Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975–2001

Abstract

Sandwiched between the baby boomers and the millennials, generation X has never gotten its due—with a starting birth year of 1965, the cohort narrowly misses being able to claim Vice President Kamala Harris as one of its own, for example. Now, a provocative new monograph offers a generation X biography, even if the author does not couch the book's purpose in precisely that way (or, curiously, ever use the term generation X). Rather, Kyle Riismandel's Neighborhood of Fear seeks to explain the rightward shift of U.S. politics since the 1970s through suburbanites' deployment of a “productive victimization” strategy to assert new forms of control over suburbs even as it permanently tainted the earlier image of those spaces as places of refuge (p. 100). Riismandel brings together fascinating examples that support his thesis admirably: the abrupt turn against nuclear power; increased awareness of toxic chemicals; the security industry's rise in response to burglaries and a handful of sensational murder-kidnappings; and disapproval of youths' preoccupation with video games, hardcore punk rock, and the occult as expressed through heavy metal music and role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. While Ronald Reagan's organized New Right launched a mainly evangelical Christian–informed critique of the country's supposed moral decline, lumping together divorce, premarital sex, pornography, and homosexuality, Riismandel argues that elements of the approach were adopted by relatively liberal parents as “nonideological” common sense (p. 9). Noting how the proposed remedies fit with the Reaganite preference for privatized, local solutions rather than reliance on experts or governmental action, he contends that the New Right essentially colonized mainstream politics and thereby won the culture wars.