Suburbs and Politics in America

Abstract

When we talk of suburbia we talk of many things, because an increasingly larger proportion of the diverse American people live there. By 1970, over a third of us lived in these places, and by 1985, by one estimate, more will live there than populated the entire nation in 1920. In such locales there is all the richness of people that one could want. I know of suburbs founded as investments by the Mafia and others which the Mafia use as respectable retreats. Some are largely black even though blacks have remained a constant 5% of all suburbanites since 1900.1 Some suburbs are filled with workingclass Mexican-Americans while in others are clustered bourgeois Spanish-Americans. An increasing number are slums, or slurbs, badly in need of redevelopment; yet others are enclaves of the wealthy and well-born. However, my task is not to detail that variety of suburbia, which has been done elsewhere,2 but to raise certain questions about its politics in the national political system. Thus, is there a suburban politics distinct from the politics of other locales? Whether distinct or not, what are the prime qualities of a suburban politics? How does it relate to the system constraints imposed by state and local regime norms and by contemporary forces? How does it relate to the system constraint of the national political system? And finally, how does the evidence of suburban politics relate to the basic political values inbued in our system? The answers given to these questions will draw upon several sources,3 as well as some conceptualizations working their way out in my thinking.