A tribe, or a way of being?

[thefuturemesozoic]

Ten years ago, I moved to Austin from the Boston area, partly to escape the cold and partly out of a vague sense that I would benefit from a change of pace. I was moving from a place with a relatively stable population to a place that was rapidly changing. Anchored by the state capital and by the University of Texas at Austin, the UT system's flagship campus, Austin has been experiencing rapid growth since its inception. In 1980, the city had a population of around 350,000. Today, its population is over 900,000 (though some of this growth has come from annexation, rather than migration). The city has often been considered a liberal oasis within a conservative state, and, at the same time, our growth has created some challenges and resulted in some tension. Our local politics features divisions not so much between Democrats vs. Republicans as between people favoring differing approaches regarding the city's growth. I feel that observing local politics leads to some insights into who we are as people.

For the most part, progressive Austinites are happy with the changes that have been happening at the national level--same-sex marriage being legalized, attention being paid to institutional racism (even if there is still a long way to go in that regard), and so on. On the whole, however, we are much less enthusiastic about change at the local level. We feel that growth has resulted in increased congestion and housing becoming more expensive. Neighborhoods where lower-income people of color have traditionally lived are being taken over by higher-income whites, many of whom are themselves priced out of the neighborhoods where middle-income whites have been able to live in the past. We have a vague feeling that Austin has been losing its soul. For many long-time residents, it just doesn't feel like the city they moved to and fell in love with many years ago. Of course, not all change is the same, and it is understandable that a given person would embrace change in one context while cursing it in another context. It does, however, suggest that a given person can be tolerant of differences in some contexts but not others, as will be discussed later on.

As a city, we view immigrants positively. We proudly stand against our Governor's efforts to cooperate with the Trump administration. We understand, intuitively, that immigrants strengthen our society and that they mostly want the same things out of life that we want. In terms of newcomers to our city, however, our attitudes are more varied. It seems to be a favorite pass-time for Austinites to complain about the people who haven't lived here as long as we have (especially if they moved here from California). Them newcomers, they don't share our values. They don't respect our town or its history. They're trying to make Austin more like wherever they're from, rather than coming here and assimilating like we did. We need to stop planning for growth and start planning for no growth. In fact, trying to stop growth has been what many people have been doing for decades. I've heard of people voting against light rail proposals, for instance, because they figured that, if we don't make investments in things such as mass transit, then people will stop coming here. Not all Austinites share these attitudes, and not all to the same degree, but attitudes toward growth figure in our political decisions. Do we seek to stop people from coming here, or do we accept that growth is a fact of life and seek to handle it as best we can? We would emphatically state that the needs of immigrants to our country should be weighed equally with the needs of people who were born here, but do we feel that the needs of young people who are starting out in life should be weighed equally with the needs of long-time residents? It is a common refrain that we should focus on the needs of people who are already here, rather than the needs of people who aren't here yet. To quote a member of my neighborhood association's mailing list: "I'm fine with thoughtful development but we longtime homeowners, we longtime renters, we builders of Austin's qualities of life & community, should be more valued than these who charge in from all over and throw money all over our town. They want to move here because we've made it great, and now they're killing it." Thus, people feel justified in saying that the concerns of older, long-time home owners should be prioritized over the concerns of younger residents who wonder if they'll ever be able to afford to buy a house. The latter group is destroying what the former group has built, after all, so why be concerned about them? While progressives recoil at the othering and stereotyping of immigrants to our country, there is not a similar taboo against othering and stereotyping newcomers to our cities.

Most Austinites, being the progressives that we are, see climate change as a challenge that we must face, and, at least in the abstract, we want to do our part. We enthusiastically support efforts to get our municipal energy supplier to switch to renewable energy. We often support efforts to improve our mass transit system, at least when these efforts seem sensible to us. However, although we understand, in principle, that radical change would be needed in order to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, this does not necessarily translate into support for the kinds of land use changes that would encourage greater transit use and reduce vehicle miles traveled. Our central neighborhoods are relatively walkable, have relatively good access to transit, and are close to several important employment centers, so residents of these neighborhoods tend to drive less, on the whole, than residents of neighborhoods on the periphery of the city. Many of us see the single-family zoning in these central neighborhoods as sacrosanct, even as the single-family homes that we seek to protect are unaffordable to low and middle-income Austinites who didn't buy their house years ago, when a middle-income family could afford to do so without much trouble. The result is that most new development occurs on the edge of the city and in the suburbs, in places that are more difficult to serve by transit. In the central neighborhoods, older single-family homes are torn down and replaced with much larger, more expensive single-family homes. In a Nextdoor discussion on land use, one resident wrote this: "I'm also concerned about climate change and I support smart growth, public transportation, and renewable energy replacing fossil fuels wherever possible. However, supporting those things does not mean that I'm obligated to support my neighbors' homes being replaced with multiplexes, commercial businesses opening on residential streets, impervius cover replacing trees, and increased street parking." We seem to feel that, where climate change is concerned, we can recognize that it is an urgent problem that must be solved, even if this requires radical change, while simultaneously opposing routes to that goal that we see as disruptive to our own lives or to our ideas of the way things ought to be. Perhaps we figure that, if only we could get the Republicans out of the way, then we would find ways of achieving our various goals without a lot of trouble.

