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The “burning of the cities” in the 1960s continues to haunt conservatives. When they’re not concerned with “drowning government,” something’s “burning.” The latest iteration is a screed in the National Review by one Stanley Kurtz who’s trying to convince himself that the heir of the burning cities now has his eye on the suburbs.

Frankly, I don’t intend to even read the whole thing, but the first paragraph of “Burn Down the Suburbs?” seems worth dissecting.

President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs.

That’s probably a true statement. Democrats, by and large, are not fans. And, if the statistical data are at all valid, the suburbs are being abandoned by the youth in droves. Spending many hours of every day in cages on wheels that have to be driven by oneself is not attractive to people who grew up being either car-pooled or bussed. So, the cities are filling back up. This is, of course, worrisome because many people living close together are hard to control.

Indeed, he intends to abolish them.

The hubris this sentence implies would be mind-boggling, if we didn’t remember that conservatives routinely take the intent for the act. So, what Obama intends doesn’t really matter because there’s no expectation it will get done. The intention is what’s important, if people are to be frightened, and scaring people is important, ’cause misery loves company.

With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny.

Surely, the “swing constituency” is not going to be relocated to the urbs by November! So, the agitation in the run-up to the 2012 election seems sort of strange.

Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most public school systems already regional to take advantages of economies of scale? Never mind that there’s a big difference between incorporating suburbs into cities and merging service delivery systems. And consolidating tax collection by instituting a financial transaction tax makes a lot of sense. There’s an old saying that “the piper calls the tune,” but that only counts if the fiddler knows how to play. The paymaster has long stopped being determinative of what gets done. Which is why the kerfuffle over Obamacare is so much hot air.

To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term.

This sentence is just plain false. The President of the United States does not design nor put social programs in place. That’s the function of the Congress. It may be a conservative wet dream that the President is a dictator designated by a popular vote, instead of hereditary DNA or a military coup, but the fact is that the executive can only carry out programs the Congress authorizes and funds. Conservatives should look to their representatives on Capitol Hill for a redress of grievances.

The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.

This sentence merely echoes the “designed to fail” theme that characterizes conservative ruminations. Threatening the impossible works so well because the inevitable failure will be welcome by all.

However, it’s just possible that Kurtz is announcing a new focus in the ongoing saga of segregation. If migrants can’t be separated from “traditional” Americans, and if married people refuse to be segregated by gender or from the interests of single people, who were, are going to be, or don’t want to be married, and brown people can’t be segregated from white people, then maybe urbanites can be segregated from suburbanites. After all, there just absolutely has to be some criterion by which to divide people into groups. Groupists, they need to have a group to which they belong in order to know who they are. What’s strange is that groupists insist that independence and individualism is their goal.

Monica Smith

Monica Smith writes Hannah's Blog. Born in Germany, she came to the United States as a child, living first in California, then after an interval in Chile, in New York. Married to a retired professor at the University of Florida, where she lived for 17 years, she moved to St. Simons Island, Georgia, in 1993 and now divides her time between Georgia and New Hampshire. (New Hampshire, she says, is always interesting during a presidential election.) She and her husband have three children and five grandchildren. Ms. Smith says she "learned long ago that I am not a good team player when I got hired at the Library of Congress, fresh out of college with a degree in political science and proficiency in four foreign languages, to 'edit' library cards and informed my supervisor that if she was going to insist I punch the clock exactly on time, my productivity was going to fall from being the highest to being the same as everyone else's. The supervisor opted to assign me to another building where there was no time-clock. After I had the first of our three children, I decided a paycheck wasn't worth the hassle."

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