Willy Staley, in Next American City, succinctly explains why Tea Partiers think Smart Growth is a UN Conspiracy:
Some might say that the Tea Party’s platform contains some contradictions. It seems that they’re—like most people, really—willing to ignore those spending programs from which they benefit directly.
The subsidization of suburbia is one of these beneficial spending programs, too. But the nature of this subsidy is so diffuse that it’s hard to point at directly—cheap petroleum, tax incentives for homeowners, DOT money that goes straight to highway funds, etc—so that it is now taken for granted, a mere part of the “American way of life” that only really existed for maybe two and a half decades following World War II.
What we now have is an arcane set of budgetary entitlements and subsidies that have become central to the American experience, by being invisible to most people. So, when there’s an 18-year-old plan to at least consider the impact of human settlement on the environment, it looks like a conspiracy to those who benefit directly from the subsidies, and believe them to be inalienable rights instead of a diffuse set of polices, which, by the way, have an averse effect on the environment, society, and economy of our nation.
Tea partiers “think” ? Really? I see no evidence of actual thought processes.
Teapartiers are actually quite open-minded and are maybe more than 50% of the population of the US. Your little smear Mr. Rees shows the level of debate you’re willing to engage in, ie. none. Name-calling only for you. Grow up, your ilk is going down fast. No one believes the cap-and-tax scam and the cracks are more than showing in your “argument”.
I am reposting a comment from that website, its pretty awesome:
D.K. on Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 12:41pm
Until the late 80’s and early 90’s, suburbia had functioned as a de facto form of ethnic and socioeconomic segregation, with minorities and the poor being excluded from the newly created “good neighborhoods”. Distance and a lack of public transportation made sure that ‘undesirable’ types wouldn’t be seen in these “good neighborhoods”, or attend “good schools” (as the inner-ring suburbs became more integrated due to changing lending policies and growing minority clout, many middle class whites—the backbone of the “Tea Party”—abandoned them for the new “exurbs”, where they hoped to create a more socially and ethnically segregated environment).
This explains the often fanatical resistance to public transit schemes by Tea-party types. The notion that buses or rail will facilitate an “invasion” of their suburban enclaves by “gang-bangers”, “urban criminals”, (code words for non-whites and the poor) and so on is still alive and well. Couple this with the idea that somehow public transportation is at its heart anti-freedom, anti-American, and a symptom of “utopian central planning” and you have a recipe for middle-class hostility to anything that subverts the suburban paradigm.
Conservatives and libertarians have internalized the concept that autos/highways equal freedom. The diffuse nature of the pro-auto, pro-highway subsidies means they’re invisible to anyone without a firm understanding of public policy, whereas subsidies to public transportation are much easier to measure due to their direct nature.
Sadly, the idea that owning a 10,000-square foot mini-mansion 30 miles from where you work, and being able to commute there daily using a huge gas-guzzler is somehow both emblematic of American freedom and the necessary and proper state of things is an unfortunately ubiquitous one today. The coming oil price shocks will profoundly shake these assumptions, after much anguish, finger-pointing, and attempts to shore up the current system (look for massive fuel subsidies to keep gas prices artificially low….of course, these won’t be called subsidies since they’d be helping “the right kind of people”). Expect the classic five stages:
1). Denial (“Oil prices can’t go up, because if that happened, I wouldn’t be able to drive my Hummer 16 miles round trip to pick up groceries or a prescription… and that’s just unfathomable!! I might have to make adjustments in my lifestyle, and to me my lifestyle is non-negotiable. Peak oil is just so much liberal noise, like climate change and acid rain.”)
2). Anger (“It’s those **** liberals and socialists! If they’d just let us drill for more oil in the Atlantic and Pacific, extract more natural gas by fracking every last acre of ground, and strip mine more mountains for oil shale, we’d have plenty of oil!! It’s the ****** (*insert group of the week here*) messing it up for the rest of us—the good people!!”).
3). Bargaining (“What if we start using those new light bulbs and recycling our trash? Would that help?”)
4). Depression (“Things we so much better back in my grandparents’ day! Why can’t gas cost 30 cents a gallon again? Why is this happening to me?”)
5). Acceptance (“I guess we’ll have to move closer in and get a smaller car, and maybe take that newfangled train they built a few years back. Maybe living in a walkable neighborhood and using public transportation won’t be that bad. Guess we don’t have a choice, anyway.”)
One way or another, the suburbanization of America is gong to come to a screeching halt, and it’s not going to be pretty (politically, socially, or economically). What you’re seeing with the opposition towards moving toward a sustainable system of living and moving is both a gut reaction from people fearful of having to give up privilege and vested economic interests playing off this in an attempt to head of the inevitable.
This is par for the course for the tea-party. As DK and Will said, they’re essentially against government spending, if that spending benefits ‘others’ because they’re ‘patriots’ who want to ‘fight the deficit’. If you want to cut off funding that benefits them, and point out how it will ‘fight the deficit’, what you are “really doing” is engaging in a capital-A capital-C conspiracy.
I strongly suspect that only a small portion of people who think of themselves as Tea Party supporters have heard of Agenda 21, or even have any strong opinion about the livability issues discussed above. Tarring the entire movement with the ideas of its looniest fringe is like assuming that all 60s radicals were part of the Weather Underground.