Palin’s ‘small-town’ scam

Sarah Palin is trying to play the small-town card. Her handlers even had her quoting the infamous hater and anti-semite columnist Westbrook Pegler: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity." The point, of course, is that she was a "small-town mayor," an "average folks" product of a "small town." Just like you folks hurting in Ohio and other battleground states.

Trouble is, Wasilla, Alaska, is not really a small town in the Disneyland Main Street USA way she’s trying to conjure. This railroad camp turned into an exurb of Anchorage with all the attendant flotsam: big boxes, no downtown, car dependent, sprawling. It’s also in a state that is America’s welfare queen of federal handouts. So we’re not talking Harry Truman’s Independence here.

She’s trying to conjure the town that has been largely destroyed by sprawl, Interstate highways, economic and cultural shifts, and the predatory, monopolistic practices of Wal-Mart. As Thomas Frank pointed out in his new Wall Street Journal column, policies that kill small towns have been an intregal part of the Republican Party of John Sidney McCain III.

Yet the exurb vs. small town issue doesn’t stop there.

I’ve lived in a real small town, at the time unspoiled by the automobile, so there’s no need to romanticize it. This one had once been a "sundown town" — as in, blacks couldn’t live there. Nearby were two small towns where lynchings had occurred in living memory. Yet what a place to learn. Every part of the human condition is on display at close range. I saw no more honesty, sincerity and dignity there than in the city.

At its best, however, the real American small town tended to reinforce values about the common good. The stores clustered on Main Street were locally owned, with owners whose livelihood was tied to the health of the community. People knew their neighbors and saw each other, especially on Saturdays when the farmers came into town — rather than just driving past each other. People of all classes, and often races, lived near each other, and reached their working and living agreements together. People could walk.

In reality, of course, many American small towns had been dying for decades as the nation became more urban, as industry demanded the clustering of workers and opportunities were broader in the cities. "How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Par-ee," they sang in World War I. Yet presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan came from authentic small towns, and that experience informed some of their best intentions. (On the other hand, the cosmopolitan patrician Franklin Roosevelt did more to actually help small towns). Now many small towns hang on, some with yupped up artsy downtowns, most ruined by the Wal-Mart cluster out on the edge of town.

Sarah Palin is from exurbia, the sprawl beyond the sprawl that Republicans tapped to, perhaps, win the 2004 presidential election. Exurbia, even more than suburbia, is by its nature the mirror opposite of a small town. It is sprawling, lacks a center or soul, tends to be adamantly against civic design or planning, and is highly exclusionary, especially based on class and income. It is Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort up close. Thus, in Columbia, S.C., the state capital, you have a city that is 49 percent white. Yet the fast-growing nearby exurb of Lexington County is 83 percent white. And so it goes around the country.

They are also usually totally car dependent. And even with their homogenity, many exurbs have serious crime and social problems, yet lack the resources to address them. Many exurbs are heavily tribal in religious affiliation (e.g. Gilbert,
Ariz.). Many are zoned to limit public spaces and seek to limit
social services, so their problem individuals end up in center cities.

The people who live in exurbs — to use a broad brush — tend to vote Republican.  Democrats are trying to get traction in these places — because the exurbs will be as screwed as any of us by the malpractice of the past eight years. But can they do it with a black candidate?

Of course, many Americans seem to live in their heads. They live in a suburb where individual car trips are necessary for everything. But in their heads, they live in the small town on television. Or they get their urban fix by watching television. It’s an amazing placelessness.

The problem with Palin’s exurban background is that it makes her ignorant of, and hostile to, the 21st century urban solutions that are needed in the places where most Americans live, both cities and suburbs. The exurban mindset is unleashed individuality, don’t fence me in, the hunter and gatherer that moves on when the camp is ruined, and, of course, tax cuts. (Metro Phoenix, call your office). Exurbia tends to be a drag on a state or county’s infrastructure, even as the developers behind it make big profits and pass along the public costs to everyone, and to the future. Its proponents trumpet the free choice to live in "unspoiled" places using economic arguments — yet they don’t factor in either the large public costs, subsidies in the form of freeways to exurbia, or the economic value of lost farmland, forests or ecosystem.

No wonder exurbia is ground zero of the mortgage disaster. It is being hurt by high gas prices and lack of transit or Amtrak service. Just wait. The crisis will only get worse. But the exurban sense of individual entitlement, the Randian demand for no common connections or obligations — again, broad brush — will make solutions impossible. Real small towns will have a much better future.