Progressive Geography’s Intellectual Dead End
REVIEW ESSAY
White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy
by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
Random House, 2024, 320 pages
Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs
by Benjamin Herold
Penguin, 2024, 496 pages
Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City
by Richard E. Ocejo
Princeton University Press, 2024, 288 pages
Well-Intentioned Whiteness:
Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City
by Chhaya Kolavalli
University of Georgia Press, 2023, 242 pages
Americans are familiar with steep political divisions on issues like race, class, and gender. Perhaps less understood, but arguably more definitive, is the widening gap between the cognitive elites concentrated in big cities and the rest of the country. In our current “war against the masses,” to quote the late Fred Siegel, geography plays an increasingly dominant role.
Even as people move away from big cities and head to suburban, exurban, and rural areas, progressive geography insists that the nonurban majority lives in racist hellholes that produce leaders like the odious Donald Trump. These areas also supposedly serve as breeding grounds for Trumpian fascism, as the Nation recently suggested.
Disdain for the people inhabiting the periphery has long been embedded in the media and academic worldview, dating back even before the writings of Lewis Mumford. It is also ultimately terrible politics. Demeaning non-city dwellers as racists, homophobes, and fascists may not be the best way to start a conversation with the roughly 90 percent of Americans who live outside the urban core.
Urban Progressive Rage
Perhaps the most noxious—and widely discussed—assault on how Americans choose to live can be seen in White Rural Rage. Written by two progressives, University of Maryland professor Tom Schaller and veteran journalist Paul Waldman, the book’s basic thesis is that the American countryside has become a breeding ground for every reactionary tendency, from assaults on transgender “rights” to racism, authoritarianism, and the latest bugaboo, Christian nationalism.
The authors base much of their thesis on the “abandoning of rural and small-town America, particularly among the young.” In reality, however, rural and small-town America turned the corner several years back, and now these areas are growing faster than they have in a half century. Demographer Wendell Cox has found, through census data analysis, that migration out of small towns and cities began dropping in 2016. Since 2020, they have started gaining net migrants while big metro regions with over ten million residents have lost 1.5 million migrants since 2010, a decline that has now spread to regions with over 2.5 million.
Schaller and Waldman link this decline to the rise of far-right, violent politics and identify rural and small towns as the “essential source” of anti-Democratic Trumpism. But as a recent piece in Reason demonstrates, the research cited by Schaller and Waldman concludes the opposite: the “more rural the county, the lower the county rate of sending insurrectionists” to the January 6 Capitol riot. The authors of the Reason piece also mention a peer-reviewed article in the journal Political Behavior that compared rural and non-rural beliefs and found that rural Americans are actually less supportive of political violence than people in bigger cities. In discussing political violence, Schaller and Waldman, not surprisingly, do not mention the deeds of Antifa or the massive and sometimes deadly disruptions during the 2020 Floyd riots.
The authors also claim that commitment to democracy and free expression in rural America is “faltering.” An Atlantic study, however, recently showed that the most “intolerant” precincts in America are located not in the countryside but in urban regions, led by the Boston area, the Bay Area, and the Puget Sound, while rural areas were far less so. Similarly, the strongest opposition to free speech and support for censorship and de-platforming comes not from the South or the Great Plains, but from highly educated college graduates, particularly from the most elite schools such as Harvard. A recent Rasmussen poll notes that inner-city elites, with graduate degrees from prestigious institutions and an oversized media imprint, feel Americans have “too much freedom,” while the vast majority believe there is not enough.
And then comes the inevitable charge in White Rural Rage that this part of the population is “uniquely xenophobic.” Yet in research I led for Heartland Forward, we found some of the fastest growth among foreign-born Americans is occurring in places like Des Moines or Cedar Rapids. Brookings has noted that, although they tend to oppose undocumented immigration, denizens in these areas have experienced the fastest growth in foreign-born population nationwide. Moreover, this surge has taken place in strongly pro-Trump places that traditionally experience low concentrations of immigrants. Whereas the overall growth was 10 percent nationally, the growth in states like Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and the Dakotas during the last decade stood at 30 percent.
Many newcomers I interviewed do not find hostility in small towns and rural areas. They instead find a supportive community; these newcomers are a welcome addition to regions that have long seen an exodus of talented young people. “I can’t say I experience racism here as an immigrant,” remarked architect and Springfield, Missouri, resident Angela Shyaka, who is 24 and of mixed Polish and Rwandan ancestry. “It’s a great place to settle because it is very welcoming, and people are supportive. The dynamic I see here is very encouraging. I would rate it high.”
Urban Illusions, Suburban Dreams
The other critical target of the new progressive geography is the suburbs and exurbs. In Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs, author and Philadelphia resident Benjamin Herold sees the suburbs as reflecting a flawed and “relentless cycle of radicalized development and decline.” He portrays the suburbs as providing only “an illusion of wealth” perpetuated by government handouts and fundamentally “a Ponzi scheme” with awful ramifications for communities and families.
For generations, progressives and urban boosters have predicted the death of suburbs, arguing that they will become “the next slums.” Takedowns of suburbia are regular features in progressive papers like the New York Times, which also blame them for city housing woes. Yet the suburbs are hardly dying. Indeed, they account for about 90 per cent of all growth in U.S. metropolitan areas since 2010. Between 2010 and 2020, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained two million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million people.
The same goes for businesses as investment in corporate real estate moves away from dense urban areas. Remote work, rising before the pandemic but expanding rapidly since, allows professionals to work ever further away from their place of employment. According to a recent MIT study, suburban and exurban lifestyles, which are built around cars, now constitute roughly 80 percent of the nation’s metropolitan population, while barely 8 percent live in the urban core and the rest in traditional transit-oriented suburbs.
