Not So Wonderful Now

To some extent, this retrenchment will be healthy. If Americans invest slightly more of their savings in retirement accounts and slightly less in real estate, so much the better for all concerned. If they buy more Ford Focuses than Jeep Grand Cherokees, it's good news for the environment and for highway safety. So, too, with McMansions: A return to smaller, less-meretricious homes will be a victory for both energy efficiency and good taste. And as someone who lives in one of those mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, I'm not going to deny that they have their charms.

But the fact that Baileyism may have gone too far doesn't meant that the Bailey vision isn't worth defending in the long run. Even once the current economic crisis is behind us, a variety of 21st-century challenges -- energy shortages, wage stagnation and family breakdown -- are likely to make the traditional suburban dream increasingly difficult to afford, both for working-class Americans and for the country as a whole. To let it slip away entirely, though, in the name of efficiencies environmental and economic, would mean giving up something that's uniquely precious about American life.

At it worst, suburbia is garish, wasteful and alienating. But there's a reason George Bailey's vision won out over Mr. Potter's. It offered the average American something no country on Earth had ever offered its citizens before -- the promise of an equality rooted in ownership, a citizenship rooted in self-sufficiency and an entrepreneurial spirit rooted in security. America has a higher birthrate than other Western societies; we take more economic risks; our patriotism, our optimism and our willingness to volunteer and give to charity exceed what you find in Canada and Europe. And our exceptionalism begins at home, in a way of life that we take for granted. It's easy to forget what a hard-won achievement something as simple as a private backyard or a spare bedroom looks like in the sweep of human history.

"Doesn't it make them better citizens?" Bailey asked, pitching his fellow businessmen on the idea that even the poor deserve a chance at picket fences. "Doesn't it make them better customers?"

The principle may have been applied too promiscuously, but the answer still is, "Yes."

rossdouthat@gmail.com

Ross Douthat is the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream."