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The American Divide

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  • The American Divide

    Old Article i've posted before, but don't think new ppl have seen. Hope it helps foreigners understand the differences:
    POLITICALLY, the United States is split down the middle these days. The dead-heat presidential election of 2000 followed congressional elections in 1996 and 1998 which were also, in effect, drawn by the two main parties. The Republicans and the Democrats are now preparing for next year's elections in the belief that the outcomes could be just as close.

    What does this deep, central division mean? Are the voters split between yin and yang? Masculine, feminine? Mars, Venus? The Economist thought an answer might be found by looking at a leading member of each party and, perhaps more revealingly, at the districts that send them to the House of Representatives in Washington, the chamber the Founding Fathers designed to be closest to popular opinion.

    In the House, Dennis Hastert is the Republican speaker, Nancy Pelosi the leader of the Democratic minority. Mr Hastert, a hulking former wrestling coach, is a fairly straightforward conservative: he is against abortion, gay marriage, the Kyoto protocol; for the invasion of Iraq, the death penalty. Ms Pelosi, a tiny bird-like woman, is an unabashed, card-carrying liberal.


    The districts they represent provide an even bigger contrast. Remember those maps of the 2000 election that divided America into the “red” states that voted for George Bush and the “blue” states that voted for Al Gore? Ms Pelosi's district, California's eighth, is more or less coterminous with San Francisco, the bluest, most liberal city in America. Mr Hastert's district, Illinois's 14th, is deep scarlet. It begins in the suburbs 30 miles (50km) west of the Chicago Loop, and then stretches out through miles of cornfields to a point just 40 miles short of the Iowa border.

    It has a good claim to being the most Republican district in the country, at least if you factor in length of loyalty. The Republican Party has a strong southern flavour at present, but states such as Texas and Georgia have turned red only in the past decade or so. Illinois has been full of Republicans since the Grand Old Party was founded in 1854. The district contains many of the GOP's greatest landmarks, from memorials to Union soldiers killed in the civil war to Ronald Reagan's birthplace.

    Ms Pelosi's district used to be Republican, too: all San Francisco's mayors from 1912 to the mid-1960s were Republican. But today the city competes with next-door Berkeley for the title of America's most Democratic enclave: 56% of registered voters are Democrats and only 12% Republican. San Francisco does not elect a single Republican official. The president of the city's Board of Supervisors is a member of the Green Party, as are three of the seven members of the school board.

    The two places are very different. San Francisco is part of vertical America, a land of soaring skyscrapers and high-density living. Mr Hastert's district is part of horizontal America. The same goes for the people. In Illinois a broad girth is a sign of health. In San Francisco even the chefs are thin. San Francisco is a mixture of blue-bloods and gays, dotcom millionaires and ageing hippies. Mr Hastert's district is resolutely ordinary. Locals think of themselves as typical Americans, and their geographical vision is often bounded by the Great Plains that surround them.

    Not surprisingly, the two districts have totally different attitudes to growth. San Francisco is a strikingly beautiful city, famous for its precipitous hills, the Golden Gate bridge and the mists that roll in to keep it, as the saying goes, air-conditioned by God. With the sea on three sides, it has grown in size over the years without losing its human scale. Though in many respects a small town, it also has the amenities of civilised life, from decent museums to fine restaurants. Mr Hastert's district is flat and boring, culturally as well as physically.

    Yet Mr Hastert's district is growing while Ms Pelosi's is stagnating. New houses march like a vast army resolutely westward across the Great Plains, from Chicago to rural towns such as Yorkville, where Mr Hastert taught, and Dixon, where Ronald Reagan spent much of his boyhood. And behind the houses are all the accoutrements of suburban boom time: huge schools and giant shopping malls. The high-school where Mr Hastert once taught has doubled in size since he entered politics in 1980. The main roads are lined by row upon row of shopping malls, each filled with superstores that seem bent on testing to the limit the principle of economies of scale.

    San Francisco, by contrast, is anti-growth. Whenever it has looked as though its expansion might become dramatic—as in the 1970s and the 1990s—anti-growth activists have come up with referendums to squelch it. They say the city cannot expand without sacrificing its legendary beauty: 777,000 people are enough for a bit of hilly land that occupies just 47 square miles (122 sq km) at the tip of a peninsula.

    Well, maybe. Much of San Francisco is indeed stunning, but some would profit from redevelopment. A lot of the city's housing consists of nondescript houses and some districts, particularly south of Market Street, are downright tawdry. At least part of the anti-growth lobby seems more concerned with thumbing its nose at business than with preserving the past. Conservationists recently celebrated their success in stopping a developer from doing up the city's old armoury, which is becoming increasingly decrepit.

    The second big difference between the two districts lies in the relative importance attached to family life. Most of the people flocking to Mr Hastert's district are doing so for one reason: to bring up their children. They want space to build big houses, as well as freedom from the drawbacks of urban life, particularly crime. In upmarket St Charles 85% of people own their own homes; even in meat-and-potatoes Elgin, home ownership runs to 70-75%.

    In the first half of the 20th century, San Francisco was one of the most family-friendly cities in the country, with magnificent parks and schools and an abundant supply of family houses. One of America's most popular radio programmes between 1932 and 1959, “One Man's Family”, was a hymn to the joys of bringing up a family in the shadow of the Golden Gate bridge. But San Francisco now has one of the lowest proportions of families with children in the country (it has more dogs than children, say some). Almost 70% of the population is single. This is not just because the city is the capital of gay America. San Francisco also has lots of young singles, and of older people living alone.

    Both the property market and the school system discourage families. Only 35% of San Franciscans own their own houses, compared with a national average of 70%. At the same time, rent control both freezes rental housing and institutionalises an anti-growth mentality. The public-school system is strained both by high immigration—half the city's schoolchildren speak a language other than English at home—and by poor management. Most middle-class people either send their children to private schools or move out.

    There is also a class difference. Mr Hastert's district is as resolutely middle-class as it is cheerfully mid-American. A few businessmen live in multi-million-dollar houses, and send their children to private schools. But most people send their children to public schools, shop in giant shopping malls and eat in chain restaurants. The region's varied economy means that you do not need a higher degree to get ahead: people do well in farms and factories as well as in office suites. And the almost universal commitment to the public schools reinforces the sense of equality. Sue Klinkhamer, the mayor of St Charles, points out that her local school district is so big that people living on fairly modest incomes can send their children to the same schools as do millionaires.

    San Francisco is both higher- and lower-class. The city is home to some of the richest people in the country, many of them, like the Hearsts, Haases and Crockers, the heirs to rather than the creators of huge fortunes. It also has a disproportionate number of single professionals with big disposable incomes. Yet it is also host to one of the country's biggest concentrations of homeless people. Over 8,000 of them, perhaps twice that number, many drug-addicted or mentally ill, live on the streets. “A mixture of Carmel and Calcutta”, is the verdict of Kevin Starr, California's state librarian, on his native city.

    The contrast extends to the two districts' representatives. Mr Hastert taught history and politics, and coached wrestlers, at Yorkville high-school for 16 years (his wife, Jean, taught PE there for 36 years). He is passionate about old cars, sport and farming. Ms Pelosi, by contrast, is blue-blooded. Both her father and her brother were mayors of her native Baltimore. She was taken under the wing of another political dynasty: the Burtons of San Francisco. Her husband is a leading businessman, and the Pelosis are a fixture on the San Francisco social and cultural scene.

    Not surprisingly, the political cultures of the two districts are totally at odds with one another. Mr Hastert's district is a place where even Democrats profess affection for Mr Bush. Ms Pelosi's district is a place where Mark Leno, the state assemblyman for eastern San Francisco, can find himself labelled a “conservative”, even though he favours “transgendered rights” and the legalisation of cannabis for medical use.

    It is not just ideology. San Francisco is a city of political activists. Cecil Williams, a “minister of liberation” who runs Glide Memorial Church in the heart of the Tenderloin district, boasts that “We don't just do one kind of [political] demonstration here, man. We do them all.” San Francisco saw some of America's biggest public protests against the war with Iraq. Activists tend to attribute the locals' readiness to get involved in politics to their high level of education: over half the population have either graduate or post-graduate degrees. Others think it has more to do with the fact that government is the biggest local employer. Public-sector unions are stalwarts of the Democratic Party's left wing.

    Alas, political activism does not necessarily make for a well-run city. San Francisco's political arrangements are dysfunctional. Power is divided between a mayor and a Board of Supervisors who are often at loggerheads. The 11 supervisors are elected by districts rather than the whole city, an arrangement that encourages parochialism. Add to this the local fondness for ballot initiatives—referendums, recalls—and you have a formula for gridlock.

    The situation in Illinois is exactly the opposite. People will turn up for the occasional rally, say, to commemorate September 11th. Plenty of them are angry about the high level of property taxes. But they do not really care. The staff who look after Mr Hastert's farm while he is away have so far refused all his invitations to make their first visit to Washington, DC. Yet local politics seems to work pretty well. The streets are clean. The schools are successful. The mayors of blue-collar Aurora and Elgin have done much to regenerate their cities.

    Two other differences in values are striking. The first concerns religion. Mr Hastert's district is building new churches or expanding old ones. In the Chicago suburbs some churches have thousands of members. Out in the sticks, some small towns have seven churches and just one bar. San Francisco, by contrast, has been closing churches for years. There was a time when the Roman Catholic archbishop was one of the most powerful political figures in town. Today he is not merely a marginal figure in a largely secular city, but also just one voice amid a religious cacophony that praises everything from Buddhism to the Church of Satan.

    Then there are the two districts' attitudes to social disorder. Mr Hastert's district is meticulously well kept. The mayor of St Charles says she recently received a call complaining about cobwebs on a local bridge. She had them removed that day.

    San Francisco's army of homeless can give it a medieval feel. Beggars line the streets and doss in doorways. Deranged unfortunates roam free. The United Nations fountain in the Civic Centre had to be walled off recently because it was being used as a public lavatory. The homeless get a monthly stipend from the city and state governments, and free food from religious groups. A recent ballot initiative to give street people care rather than cash was struck down on a legal technicality, though the voters had approved it.

    Two rather nuanced lessons can be drawn from Pelosiville and Hastertland. One involves partisanship. The gulf between Illinois's 14th district and California's eighth helps explain why competition in America's political system is becoming fiercer at the national level. Fifty years ago the differences between the country's two, relatively unideological, parties seemed small. Now they gape wide. Against this, however, the partisanship that so poisons the atmosphere in Washington, DC, does not always extend to local politics. Though the two districts could not be more different, in both of them the two parties rub along pretty well.

    The bigger lesson has to do with America's political future, not just nationally but also internationally. Most foreigners are at ease in Ms Pelosi's America. They know San Francisco from films or even personal experience: tourism has been the city's biggest industry since the early 1960s. Europeans, in particular, feel at home with the city's compact structure, leftish politics and permissive atmosphere. Mr Hastert's America, on the other hand, is a mystery.

    Yet most of America's growth is coming from places like Mr Hastert's district. The proportion of Americans living in suburbs has risen from just under a quarter in 1950 to more than half today. And increasingly people work in the suburbs as well as live in them: Joel Kotkin, of Pepperdine University, points out that suburbia accounts for 57% of office space in the country and 90% of new office building. Suburbanites prefer Republican to Democratic policies by a 15-point margin, according to Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster.

    But just as you imagine that the Republican Party's triumph is as inevitable as the onward march of McMansions and shopping malls, the picture clouds. The Democrats have been gaining ground in Mr Hastert's district. The refugees from Chicago are not as reliably Republican as rural types. Many are unhappy with the GOP's religious wing and its intolerant views on abortion. The district has also seen a huge growth in its Latino population. It is perhaps a warning to Republicans that Mr Reagan's boyhood home town, Dixon, now has a Democratic mayor, albeit one who voted for Mr Reagan and describes Mr Bush as “a great human being”.

    The Democratic Party has been doing even better in Illinois as a whole. Having voted Republican in every presidential election between 1968 and 1988, Illinois went Democratic in 1992. Al Gore won the state by 12 points in 2000. Two years later the GOP lost control of both the governorship, for the first time in 26 years, and the state Senate, for the first time in ten. Helped by the state Republican Party's corruption and incompetence, the Democrats are plainly in full contention.

    But if the Democratic Party as a whole is not necessarily doomed in suburban America, the San Francisco version of the party assuredly is. Democrats can survive in the land of mega malls only if they make their peace with mainstream America—if, that is, they adjust to the priorities of people who own their own homes and go to church on Sunday.

    It is possible to imagine voters in districts such as Mr Hastert's returning a Democrat. But it is impossible to imagine them sending their sympathies to the French consulate during the recent row between America and France, or tolerating an invasion of beggars. Whether America becomes more Republican is debatable; there seems little doubt that it will become more conservative, and less cosmopolitan. In the long term that may have more profound implications for America's relations with the rest of the world than any little disagreement about Iraq.
    http://www.economist.com/World/na/di...ory_id=2313020
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