What does it mean?

There are similarities between some liberal Austinites and parts of Trump's base, both in terms of the way they perceive their situation and the attitudes they express. To be clear, these characteristics do not apply to all (or perhaps even most) Austinites, and not uniformly so, nor are they unique to Austin, as many other cities are facing similar challenges, but I will use the term "Austinites" here as a shorthand. Trump supporters worry about their economic security--they expected to be able to put in a hard day's work and take home a decent pay check, but economic security has been eluding them. Many Austinites bought a home which they expected to live in for the rest of their lives and then to pass on to their kids, which they feel shouldn't be too much to ask, but rising property taxes create anxiety for them in terms of whether they will be able to do this. In terms of culture and values, Trump supporters feel that there has been too much change too fast, and it no longer feels like their country, like the country they grew up in. Austinites feel that, at the local level, there has been too much change too fast, and it no longer feels like their city, like the city they moved to when they were young. Trump supporters feel that their government has been coddling immigrants while forgetting about them, the humble people who built this country. Austinites feel like their city government has been coddling newcomers while forgetting about them, the humble people who built this city. White, male Trump supporters don't feel that they are particularly privileged on account of being white men. After all, they might be living pay check to pay check, with little saved for retirement. Maybe a long-time Austin resident lives in a $500k house that he owns outright, but he doesn't feel particularly privileged. After all, he didn't assign that value to his house, and he is just someone who has played by the rules all his life, without whining that the rules were rigged against him, and now he is being taxed to death. Trump supporters other immigrants (especially undocumented immigrants) and people of color. Austinites other people who have not lived in Austin as long as they have. Othering newcomers to one's city may not do as much harm as is done by othering undocumented immigrants and people of color, but it comes from a similar thought process. In both cases, stereotypes are attributed to members of the outgroup, whether they apply or not. Trump supporters see undocumented immigrants as possible criminals, although studies show that undocumented immigrants tend to commit fewer violent crimes, on the whole, than people born in the US. Austinites see newcomers as charging in and throwing money all over their city, although, on the whole, millennials tend to be poorer than the previous generation. For incumbent home owners living in now desirable neighborhoods, however, their new neighbors will tend to be the people who can afford to buy houses in these neighborhoods at today's prices. The vast majority of younger people will be priced out--even the fixer-uppers, seen as modest and affordable, will be out of their price range. It seems that people are capable of forming stereotypes and marginalizing outgroups even if we see ourselves as people who do not stereotype or marginalize outgroups, just as research shows that, in the context of race, bias remains despite whites' perception of ourselves as not racist. If we feel anxious about our future and besieged by unwanted change, then we might hunker down and favor policies seen as benefiting the people who we see as most like us, and this holds whether or not we self-identify as progressives.

I see several interlocking explanations for progressives generally being tolerant towards groups such as ethnic minorities, religious minorities, LGBT people, and immigrants, while not necessarily being tolerant towards all outgroups. In the US, these groups form a large part of the Democratic Party's base, so there is a political coalition that needs to remain together. We do not see these groups as threatening our way of life or exasperating whatever challenges we face. If we publicly deviate--by making derogatory comments towards Muslims or undocumented immigrants, for instance--we would incur a great social cost, since we would appear to be one of the others--perhaps someone who voted for Donald Trump. We would be seen by those around us as complicit in the harm being done to those they care about, so we have a strong social disincentive against stereotyping these groups. In the context of local politics, however, none of these factors apply. Local political races mainly do not involve the same issues that are salient at the national level, so long-time home owners and young renters are not held together by the need to form a political coalition. Since Austin has been experiencing rapid growth, it is not the case that incumbents are not affected by the influx of newer residents. Finally, stereotyping or denigrating newcomers does not cause one to risk being branded as a hated outsider, so the social consequences are not the same as for stigmatizing outgroups disliked by Trump supporters.

