Saturday, September 13, 2014

Why Progressives are Doomed: The Automobile

The New York Time's "Upshot" wrote an excellent piece of hopelessness for Progressives in the USA on September 6th:

Why Democrats Will Be (at best) Obstructed for the Foreseeable Future

The use of geography is a sorely lacking and needed analytical tool. Gerrymandering has a Republican Party bias.

The future of the US, if there is a future, will be defined as a struggle between a progressive and dynamic metro-urban culture; and a frightened, selfish, anti-social, regressive, materialistic periphery, both 'rural' and 'exurban.'

What is missing from Mr. Cohn's excellent piece is the role of automobile culture in this battle.
It simply wouldn't happen without it.

Massively funded freeways, cheap gas, ever increasing (ignored) speed 'limits,' node-less, sprawling development including 'white' collar office space with sterile 'lifestyle' centers preserve a culture of TV watching after driving a car all day. Opinions, experience and knowledge are gained behind a full frontal garage door or in a zoned (shopping center) by pop media and pop news media, sports bars, and factory food based on interstate corn products. Walking is for losers, (often killed for it) and cycling is done on the weekends, only for sport on park trails. Suburbs and exurbs battle each other for tax money and dump lawn fertilizer waste and auto/petrol runoff 'downstream.'

This system of material achievement and valuation, celebrated in movies and gaming, cannot exist without the automobile.

It Won't End Pretty

"But the schools..." Oh yeah. I forgot about the schools!

Outside of perpetuating the values I listed above, I learned nothing in these schools.


If there's any hope to be had, we must work to at least make our cities, or small towns, (if you prefer it) livable again, promoting walkable, socially healthy, commercially viable mixed use neighborhoods.



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