It's Time to Take Place out of Politics

FiveThirtyEight has a cool, ongoing podcast series on gerrymandering. It's gotten me thinking about an underlying issue that everyone seems to take for granted and no one I've heard is questioning. Namely, our entire representative democracy is based on geography; that is, we are represented based on where we live instead of (or even in addition to) our political ideology, social identities, etc. That's not to say that politics, identity, etc. aren't a part of electoral politics; it's just that those things are all mediated (inefficiently, I would argue) through place.

Undoubtedly, the central role of place in our democracy is owed to the technological limitations of colonial America. Moreover, land (and thus place) mattered in agrarian society in a way that it longer does in a post-industrial society. Place, then, is a decidedly 18th-century solution to representative democracy that simply no longer represents the people of the 21st century. I've written around this idea previously.

One reason that place has persisted is that place can quite easily be exploited by those with terrible intentions. For example, "state's rights" (i.e. regional autonymy) was invoked as a defense for first slavery and later Jim Crow discrimination. Another example is calls for "local control" as a defense for segregation in school districts.

A term that shows up in the podcasts (which I assume is from the political science literature) is "natural political geography." The basic idea is that people "naturally" sort themselves by place, most importantly by conservative/Republican and progressive/Democrat. In other words, it's not so much that people on the coasts have convinced each other over time to become liberal and that people in the "flyover states" have convinced each other over time to become conservative; instead, it's that people have been more likely to move to specific regions, states, cities, and neighborhoods where people already share their ideology. (Incidentally, sociology has long known of the structural sorting that happens for race and class.) However, there is nothing "natural" about people choosing to live by those with politics that are similar to their own or, more accurately, choosing not to live among those who are politically intolerant to them. If this phenomenon does indeed exist, it is at least in part a response to the fact that we do politics via place.

Our current set of political issues are not bounded. They include structural concerns over race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. We need an electoral system that acknowledges this. Moreover, the problems that SCoTUS is currently considering in Gill v. Whitford, including "packing and cracking," are created by our insistence on place and could be remedied if we admit that we don't live in that world anymore.

Northern Exposure/Southern Exposé

We survived Tropical Storm Irma. The extent of our hardship was being without power for 19 hours and then a weekend of picking up small limbs and debris. I was texting with my mother, who splits her time these days between my childhood home in Michigan and their retirement community in Florida, who noted that, in Michigan, the electrical utilities were much better prepared for outages. My first reaction was that this was an unfair assessment, but on second thought, she might be on to something. Is it possible that there is a more healthy respect for weather in the North because of winter snow? Does the constant threat of lake-effect snow eliminate hubris?

Memories of Lake Michigan

I grew up in Saint Joseph, Michigan, a small town on the shore of Lake Michigan. I remember going away to college in Tennessee, and suddenly, the absence of The Lake became palpable to me. I had taken it, in all its grandeur, for granted for all of my first 19 years. I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The Writer's Almanac, as is part of my daily morning routine:

Heather McHugh..., born in San Diego, California (1948). She said: "I have always lived on waterfronts. If you live on the edge of an enormous mountain or an enormous body of water, it's harder to think of yourself as being so important. That seems useful to me, spiritually."

My experience of The Lake wasn't quite as McHugh describes it. For me, it was less humbling than it was confining or, perhaps, embracing. In Middle Tennessee, I had 360 degrees in which to possibly travel; in St. Joe, I had roughly half that. Instead of feeling limiting, it felt comforting. I knew that there were possibilities out there, but as a youth, I did not have to bear the anxiety that can come from the overwhelming sense of endless possibilities.

The allegory is not lost on me here, that hometowns can be simultaneously nurturing and limiting and that college opens one to an expanse of unimagined opportunities. My experience, though, was much more material and much less transcendent. I simply felt The Lake.

Empty Nests, Empty Trees, and Empty Forests

Here is something that my wife and I were wondering: are people more geographically mobile today than they were in the past? Specifically, is occupational mobility increasing? Even more particular, assuming increased mobility, what effect does this have on extended family connections, childcare, and child socialization? Surely, researchers are looking at this, no?