Much of this growth comes from millennials, a generation once widely seen as preferring urban life; two-thirds of that generation, even before the pandemic, favored suburbs as their preferred residence. A massive “back to the city movement,” the meme heard incessantly in places like Herold’s Philadelphia, does not seem to be in the cards. A Los Angeles Times/Reality Check Insights national poll taken after the November 2020 election found that just 44 percent of respondents would pick a big city once again; 32 percent of big city dwellers state that they would definitely move away from big cities if they could. This is notably greater than the quarter of those who live in suburbs and small cities who feel the same way.
Perhaps the biggest counterfactual lies in the changing ethnic dynamic in the suburbs. Rather than epitomizing racist white flight as Herold suggests, suburbs are where integration is taking place. In the fifty largest U.S. metro areas, 44 percent of residents live in racially and ethnically diverse suburbs in which nonwhites make up between 20 and 60 percent of the population. Over the past decade, non-Hispanic whites accounted for less than 4 percent of growth in suburbs and exurbs, while Latinos accounted for nearly half, and Asians, African-Americans, mixed raced, and other groups made up the rest. Meanwhile, elite urban regions like the San Francisco Bay Area have become ever-more segregated.
In their rush to view everything through a racial lens, Herold and other progressive geographers seem to miss reality. Most minorities and immigrants are likely to move to the periphery, away from places like Philadelphia, for the same reasons others do, such as good schools, parks, and safety. These ethnic suburbanites, tend to be largely ignored in progressive geography. After all, they do not fulfill the racial stereotypes so cleverly lampooned in the recent film American Fiction. Blacks who leave the city, as Pete Saunders and Ed Zotti note in a recent Chicago-area study, are not headed to other central cities but primarily to the affordable suburbs of the South.
To be sure, Herold correctly addresses some suburban problems, like the rise of crime and deterioration of schools in some areas. Nevertheless, crime, both violent and property-oriented, is currently about 50 percent higher in urban areas (it is even lower in rural areas). In terms of schooling, the story is much the same. Suburban schools may not be as strong as in the past, but the gap between them and urban public schools remains as strong, or even stronger, than ever in terms of graduation rates and performance.
Who Is the Settler Here?
Rather than deal with suburbs or rural areas as places of aspiration, some progressive geographers endorse a version of the “neocolonial” settler meme used by the activist Left. In this approach, people who live in an area, even one that has deteriorated, need to be protected from even well meaning attempts at uplift. In Sixty Miles Upriver, a chronicle of gentrification in the Hudson River town of Newburgh, New York, Richard Ocejo identifies everyone by race first and views everything else through that prism. The poor in the town of twenty-eight thousand, which is 25 percent black, are simply victims of “racialized poverty” threatened by the presence of mostly “white” settlers, who found a place “like Brooklyn only affordable.”
Yet Ocejo concedes that gentrification has opened opportunities for Latinos, now almost half the city’s population. Latinos do not easily fit into the progressive schema of “people of color” because they have no great historical tie to the place and, like many of the white gentrifiers, they tend to be entrepreneurial in outlook. Nor is this a small phenomenon; the Hispanic population in the county of Orange, New York, has grown over 30 percent in the past decade.
So, who’s the settler here? Ethnic and population shifts are not merely the product of some nefarious power and land grab at the expense of hapless minorities, undertaken by what the author labels a “racial hierarchy”; 2024 is not 1904 or even 1970. For all the tensions in our society, racial integration and intermarriage are actually increasing, just not in core cities which are increasingly characterized by a bifurcation between wealthy professionals and the large underclass.
Ill-Intentioned Identitarians
The progressive obsession with race and past transgressions characterizes Chhaya Kolavalli’s Well-Intentioned Whiteness. This book attacks well-meaning attempts to create urban gardens in Kansas City as an assault on “people of color.” Gentrifiers, for all their good intensions, may put pressure on rents in neighborhoods, but they also provide opportunities in largely stagnant neighborhood economies. Instead, Kolavalli argues that victims of gentrification are also victims of “settler colonialism,” a term much in vogue among progressive writers.
Kolavalli depicts African Americans not as potential beneficiaries of an improved city, but as permanent victims of unrelenting “whiteness.” Yet, as in many regions, Kansas City’s African Americans are taking matters into their own hands. In fact, they have become more integrated as they head to the periphery, notes a recent report from the Kansas City Star. For instance, suburban Wyandotte County, across the river in Kansas, is over 20 percent black and 31 percent Latino.
It’s doubtful these people are migrating to get away from garden gentrifiers or from attempts to beautify the city. Instead, reasons like poor education, rising crime, and a lack of better jobs surely play a role; they are, however, largely ignored in the book. Well-Intentioned White ness ends up embracing the notion of handing out parcels in the city to nonprofit “community land trusts,” a particularly bizarre assertion given her employment at the Kauffmann Foundation, once a fount of studies backing entrepreneurship.
However skewed these approaches may be in terms of realities, the progressive geographers should not be dismissed as impotent. If President Biden is reelected, some of these approaches will continue to shape federal policy beyond just the blue states. We could see attempts to invest even more in transit systems which now serve a tiny part of the general population, as well as restrictions on single-family homes and new peripheral communities, as we already see in California.
But ultimately these efforts will fail as people continue to move to geographies not approved by our cognitive elites but more congenial to people’s aspirations. Until progressives reconcile themselves to the preferences of the vast majority, they will continue to struggle, screaming in the Manhattan night while the rest of America seeks a better life in the broad expanses of this enormous country.