southern California counties of Riverside, San Bernardino, and Orange...

...The evangelical megachurch built the "King of Kings" statue, featuring a fiberglass and styrofoam Messiah rising with uplifted arms from a large reflecting pool, to proclaim the gospel to the surrounding community and especially to motorists passing by on the highway...

...Others observed that God had spared the thriving Hustler Hollywood megastore, located at the same interstate exit, which Larry Flynt opened in his home state over the resistance of public officials and a religious right group called Citizens for Community Values...

...Solid Rock Church is located in Monroe, a town that straddles the boundary between the counties of Warren and Butler, each of which has a white population of approximately 90 percent and a median family income above the national average (comfortably so in Warren, just barely in Butler...

...A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle sarcastically wondered if gay rights activists had torched the giant Jesus as payback for heartland homophobia and imagined "fundamentalists scurry[ing] about in a baffled frenzy, unsure what it all might mean...

...Home losses through foreclosure or mortgage default also have hammered sprawling exurbs, especially for minority suburbanites in the Sunbelt destinations that grew fastest in recent decades...

...Clinton's Victory revealed that economic populism could win back Reagan Democrats in the working-class suburbs, especially during hard times, and the party has also appealed to middle-class moderates alienated by the GOP's culture-war agenda...

...Until quite recently, Cobb seemed to encapsulate the trends highlighted by Kevin P. Phillips in 1969 in The Emerging Republican Majority, which forecast an era of GOP dominance driven by white-collar migration to the Sunbelt states of the South and West and the "conservative trends of the vast new tracts of middle-class suburbia...

...In 2004, George W. Bush won ninety-seven of the one hundred fastest-growing counties in the United States, including runaway victories in the mostly white exurban precincts of key battleground states such as Ohio and Florida...

...The results have been devastating in recent boom markets from Riverside County in Southern California's Inland Empire, where subprime loans and plummeting home values have displaced many Latino families, to the Orlando suburbs of Orange County, Florida (24 percent Latino, 19 percent African American), which led the state in foreclosures in 2009...

...Nationwide, Obama received only 43 percent of the white vote in 2008, and barely half even in deeply "blue" states such as California and New York, and so his strong support among Asian Americans (62 percent) and Latinos (67 percent) proved critical...