More than 220 years ago, a bunch of antitax rebels threw tea into Boston Harbor. In Election '94, the American middle class proved just as revolutionary. In race after race, from Senate and House seats to the statehouses, voters tossed overboard those perceived to be inattentive to their principal concerns -- too much crime, too much government and too little competence, too much permissiveness -- and rewarded politicians with records of achievement or the promise of it. Just look at the governors who were re-elected: William Weld of Massachusetts, George Voinovich of Ohio, John Engler of Michigan, Lawton Chiles of Florida. Each has demonstrated that innovation and government are not bitter enemies.
But an even better metaphor for what is happening in American politics now is the mayoral elections of recent years. The results in big cities, closest to the people and their needs, suggest a developing political pragmatism that stretches beyond race or party. Voters in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia and New York have opted for candidates who convey competence and can-do attitudes -- in some cases, tossing out black mayors for white ones. The same attitude has obtained in the choice of black mayors elected in recent years in cities like Seattle, Denver and Minneapolis -- all with predominantly white populations. What the voters want is simple: They want mayors who they feel will do more about crime, improve public education and the quality of life, and not divert scarce resources from the average taxpayer to illegal immigrants, welfare recipients and other beneficiaries of expensive social programs.
The history of urban life over the past 50 years reflects this same American pragmatism and the same pursuit of a better life. Cities once offered better schools, jobs, housing, less violence and more culture than the suburbs did. Today, city dwellers feel trapped in a downward spiral of drugs, crime, AIDS, welfare, homelessness and collapsing neighborhoods. When the dream of American city life turned into a nightmare, those who could afford to -- black and white alike -- fled by the millions. Today a majority of more affluent and middle-class Americans live in the suburbs. Suburbia has come to symbolize America more than do baseball, skyscrapers and apple pie. The features are apparent: Some 65 percent of families own their own dwellings, two thirds of them single-family homes surrounded by a yard. With shopping malls, manufacturing jobs, corporate offices and entertainment complexes, the suburbs are no longer sub to the urb.
An even more dramatic demonstration of the loss of faith in government and the city is the trend, particularly in Sun Belt states, to the fortress suburb. These gated communities, whether oriented to retirees, the wealthy, or young, two-income families, regard security as paramount: They seek to provide protection against everything from annoying canvassers and mischievous teenagers to menacing strangers and violent criminals.
The fortress suburb says a lot about the retreat from hope. Two years ago the Democrats and the man from Hope, Bill Clinton, promised that the decline of the cities -- indeed, of civil life -- would be halted and reversed. Today most voters do not believe them. They are unwilling to spend billions of dollars in taxes on social programs that do not seem to work and seem only to transfer money from middle-class taxpayers to tax consumers. The major fault lines of American society -- rich and poor, black and white, conservative and liberal, native-born and foreign-born -- run along those invisible but critical boundaries that separate U.S. cities from their suburbs. The result is an increasingly alienated society experiencing a deepening hostility toward those public officials who have failed to address their fundamental concerns.
The election results are not a panacea but a cry of pain. Political leaders who have survived, Republican and Democrat, will not find an easy answer to the complex and disturbing trends of economic hardship, the dissolution of family life and family values, crime and the erosion of the American dream. If our political leaders unite, there may be some hope, since America is a resilient, inventive society. But if partisan politics continue to prevail, the rot will continue eating away at the soul of the country.
