At the top of the list is stronger communities. Community is a highly important conservative value because it is through community expectations and pressures that traditional morals are best upheld. People in communities care what their neighbors think of them. If they don’t, they feel the community begin to exclude them...Conservative urbanists sound like a bunch of hipsters to me. "I was into the nuclear family before it was popular."
If community is too weak to enforce the rules and their enforcement must be left to the state, the battle for the traditional culture is already largely lost. More, the state soon becomes overly powerful...So see, if we were doing New Urbanism right, we wouldn't need cops so much -- crooks would just get shamed off the street. Though making people ashamed for wearing bright primary colors and synthetics is a good start.
We have seen that in a number of cities that have adopted aspects of New Urbanism. Successful, thriving cities have reduced crime rates, always a conservative goal...As opposed to the liberal goal of making crime go up. "But looking at what New Urbanism offers conservatives raises another question," segues Lind: "what might conservatism offer New Urbanism?"
Some answers are obvious. We offer the understanding that traditional middle-class values work. Without them, no city, neighborhood, or town, however well designed, is likely to function.It's a good thing we have these guys around to promote middle-class values to city folk. Wait'll they hear about this in San Francisco!
Beyond these, my observation over the years of New Urbanism’s strengths and weaknesses leads me to identify three important things conservatives can bring to New Urbanism. Those three things are beautiful architecture, dual codes, and streetcars.[Blink.] [Blink.]
Although many of New Urbanism’s founders recognize the need for beautiful buildings and know there is an objective, traditional canon going back to the Greeks that tells us what is beautiful and what is not, New Urbanism officially is neutral about architectural style. The reason is ideological. Like the rest of academe, academic architecture is dominated by cultural Marxism...That explains the giant hammer and sickle on Philip Johnson's Lipstick Building.
Conservatism rejects cultural Marxism and all its works, which frees us from the spurious need to be “neutral” about architecture. We demand beautiful buildings.For rich people anyway. The poor can continue to live in giant cinder blocks. Preferably somewhere we don't have to look at them.
That demand leaves architects with wide choice, ranging from the neoclassical—usually the best for monumental buildings—and Georgian to the Romanesque and the Gothic.Mr. Developer, put some flying buttresses on that hideous but profitable condo! We'll pay for it by making everyone turn middle-class and get married, which generates wealth.
To flip over all the cards, Lind considers the stuff you see liberal cities doing all the time -- walkability, mixed use, etc. -- to be conservative; Democratic administrations apparently picked them up by osmosis while strolling past a CPAC convention. Oh, and streetcars, conservatives love streetcars! That's probably why Washington D.C., which is the bluest place in the country, is presently rolling them out -- the power of conservative suggestion.
Well, it's nice to see them grabbing liberal stuff and claiming it instead of the other way around for a change.
UPDATE. "I don't even know what expressions like 'cultural Marxism' mean," says John Myroro in comments. "Seriously, I am not being snarky when I say that contemporary use of terms which I thought I understood, words like 'fascism' or 'socialist,' now seem to be used simply as interjections or placeholders. Like saying 'man' or 'you know' in between words that actually signify." I hear you, comrade, but remember that our subjects here are professional propagandists, and they have been trained to believe terms like these have explosive power (at least among the elect, if not among normal people), so to these guys such expressions are more like what "Can I get an Amen" or "I don't think ya heard me" are to gospel tents.
If you want to read more about where Lind's coming from, mortimer2000 directs you his 2007 essay "Who Stole Our Culture?":
Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.All ruined, now, and you will be unsurprised to learn Lind does not see a role for rapacious capitalism in its demise, laying it instead to "a deliberate agenda" of "Marxism" and "the 'Frankfurt School'" and all that shit, effected by cartoon characters with big beards and big black cherry bombs upon the unsuspecting sheeple. Thus was Gomer Pyle pre-empted by godless videoporn! Further down in this same essay:
We can choose between two strategies. The first is to try to retake the existing institutions – the public schools, the universities, the media, the entertainment industry and most of the mainline churches – from the cultural Marxists.Wait, what about the cities, Mr. Lind? What about the streetcars?
...There is another, more promising strategy. We can separate ourselves and our families from the institutions the cultural Marxists control and build new institutions for ourselves, institutions that reflect and will help us recover our traditional Western culture.Aha! Conservatives will build their own damn streetcars -- in Minot, North Dakota! Or perhaps at The Citadel in Idaho, where all the shooting ranges will be Gothick and walkable.
