It’s a little past midnight here in the rolling hunt country of Dutchess County where the Catskills guard the path of the Hudson down to the narrows at West Point. The leaves are beginning to turn this high and this far north; the dry summer didn’t help, and even though the days can still be hot the nights are getting a little crisp and the early color gives the landscape a distinctively autumnal cast. The farmers’ markets feature apples, cider, pumpkins and Indian corn — there does not yet seem to be a movement to rename it Native American or First American corn, but I suppose we should be patient. It will come in due course.
It has been hard to blog this week. Not that there isn’t plenty to blog about: for one thing there’s the chilling portrait of an administration at war in the Woodward book. Bob Woodward is a lot more confident than I am that washing an administration’s dirty linen in the middle of an ongoing war can help us to win or support the troops, but it obviously works for him. I may be old fashioned about this; , but wartime presidents deserve to have their policy advice, and their reactions to it, kept confidential. We should judge President Obama’s policy in Afghanistan by the consequences. The President should have either kept Mr. Woodward out of the White House or gotten him to agree to delay publication until after the 2012 election.
There’s other bloggable news as well. The half-dead Democrats seem to be stirring a little in the national polls; the generic Republican lead in the Realclearpolitics.com poll average has fallen from seven percent to three and, despite the surprising surge of good news for Republicans here in New York, the GOP problems in Alaska and Delaware might — might — put the Senate out of reach. The Castro brothers have said and done some of the most unexpected things in decades and the A-jad has brought his best game to the UN. Overall the state of Delaware has been pulling its weight in the news department this week. We seem to have our first openly ex-Wiccan senatorial candidate ever, the Vice-President is saying bad things about the President’s special Afpak envoy, and the sin of Onan (Gen. 38:8-10) has made it back into politics for the first time since Jocelyn Elders made some ill-advised remarks on the subject at the United Nations back in 1994.
I will be getting to some of the non-Delaware blogging subjects in the next few days, I hope, but my life has been revolving around the surprisingly complicated transition that takes place when a New Yorker steps out of the city for more than a long weekend. Cars, for example: who knew? I’m very happy with the car I bought, and gasoline only seems outrageously priced to me because I have bought very little of it in the US since Jimmy Carter left the White House.
No, what has surprised me about the world of car ownership is how radically it changes your relationship to the state. Back in my old free-wheeling days in glamorous Queens, I bought a Metrocard once a month, and other than the occasional late night cab, my transportation problems were solved. For less than ninety dollars a month I had unlimited access to bus and subway service that is, all things considered, pretty darn good. It has, for example, been years since I saw a rat in a subway car as opposed to frolicking on the tracks.
But with a car, your relationship with the government changes — fast. Between re-organizing my insurance, registering on-line for EZ-Pass to make it easier and faster to pay the unconscionable tolls this rapacious, mismanaged and corruptly-governed state charges on its bridges and highways, straightening out arcane clerical errors in various bureaucracies relating to the business of registering a vehicle in New York, I have had a busy time. (I am trying not to think about what it will be like to deal with a government run health care system if we ever truly go down that dark route.)
It feels as if power has shifted from me to the state. I need that car to make my weekly rounds; that means that I must comply with whatever regulations and laws the government chooses to enforce. Like a trembling serf confronting an armed knight, I have no choice but to pay any and all car and gasoline fees, tolls and taxes the notoriously crooked and incompetent pols in Albany choose to impose. Although I travel farther and more freely than I did on my Metrocard, I am spending much more money on transportation than I used to, and it feels as if the government is taking a substantial cut at every turn. True, I have the benefit of all those government built and maintained roads, yet traffic on them is a lot more congested than it was back in the Carter years. Somehow, the burden of government chafes more out here in the wilds than it did back in Queens.
The truth of course is that back in the city I was benefiting from government subsidies — just as I am when I decide to take Amtrak up the Hudson rather than make the drive. The federal government and New York state were very obligingly keeping my fares lower than the true cost of the service provided. Like all New Yorkers I complained bitterly about poor service on these subsidized transit networks, and even today it irks me that Amtrak doesn’t have free wireless on the Hudson valley route the way it does on the Boston-New York-Washington run. Why, I can’t help but wonder, are those taxpayers in Iowa and those other deathly dull flyover states so mingy? Don’t they understand how helpful it is for me to have free wireless on the train? What is wrong with them anyway? Are they greedy anti-environmentalists, or just ignorant and blind?
Not that I’m anti-car. There’s a reason why billions of people all over the world are doing everything they can to get some wheels of their own. But I’m beginning to understand why so many city mice are more pro-big government than their country cousins. In New York City I was much more dependent on the services government provides the inhabitants of a densely packed metropolitan center — and yet I encountered fewer frustrating manifestations of government power in my day-to-day life. When something went wrong with the transit system, I tended to blame the selfish out-of-town taxpayers who wouldn’t fork over the cash the city needed to make my morning ride a little smoother. Now, paying gas taxes, a ghastly level of sales tax, and car registration and EZ Pass toll charges every time I turn around, it’s harder to convince me that what government needs is more of my money — or more regulations and bureaucratic labyrinths to eat up my time.
I suppose what I’m doing is retracing on a personal level the Great Migration of Americans from the cities to the suburbs and exurbs after World War Two. A nation of subway and tram riders turned into a nation of motorists — and gradually lost its taste for Progressive era reforms. City dwellers know they need the state; there was no way I could commute by car to Manhattan and find parking at a reasonable time or cost. The government stepped in to help me with subsidized mass transit. Suburban and exurban people aren’t so sure about the government’s role. Out here, I want government to do its job and fix the roads, but otherwise stay out of my hair — and stop wasting my time and taking my money.
As long ago as the Kennedy administration, John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out in The Affluent Society that the rising affluence of the suburban American middle class was weaning people away from the New Deal state — or as I’ve called it in earlier posts, the Blue Model. As Americans get more affluent, Galbraith warned his fellow liberals, they begin to prefer tax cuts to deficit spending as a form of economic stimulus. When people are dependent on government services, they naturally want more — especially so when times are hard. But when they get a very little richer, they often start to think that they could get more relief from their problems if the government would just stop taking their money away. If I’m starving, I want more food stamps. If I’m doing a little bit better, I want you to cut my taxes so I can afford more and better food at the market on my own.
The shift from the world of Norton, Ralph, Trixie and Alice to the world of Ferris Bueller or even Roseanne is changing the way the country thinks about government. My own little migration up the Hudson River is helping me understand why.
In the first half of the twentieth century, urbanization looked like the wave of the future. As the incomes of small farmers dropped and jobs opened up in manufacturing, Americans — white and black — moved from the country to the city, where they joined the immigrants flooding into the country before the immigration reforms of the early 1920s. The Progressive movement in politics was a predominantly urban movement for a predominantly urban nation. The suburbanization of the United States began in the early 1950s and by the 1960s the suburbs were challenging the cities as the place where most Americans live. These days America is not so much suburban as post-urban: exurbs and edge cities are once again changing the country’s demographics and the internet and cheap telecommunications are bringing rural areas into the mainstream in new ways.
A post-urban nation is looking for post-progressive politics. I don’t think we’ve found the answers yet, but if history teaches us one thing, it is that we shouldn’t underestimate the political creativity and, ultimately, the common sense of the American people. In the meantime, this particular country mouse will continue with the complicated task of getting the post office, the registry of motor vehicles and my insurance company to issue all the documents and papers I need to manage my suddenly more adventurous, wide ranging and post-urban life. Let’s hope I don’t have to spend all my blogging time filling out forms.