So why does it matter?

So does it matter if many people, whether they consider themselves conservatives or progressives, have outgroups whose well-being they don't feel responsible for? We now know that the Trump administration intentionally planned to traumatize migrant children, which isn't comparable to anything that progressives might be doing. Even if progressives advocate for policies that contribute to the middle class being priced out of their cities, a middle-income person being priced out of a city is not equivalent to a refugee being turned away from our country. However, I will discuss a couple of implications that we should be aware of. First, there is the pragmatic question of how to approach the 2020 Presidential election, and there is the related question of why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016. It is often argued that racism, rather than economic anxiety, is what propelled Trump into the Whitehouse. On one hand, attitudinal studies of Trump voters support this interpretation. It is an argument suggesting that the outgroup--the people living in swing states who did not vote for Clinton--are people who elected Trump as a result of their being the kind of people they are, rather than their economic situation being a contributing factor. It would follow that Democratic attempts to gain votes in those areas would mean undermining the party's core values and would ultimately be a lost cause. In 2019, party affiliation is about values, not economics. Thus, it would seem to make sense for Democrats to avoid emphasizing economic issues that might be divisive among socially liberal voters who are disgusted by the result of the 2016 election. If this line of reasoning is correct, then, pragmatically, it would make sense for Democrats to support a candidate who isn't going to raise the ire of Wall Street executives, since such a candidate will have an easier time raising funds from large donors and will win the support of up-scale, socially liberal swing voters who dislike the economic populism represented by Warren and Sanders. However, if this narrative doesn't capture the whole story, then the conclusions that follow from it will need to be questioned. In his book, Cultural Evolution, Ron Inglehart argues that the question of why individual voters vote for right-wing populists is separate from the question of why right-wing populist parties are more popular now than they were a few decades ago. The answer to the first question, according to him, is that there is a backlash to many of the cultural changes of the last few decades, and voters are pushing back against values that are different from the values that they grew up with. The latter question, however, has to do with economic anxiety, since, both in the U.S. and in much of Europe, the economic gains of the past several decades have not been distributed evenly throughout the population, with many people losing ground and seeing their situation as precarious. In One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported, Dionne, Mann, and Ornstein make a similar point, that there is a disjunction between studies that examine voters' attitudes and studies that examine the places in which Trump support was strong. The former studies found cultural explanations, while the latter studies showed that Trump did well in parts of the country that are facing economic decline, outperforming previous Republican Presidential candidates. Ben Casselman of fivethirtyeight.com also argued that Trump did well in places facing a high degree of economic anxiety, which he distinguishes from economic hardship. Ie, Trump didn't tend to win in the poorest parts of the country, but, rather, parts of the country that are going down hill and where people feel anxious about their future and their children's future. If Trump's win was partly a result of the situation that many voters were in, that they live in places that are in decline, then it follows that it would be advantageous for Democrats to articulate plans for improving the situation in those parts of the country. Also, if progressives sometimes have feelings towards our city that resemble the feelings that Trump supporters have towards our country, and we consequently behave in ways similar to the way Trump supporters behave, then there are implications in terms of how we relate to them. The things that separate us from them are not necessarily what we assume they are, and we can relate to them as human beings, since, though we find their behavior and thought processes to be repugnant, the things that we object to are things that mirror some of our own behavior.

Finally, there is the question of who we say we are and who we want to be, and whether those things match the way we're being. We may see ourselves as enlightened people who understand the need to look at structural issues that disadvantage some groups of people, so, where housing is concerned, we need to acknowledge that younger people cannot simply follow the rules and find adequate housing to the extent that previous generations could. If we accept that addressing climate change might require significant changes in the way we live, then we ought to consider the impact of our city's land use policies in terms of whether they encourage driving, rather than encouraging walking, cycling, and the use of mass transit. If we see ourselves as people who are deeply committed to the elimination of all forms of oppression within society, and we also wish to try to keep renters out of our neighborhood, feeling that home owners make better neighbors, then we should think about who is able to buy a house in today's climate and who we are excluding. Once we have established our values and what they are, the challenge is to bring those values out into the world.