Something clicked for me based on two things I heard recently from Newt Gingerich and David Brooks. Gingerich was blathering on about how the Democrats are doomed because our leaders, like Nancy Pelosi, are from districts where only 35% of the people own homes, while nationwide it's more like 70%. Then I read Brooks' column today talking about exurbs and how the Democrats need to figure them out. It hit me that when Republicans talk about an ownership society, they are talking about an exurban society. The fundamental difference between the exurbs and cities is in how they value the public and private spheres. In other words, the exurbs are privatized cities. School vouchers, privatized social security, and health savings accounts all share the same appeal as the exurbs themselves.
New Yorkers trade a meager home life in a cramped apartment for a fantastic public life--the restaurants, the culture, etc. The trade-off in the exurbs is the opposite. It's the chance to own a better home at a lower cost. Living in the exurbs is trading public space for private space. Why go out to a movie, when you can have giant screen TV with surround sound in the basement? The appeal of the exurbs is the ability to make your personal space so much better that you don't really need the shared communal entities.
So what does this mean? In many ways it is a frightening pattern. Our society is trending towards the exurban and we, as people who believe in public institutions, have seemingly little to offer the exurbs. My instinct is to paint the exurbs as selfish and intolerant and try to appeal to those who don't long to live there. Is that a realistic strategy? How would we appeal to the exurbs? The Republicans have a huge head start, not only in message, but also in delivery. They rely on two networks to spread their message into these areas that lack public institutions: church and business leaders. More and more evidence is emerging about the well-coordinated efforts among pastors and business owners to spread the Republican message to their parishioners and employees, respectively. I think these networks drove their huge turn out. Basically, the Republicans hit them at the only places that exurbanites regularly gather outside their homes: church and work. Where does that leave us? At the very least, we can fight against these networks. The increasing politicization of religious institutions is a frightening development that we can work against. Also, employers persuading employees to vote for the party the helps the employer is tacky at best.
What about a positive message? I think our main advantages are that exurbs are a very pro-child environment and we can appeal to parents. From framing the debt as a tax on children, to framing environmental protection as protecting the future, to pushing for better health coverage, we can promote ourselves as the forward-looking, kid friendly party. Security concerns may of course, trump domestic issues. It does seem that Kerry's community of nations based foreign policy was spectacularly well designed to not resonate with exurbanites. What do we do about that? I don't know. However, just because exurbanites have traded the communal for a bigger homeland, does not necessarily mean that they reject the idea of community. In fact it may have a greater appeal, the same way that urbanites often worry the most about saving the rain forest. I am not sure what it is, but there seems to be an opening for us here.