White suburbs

[pbrower2a]

Suburbia has become legitimately urban, and it has much the same problems -- high costs for government services and infrastructure improvements, and environmental threats.

The GOP seems to treat suburbia as if it were still the somewhat bucolic area of happy families in a semi-rural environment, where people with above-average incomes can be enticed with appeals to tax cuts. Such an approach is grossly outdated -- and it caused an electoral catastrophe for the GOP.

Tax cuts mean little if low taxes mean gridlock on the expressways and boulevards. Because Suburbia has alternatives for employment, suburban government must pay teachers, cops, and other public employees enough to keep then from going to more lucrative activities -- just as in the Big City. Suburban kids rely heavily upon state universities and government-sponsored loans to stay in the middle class.

[pbrower2a]

I'd say it's a general cultural disconnect coupled with plain old incompetence. The GOP keeps pushing the same tired 'values' issues. Their pandering to the religious right increasingly comes at the expense of professionals, women, and various other minorities. Meanwhile they've done nothing to assure voters that their economic 'philosophy' (if you can call it that) works, or even that they're even remotely sincere about much of it (see: spending).

Then there's the reality that welfare reform, crime control, etc. haven't been seriously debated on the national level since the mid-90s.

I don't think it so much incompetence as perversity. The "values" issues that the GOP promotes are so narrow that they offend the majority. The alliance with the Christian fundamentalists to push pseudo-science (including creationism) as education threatens the education necessary for creating the scientists and engineers that many suburbanites want (including as their sons and daughters). The anti-feminism works only to facilitate economic exploitation. The rejection of high culture ensures the staleness of suburban life.

The GOP tried to create an absurd coalition between on the one hand a moneyed elite and on the other hand the hardscrabble poor who have little in common -- one whose ethos is a promise that if the common man suffers in overt subordination and exploitation for distant owners and harsh managers, and defends their exploitation through military service, that they will get rewards in Heaven that others won't, and plutocrats and executives -- godless as they may be --  will get the rewards that they want in This World.  Such adopts a mirror image of a Marxist critique of capitalism as a virtue. Cartels became more rapacious and executives more rapacious.

The white poor believed this when the black (their heritage doesn't believe it) and Hispanic (largely Catholic, they believe something else) poor didn't. Suburbanites could be led with promises of low taxes until government spending (for the enrichment of defense contractors) went out of control; now they know otherwise. As the well-paying jobs disappear and the cartels squeeze out small business (long a constituency for the Right), suburbanites recognize the increasing shabbiness of American life. 

Welfare reform? The GOP has excoriated the poor for years but it dares not abolish welfare. Crime control? Gross inequity in a society that cherishes material indulgence above all else (for lack of anything better) creates greed and fosters anger. The methamphetamine epidemic devastates communities that escaped heroin and crack cocaine.   

[pbrower2a]

I don't think it so much incompetence as perversity. The "values" issues that the GOP promotes are so narrow that they offend the majority. The alliance with the Christian fundamentalists to push pseudo-science (including creationism) as education threatens the education necessary for creating the scientists and engineers that many suburbanites want (including as their sons and daughters).

I mostly agree, although I think it's hard to over-estimate the degree to which Bush, the 109th congress, etc. are still hurting the party with their pathetic job performance ratings. The general public is ambivalent about many of those subjects increasingly going by the polls, if not accepting of them.

The damage is severe, and it won't go away quickly enough to rescue the GOP as a powerful challenge to the Democratic Party for the next few years. Damage control is necessary -- yet it has not been started. If there were ever time for principled statesmanship within the GOP, then now is the time. Partisanship just isn't enough to win elections.

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Slow down there, Karl.

Actually I agree to an extent, the opposition to things like equal pay, birth control, etc. makes them seem not only hostile to people's personal choice but their economic livelihood. Even without abortion, they still come off as very anti-woman.

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I think there was and still is some truth to that. Though obviously, I would probably question many of your underlying economic assumptions. However, I think more so than that a lot of the party has been, and still does, advancing it self by putting other people down. They've promoted the attitude that no matter how pathetic your own life is, least you're whatever group they happen to be rallying against at the moment ('secularists,' gays, illegal immigrants, etc.). It's victim/identity politics for white christian males.[/quote]

Diversion of anger to pariahs offers not only hazards to pariahs but also no solution to economic distress. Cast off the secularists/heretics and the intellectual innovators flee. A ban on same-sex marriage denies an expression of one of the noblest expressions of human goodness -- love that many can express in no other way. We can achieve more by steering people away from illegal drug use than by shipping "illegal aliens"... back.

