The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey D. Sachs Read Free Book Online Page B

country’s cultural cleavages.
    The culture wars opened on many fronts. In addition to the civil rights movement, urban riots, and rising crime rates, the 1960s had ushered in the counterculture of drugs, sexual liberation, the surge of women’s rights, and the beginning of gay rights. The cumulative effect of these cultural upheavals, packed into just a few years and capped by increasingly intrusive social regulation such as cross-city busing, affirmative action, and Supreme Court–led legalization of abortion in 1973, led to a sense among religious conservatives that liberals aimed not just to fight poverty and discrimination but also to dictate a new social order. The culture pot was set boiling. Sunbelt conservatives rose up against an activist federal government that they believed threatened traditional Christian values.
    Suburban Flight
    The civil rights era and racial unrest in the cities in the 1960s also accelerated another massive geographical trend: the flight to the suburbs by affluent white households. Suburbanization was already under way in the 1950s, before racial politics came to the forefront. The rise of the automobile, combined with the postwar baby boom and the return to normalcy in the 1950s, spurred the surge in suburbanization. Then came a dramatic white flight to the suburbs in the 1960s and afterward, reflecting both social and economic forces. The social forces consisted mainly of the desire of many whites to live in homogeneous white neighborhoods. The economic forces consisted mainly of the search by affluent (and mainly white) households for quality schooling for their children. 11
    More affluent households increasingly sorted themselves into higher-priced affluent suburbs that supported better public schools based on higher tax collections. The influx of affluent households into favored suburbs raised property prices and priced out working-class households, which had to choose among less desirable urban and suburban locations. The poor were generally left to the low-rent and least desirable locations in the inner cities. Thus, Americans sorted themselves by class and race to produce today’s residentially divided America.
    The economic ramifications of the suburban-urban divide were stark, in that school financing diverged between poor inner cities and affluent suburbs. Residential sorting became a crucial way in which educational and income inequalities were propagated from one generation to the next. In order to avoid a prolonged poverty trap, federal and state financial support for very poor school districts became more important than ever.
    The political ramifications were equally stark: the affluent suburbs turned more Republican, and the poorer urban areas turned more Democratic. Congressional districts thereby became “safer” for Republicans or Democrats, with fewer swing districts as a result.In the safe districts, dominated by one of the political parties, the real political competition comes not in the November elections but during the primaries, tending to pull the Republicans in safe districts more toward the right and the safe Democrats more toward the left. We should remember, though, that big corporate money has pulled both parties to the right. The overall effect is a very conservative Republican Party and a Democratic Party that is generally centrist (or even right of center in districts where campaign financing looms especially large).
    Still a Consensus Beneath the Surface
    One possible reading of this chapter is that the search for a new economic consensus in America is a fool’s errand. After all, the country is deeply riven by cultural, geographical, racial, and class differences, all of which have become deeper in recent decades. The Tea Party seems to represent the latest ratcheting up of the ongoing battles between liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners, whites and minorities. How, in these circumstances, can there possibly be a new set of shared