Yet the Kerry camp and the Democratic Party leadership seem unruffled. In most of the country, such developments might have local elites in a state of panic. In the Bay State, though, the loss of middle-class families "is not defined as a problem," says Goodman.
This, suggests Doug Fisher, head of economic development for Northeast Utilities, a regional power company, is because things are generally jim-dandy for the hip-ocracy who now dominate the state's Democratic Party. Today, New England elites talk not about new jobs and opportunities, but about how rich those who can still afford to live there are becoming. The soaring housing prices chasing the middle class out of the state have proven a huge windfall for the Harvard professors who bought their homes a decade ago. "The real argument here is between jobs and income," suggests Fisher. "We still have plenty of money, and that's all that people think matters. We are becoming an economic-development cul-de-sac, and a lot of people like that."
The Post's opinion and commentary section runs every Sunday.
• Outlook Section
| | |
|
Although the number of Massachusetts natives earning associate and bachelor's degrees has been dropping, there are still plenty of wealthy people around the world willing to pay huge bucks to get their offspring into Harvard. Not surprisingly, Harvard faculty are the second-largest source of direct campaign funds from employees -- behind the massive University of California faculty -- to the Kerry campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington.
The economic attitudes of these intellectual elites may help explain why the Democratic Party today can no longer do a convincing job of "feeling the pain" of the middle class. It also suggests a disconnect between the Democrats and those very places where Americans now go for opportunity.
It's possible that younger educated workers moving to "retro" country will import "metro" values and expand the blue areas into the red countryside. This is already happening in places such as Raleigh-Durham and Austin. Yet for every one of these much-ballyhooed pockets of retro-state sophistications, there may be many others that are filling even more rapidly with a different population. Even in Midwest "swing states" such as Ohio, the counties gaining population are peripheral suburbs, places where both the newly affluent and the lower middle class are heading. These areas, according to demographer Frey, have been adding population over the past three years at a rate of 2 percent annually, compared with virtually no growth in the established metro areas and even declines in the urban core. Most are solidly, and increasingly, Republican.
But it's not on purely economic issues that the Democrats fail to reach such voters. Suburban dwellers in states from Maryland to New Jersey to New Mexico increasingly see liberal politicians criticizing precisely the places where they are moving. Democrats want to attack suburban sprawl with policies that often drive housing prices out of reach. Look at Portland, Ore., where highly touted "urban growth boundaries" have by many accounts raised housing prices so high that people are fleeing across the Columbia River to Washington state.
In Albuquerque, some city leaders, chiefly Democrats , recently proposed discouraging front garages and backyards -- centerpieces of the middle-class American dream -- in future developments, hoping to further limit new growth of cheaper, "sprawl"-like housing in the largely Latino and working-class city. As a result, most jobs and many upwardly mobile people have been migrating beyond city limits to sprawling, less picky places such as neighboring Rio Rancho.
If the Democrats want to keep the "party of the people" label, they shouldn't be furthering policies that make it harder for people to fulfill the dream of owning a house -- with a yard and decent schools -- in the name of the environment or of preserving "authenticity," both frequently cited by anti-sprawl politicos. They would do well to remember the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman may privately have thought industrialized cities and dustbowl towns were crummy places to live, but they still fashioned their economic appeals to people who lived there.
Democrats could think about offering a muscular economic policy that deals with the real problems suburbanites face -- crime, increasingly congested roads, lack of vocational education for the children who won't be attending college but aren't destined for jail. And most of all, they could address the reasons -- the lack of decent schools, middle-class housing options or the erosion of middle-income jobs -- that are driving so many Americans to the "retro" states or leading them to desert the blue cities for the redder outer suburbs.
Ultimately, the answer to the Democratic Party's democratic deficit won't be found among the dons in Cambridge, the patricians on Beacon Hill or the celebrities in Malibu. It will be found in identifying and understanding the strivings of middle-class people living in unfashionable tract suburbs, working-class city neighborhoods and small towns across the country. Until the Democrats find a way to connect with these people, they will find their own fortunes receding in the face of an enormous field of opportunity.
Author's e-mail: jkotkin@pacbell.net
Joel Kotkin is an Irvine Fellow with the New America Foundation. He is the author of "The City: A Global History," to be published by Modern Library early next year.
