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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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The idea of trying to hide and defending ones farm is one of the worst ideas in the American right. Chicago has African levels of murder and the people who built it vote democrat and have BLM profiles on their linkedin since they isolated themselves in suburbia. This is the same mistake the French elite made by moving to Versailles. If you isolate yourself from society, cohesion will plummet. If people don't interact there is no understanding left. This will rip society apart and create a soulless city. American cities tend to lack public spaces, life on the streets and genuine culture and instead have stroads and strip malls. A walkable mixed use development is much more likely to have a living culture with less fat people and a stronger identity as people actually interact with each other and have chances to form a collective identity. If you are nothing but an atomized consumer isolated from the others, bringing in cheap foreign labour seems much more appealing than if they have to live next door.

A healthy society should be one large community in which different classes play different roles but fundamentally are one team. How are people going to identify with each other if they live in isolated enclaves? The goal should be to maximize skin in the game as people climb the social ladder. Greek and Roman aristocrats went into battle first, the same should apply today with the added requirement that they use public transit and drink tap water. Low skin in the game for the top is a dangerous direction for a society to wander.

American sprawling cities are the most woke and most pro multicultural places on Earth. Even places in Europe that are considered multicultural are as white as Boston. The idea that suburbia would lead to a better society for right wing people seems to be empirically false. It seems to lead to generic urban sprawl in which the top third is isolated from the rest of the society and slowly loses its connection to the rest.

I agree that outer-ring suburbs are about the worst in terms of optimizing atomic quality of life vs. community, but you seem to completely exclude the existence of small towns, which seem to me to offer superior sense of community along with low cost of living and the most egalitarian of lifestyles (due largely to the lack of high-end amenities, granted.) The main downside is lack of economic opportunity, but there's no inherent reason we couldn't make that a social priority as opposed to densification.

For what it's worth, my choice was already a unit in a multifamily dwelling in a relatively dense area of the city (although Madison is not an especially dense city as a whole. My preferred style of living are places like the row homes in Alexandria. I agree completely with preferring an interconnected community, walkability, bikeability, and a firm sense of city identity as important. I'm not interested in Retvrn-style politics of retreat, I'm interested in asserting the legitimacy of communities being able to say no to larger, non-local governments imposing deterioration on them in a way that no should accept for their neighborhood. I just have no particular desire to impose this preference on suburbanites - if they don't want this in their backyard, they get to say no, and that's fine.