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If you look at polls, tax cuts are still popular. There is a reason Obama is still promoting his tax credits left and right even while promising to raise them on the 'wealthy.' I think the real problem is, Republicans have lost all credibility on the issue of domestic spending. Even while paying lip service to supply side economics, limited government, etc. the Bush administration and others like them have spent hundreds of billions not just on expanding entitlements and departments but on the 'earmarks' and other pet projects... All while railing against them. Not only that, but in addition to obvious hypocrisy they have nothing to offer the general public in place of their (often poorly explained) 'small government' model.

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I think you're misunderstanding me. What I was implying is, those issues traditionally have drawn white middle class voters to the GOP. That is not to say that I whole heartedly endorse all aspects associated with those policies. I find the war on drugs and cuts in mental health services in particular to be disastrous. However, regardless of their validity, most of those policies were adopted to a limited extent by the Democrats in the 1990s. Consequently, serious expansion of welfare reform and a return to a more rehabilitative/positivist 'liberal' position on crime has largely been outside of national public discourse. That may be changing given some provisions of the stimulus (food stamps, unemployment) plus some states considering abolishing the death penalty once more. But those are not anywhere near the hot button issues they once were, and that's demonstrably hurt the Republicans.
[/quote]

Tax cuts are popular, but control of reckless spending is far more difficult. Both The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are big-spending parties. To be sure, effective government does not come cheap, and privatization has its hazards (especially when the privatization entails the imposition of monopoly power). Does anyone want to sell the non-tolled highways off to profiteers who exact as much out of users as possible, or would we prefer that governments have responsibility for their condition? Much as I despise drugs, I recognize the use of those drugs that induce oblivion (including alcohol to excess) as symptoms of a sick society unable to induce confidence in economics and other human relationships.  Welfare reform? Shrinking opportunities ensure the need, even if only for a couple of years, of the expansion of welfare just to prevent hunger.

I'm not sure that I can fully trust the concept of rehabilitation in corrections. Most people who enter the penal system are already wrecked badly, and the wreckage demonstrates the appropriateness of earlier intervention. Local governments can use computer technology to make police work more effectively; an example is San Jose, California, which has computers in police cars so that the police can check any license plate number for legal violations. Grand theft auto, one of the gateway crimes, has plummeted. 

Unglamorous as mental health is as a public expenditure, we surely need to quit foisting the care for the mentally-ill upon relatives who must mess up not only their own finances but (even worse) their personal lives in custody of the dim-witted and insane. The only insane that our system treats effectively anymore are the senile and feeble-minded elderly.  Ronald Reagan went too far in 'emancipating' the mentally-incompetent, many of whom ended up in the penal system when they could take care of their needs in only one manner.

If the GOP has any future outside of rural America, then it will be as a challenge to corrupt and ineffective governments. It can no longer rely on the assumption that suburbanites care for nothing more than constraint upon taxes.  Tax cuts have gone as far as they can go in stimulating the economy, and those of recent years may have achieved little more than to foster perverse economics: big-business predation of smaller businesses, reckless spending, and sub-prime lending.

American history has shown that the #2 party can die from its own discreditation (Federalists) or irrelevancy (Whigs). 

[pbrower2a]

I have a question for anyone from Wisconsin and/or Indiana on here:

Why are the Milwaukee and Indianapolis suburbs so overwhelmingly Republican? This is a phenomenon that has always intrigued me. Any thoughts and insight would be appreciated. Thanks  

Indianapolis? When Richard Lugar was mayor he did one of the most rational ways of a big city dealing with suburban sprawl: he incorporated it into Indianapolis by arranging an idea called "Unigov". Any community or rural area within Marion County not already within a city would become part of Indianapolis. In effect, Indianapolis devoured any suburban fringe before it could form.  Indianapolis has had few suburbs, and the ones that it now has are mostly outside Marion County. Those still have exurb qualities -- some rurality remains. They thus vote Republican because they have yet to get big-city problems.