Sort of political Monday

Here in Ottawa, the downtown people have recently lost a big fight over development of one of the upscale downtown neighbourhoods. To me what matters is not the actual battle so much as what it signifies. These people lost because they have lost their power to impress the much larger number of people who live in the suburbs.

Back when the blue versus red divide first popped up, a lot of my friends comforted themselves with the notion that blue represents growth and red represented a declining past. That made a certain sense because it had always been that way in the past. Right up through the 1980s, small-L liberalism had been winning the growing urban areas and conservatives had been fighting a rearguard action based on support from a rural backbone.

Now that has changed. The big shock here was the latest US Census data that shows that the red parts of the country are growing faster than the blue. Although though it is not often acknowledged, the great financial collapse we are still living through took place mostly in Blue America.

The hip urban type is now a class in decline. Satellite suburbs and development belts around cities are now where the real population growth and economic growth is. And the traditional power bases of the hip urban class are in decline: the media, universities and the public sector are all declining, and the universities and public sector actually have it worse than the media beacuse they have such huge spending problems.

I'm not saying liberalism is dead. What I am saying is that if liberalism is to have any future at all, it has to start winning the hearts and minds of the middle class people who live in suburbs. And that is going to be tough for liberalism because most liberals I know have spent the last few decades cultivating hatred for those people who live in suburbs.