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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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The suburban demographic is naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist.

This really doesn't match my experience in the US: the average suburban dweller I know has a mortgage "rooting" them to their dwelling and presenting nontrivial costs -- real estate sales, movers, etc -- to up and move elsewhere. There may be some individualism, but the average suburban school has an active parent organization donating time and funds to local education. And there's no shortage of other groups meshing the community together: churches, youth/adult sports leagues, and so forth.

I wouldn't expect support for the alt-right to take off in suburbs -- whose inhabitants seem generally happy and content to just grill in their backyards -- but I think "solidly neoliberal" reflects what is actually a general conservatism in the sense of being change-averse: suburbanites don't want major political changes (locally or nationally: these might, gasp, impact property values), and garden-variety neoliberalism seems to be one of the least change-seeking platforms currently. In general, I think they want to keep things as they are, with an eye toward modest, gradual improvements and at least a stated preference for "be nice" policies with modest price tags. These folks aren't pushing to (re-)overhaul American health-care because they're largely employed and prefer the devil they know in their existing insurance plan. They aren't pushing to defund their police departments. But they might agree on increasing Medicaid spending or buying body cameras for police.

But perhaps Sweden's idea of a "suburb" is very different from what I experience day-to-day.

I suppose if you're a dissident rightist observing your outgroup from, well, the outside, it's easy to conflate a) the leftist urban laptop class / PMC who are mostly renters or at least live in inner-city flats and who are relatively eager to wage the culture war and are indeed "naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist" a) neoliberal/centrist suburbanites who are recognizable by occasionally publicly spewing the same liberal/woke snark as group 'a'.

But perhaps Sweden's idea of a "suburb" is very different from what I experience day-to-day.

I would say that this is probably a factor, but what little I've seen of suburbs in Europe (example: the suburbs in Cry of Fear, a Swedish-made game set in a Swedish town, which I presume is all modeled fairly faithfully to real life) suggests that they aren't fundamentally different from American suburbs in terms of layout, construction, and even appearance.

And yes, I would also say that suburbs, in terms of their neo-liberalism, probably can be thought of in the leftist-sneering-sense of neo-liberalism in that they are foundationally conservative with some helpings of Blue Tribe-ness.