Left or Right – Does it Matter anymore?

During what is now known as the Golden Decade of the 1990’s (And didn’t life appear tough, even then?), we all had fun spending money that we didn’t have. As life appeared to be something that was too good to ever end – something that certain bankers took way too seriously – I always thought it strange that the U.S. voted in a right-wing government, when the rest of the World were falling over themselves to vote into power a more Social Democrat administration. Looking around the same World now, President Obama must feel very lonely. As everyone else in the G8 and beyond have entrusted fiscal Conservatives to hold on to what is left of their country’s Purse Strings, only the States have installed a Left wing government. Why this mismatch? Is America ahead of, or behind, the curve?

While the rest of the World appeared to ‘get it’ about having so much loose money slopping about in the global economy, and preferred governments to give some of it away to worthy causes like the elderly and the poor, the US went another way. Of course the Clinton’s second term in power was nothing about policy, and more to do with a heavily reported smear campaign based on morals. This four-year witch-hunt was enough to make Americans look at themselves a little more closely, and make the 2000 election almost too close to call. As this was closely followed by the soap opera of Florida’s hanging chads, and other misdirection tactics, a change in fiscal policy wasn’t really the main voting urge. But are voters really that prescient, and can we look at a planetary herd mentality, or is something else at play, here?

Over the decade 1995-2005, the Conservatives in any Western country were looking at their second Parliament in opposition, if not more. They tried to shift their own values to the left in order to capture the centre of the vote, and steal a march on the governing Socialists. In reply, Governments all over the World moved their rhetoric to their oppositions more usual ground to show that they understood disaffected voters that couldn’t stand to see their party’s shifting ground. By the time the global economic meltdown added another 8 years to our working lives, we all saw an Opposition Party that had been talking to our needs for years, and were also fiscally responsible enough to tell us how we were going to face the next decade of deprivation. We do, after all, need to be told what we have to do.

Of course, the States voting block have come through so much more. Their last 2 administrations possible began with a possible Coup D’etat, an engineered terrorist attack that led to an unwanted war, and finished with the failure of an economic experiment that the rest of the World is paying for, while those responsible for it have actually been rewarded with voter money. No wonder they were in the mood for a drastic change. The question is, will they remain with their new bold choice, or will the Democrats (like the rest of the World’s Left wing parties), change their tune, and try to capture ‘the middle’. If the latter is true, there is no more Left and Right. Just vote the buggers out that are in power, and try the other guys – even if they are saying the same things.

Say Goodbye tothe Suburbs.

Have you noticed that we are in the middle of another almighty shift in human movement? We all learned in school about the Industrial Revolution, and how it forced the end of the Agrarian way of life for Millions in the West. You got the vision of millions of people being herded in never ending bedraggled columns toward the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of the soot-covered cities. The City where I was born was like that. Prior to the 1850’s, it was a few canal locks on top of a hill whose only claim to fame was that the valleys to its west used to be a country hunting estate for Henry VIII.

Of course, once factories started to require freight, canals became the preferred method of transportation, and this small town became a city in a matter of months, apparently.Growing up, I knew I lived in an automobile manufacturing city close to Europe’s largest Freeway exchange, with a large ‘green belt’ around it, just a few miles outside the suburbs where my family moved to – an actual 20 minute bus ride from downtown, how exotic!

These days I live in a city that has shrugged off it’s Lumber past for the most part, and has become part of what the more modern thinkers amongst us describe as a global cyber-network, more attached to a city down the coast in a different country than it is to it’s own nation’s capital. Among the most exciting real estate developments in recent years has been the transformation of a run down warehouse district (A relic of the port city we always were, but that has now moved to a more easily managed part of town), into a hip, young, cyber-entrepreneur type of clichéd downtown ghetto: Restaurants and bars that are way too expensive for what they sell, a Starbucks every ninety feet – that kind of thing.

This major shift in the migration habits of the current generation is due to the Internet. Now, kids are learning how to navigate spaces much bigger than the direct world they will graduate into. They are then using this knowledge to run their own businesses from a laptop and a cell phone, so they don’t need space to make money. With post-boom generations becoming smaller, there is no pressure to marry and have their own children, so the entire edifice of satellite cities, bedroom communities and the daily commute will be over in the next decade. Our current view of 2-up, 2-down semis in the suburbs will be the same as we now look at 4 story, 5 bedroom, and 4 bath Victorian mansions. OK for some, but way over the needs of most of us. As oil prices go up, and the automobile becomes too expensive to run, what will happen to the suburbs?

Of course, if they become too expensive to run by their city councils, eventually they will be swallowed up by their nearest cities – the very ones that birthed them in the 70’s. Whole neighbourhoods will be bulldozed to cut down on costs, and to save them from criminal activity. Eventually, they will be returned to farmland to promote local produce manufacture in the new, warmer climate.

In other words, the entire suburb culture in the 2040’s, could well look very much like it did in the 1950’s: A One-Century experiment in growth for one generation that was shown to work, but with many flaws that greed alone couldn’t answer.