Standing, red wine in hand, in the San Mateo fern bar with smart, talkative, venture-capital-backed young people, I sensed déjà vu. After hearing the term "$300 million conservative message machine" for the umpteenth time, I realized I was breathing that old venture-capitalism byproduct called vaporware.
The above quote is from this week's SF Weekly, a Bay-area alt-weekly, run by the New Times Company, the new parent of the Village Voice. (New Times general political stripe hews to a sort of liberal/libertarian melange.)
The article, entitled "Greening the Left", covers the venture-capital style financing of various progessive organizations aimed at creating a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy - the nascent collection of liberal think-tanks, media outlets and organizing groups that Kos and others regularly trumpet as the means by which to take back Congress and the White House.
And all this talk seems like so much dot-com style vaporware.
More on the flip.
Somehow this talk seems to have a texture similar to the grains of truth buried amid boulders of wishful thinking that characterized the venture-capital-funded dot-com boom. Then, as now, rich financiers threw money at talented kids based on a story about a new and different future.
Back then, wealthy patrons and young entrepreneurs repeated a story about an emerging New Economy based on widespread broadband access to the World Wide Web. Nobody seemed to notice that telecom monopolies were delaying broadband rollout, and choking off dot-com dreams.
The crux of the article is that that the growth of conservatism in this country has a lot less to do with Fox News and Richard Scaife than it has to do with demographics that will be much, much harder to change: stagnant or negative population growth in Democratic stronghold urban (and I would add deep rural) areas and the growth of Republican-leaning suburban/exurban areas.
America has been turning rightward for the past half-century not because of Cato Institute policy monographs.
America's becoming more conservative, and Republicans have seized power, because the real $300 million conservative message machine is America's expanding suburbs and exurbs. They've been growing as Democratic heartland cities have stagnated for 50 years.
All the talk of animating young voters, of creating a progressive idea infrastructure, or of applying the virtues of the high-tech investment business to leftist political entrepreneurialism is at best a sideshow compared to this. It's a phenomenon nobody in the world of multimillionaire-funded liberal activism seems interested in addressing.
It is no secret that the places where Gore and Kerry did best (and Democratic candidates in general) are urban locations. Even on the blue coasts and Upper Midwest, when you look at county by county breakdowns, it is clear that it is the cities in those states that made them blue. And these are precisely the areas which for the most part have seen stagnant population growth, easily outpaced by the growth in surrounding suburban and exurban communities. If it weren't for immigration, most of these cities would have had slower or even negative population growth.
This demographic shift is the result of hundreds of thousands of local political decisions to prevent new homes from being built in cities, and thus divert housing demand into cul-de-sac construction in formerly rural areas. Building new apartments inside cities, and next to residents with the money, savvy, and leftist rhetoric to prevent them, means developers must run the equivalent of a political campaign. It's the type of campaign that would be well served by armies of young idealistic liberal operatives funded by progressive billionaires.
Somehow, though, I find it hard to envision the Rappaports telling Neitzel and Music for America founder Dan Droller, 25, to report to a city council meeting to speak on behalf of a high-rise condominium developer after they've finished passing out anti-military-recruitment fliers at a SambaDá concert.
Instead, these outside efforts to reinvent the Democratic Party are taking an easier, more enjoyable, but probably less effective path and ignoring liberalism's giant demographic problem.
Living in the Bay Area, its a phenomenom I see time and time again. People of good will who identify themselves as liberals or progressives on most issues, getting up in arms every time any change to the built environment is proposed that would increae density. Every proposal for a high rise apartment or condo complex is immediately met with opposition, with clamoring about impacts to traffic, parking, noise, infrastructure and that age-old NIMBY hobby-horse: quality of life.
In the interest of full disclosure, I happen to work in real estate development (on the affordable housing side) and its very clear where the money flows: to the suburbs. The amount of development taking place in cities pales in comparison to the amount taking place in exurban and suburban areas. All things being equal, developers would build in urban areas: there's more existing infrastructure, more existing amenities and plenty of demand. But everything isn't equal and its far, far easier (and cheaper) to get an exurban tract home development permitted, zoned and built than it is to get an apartment building permitted in San Francisco or New York or Boston. And the demographics marches on.
Recently in San Francisco, for example, people are starting to wake up to the fact that San Francisco's population has the lowest percentatge of children than any other major city. We literally have no families because anyone with any means at all moves out to buy a home they can afford in the 'burbs. The result is that our schools have less kids from middle and working class families (and get worse as a result) and schools are forced to close. And more parents move out of the city. The response by the cities progressive community: protesting school closures.
And the demographics marches on.
Its a hard nut to crack and I'm personally not sure how. Yet, it seems like an issue we should be addressing as much as, if not more than, building a Vast Left Wing Vaporware.