[Dialogue] Suburban mindset reborn: Patio Man

[James Wiegel]

Revisiting Patio Man
By DAVID BROOKS
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
Patio Man is surprised at how much the bankruptcy of Sharper Image has upset him. In the vast expanse of teenage clothing stores at the mall, Sharper Image at least offered him a moment of interest and delight. The store allowed him to indulge his curiosity in noise-canceling headphones, indoor putting greens and overly expensive toy cars. Now it seems that might all come to an end, and he will have to adjust to life without.
He is adjusting to a lot of changes these days.
For all the talk of plumbers and investment bankers, populists and elitists, Patio Man is still at the epicenter of national politics. He is the quintessential suburban American, the service economy worker, the guy who wears khakis to work each day, with the security badge on the belt-clip around his waist.
He lives in northern Virginia, along the I-4 corridor near Orlando, Fla., in or near Columbus, Ohio, along the Front Range of Colorado, in the converging megalopolis between Albuquerque and Santa Fe and in many other places.
He has a house -- worth less and less -- in a relatively new development. He's holding off on the new car. He's trying not to look at his retirement account balance. But he's happy with the new streetscape shopping area where he and his family can stroll before a movie.
If you wanted to pick words to capture Patio Man's political ideals, they would be responsibility, respectability and order. Patio Man moved to his home because he wanted an orderly place where he could raise his kids. His ideal neighborhood is Mayberry with BlackBerries.
He doesn't expect much of government. He believes that he is responsible for his own economic destiny. But he does expect government to provide him with a background level of order.
In times of turmoil, he has gravitated toward the party that could restore his sense of order. In the 1970s, crime and social breakdown seemed like the biggest threats to order, and he gravitated to the GOP. In the late 1990s, Republican revolutionaries seemed to bring instability, and he softened on Clinton. Then terrorism threatened his equilibrium and he helped re-elect Bush. Then, post-Iraq and post-Katrina, administrative incompetence led him a bit the other way.
Now disorder has come from an unexpected direction, not from foreign enemies or domestic zealotry but from a society-wide contagion of financial risk-taking. Government programs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac seduced people into homes they could not afford. Private bankers took on too much risk with too little capital. Consumers, including Patio Man himself, racked up an enormous personal debt.
The effects threaten everything he has achieved. There are foreclosures in his neighborhood. Like all taxpayers, he's been asked to backstop Wall Street's losses. He braces for recession.
How is Patio Man responding?
On one level, the changes are surprisingly modest. There have been no big changes in how Americans describe their political philosophies. Somewhere between 40 percent and 49 percent still call themselves conservative, and about half as many call themselves liberal. Distrust of government is still high.
Ronald Brownstein of the National Journal compared today's poll results, group by group, with past election results. Especially for those over 30, the stability of the preferences is more striking than the changes.
But deeper down, there are some shifts in values. Americans, including suburban Americans, are less socially conservative. They are more aware of the gap between rich and poor. They are more open to government action to reduce poverty.
But, most of all, there is a tropism toward order and stability.
Some liberals think they are headed for an age of liberal dominance and government expansion.
"If Obama offers a big, budget-busting program next year, it will more likely be seen as fair than irresponsible," Jonathan Alter writes in Newsweek.
But the shift in public opinion is not from right to left, or from anti-government to pro-government, it's from risk to caution, from disorder to consolidation.
There is a deep current of bourgeois culture running through American suburbia. It is not right wing, but it is conservative: a distrust of those far away; a belief in convention and respectability; and a strong reaction against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order.
Democrats have done well in suburbia recently because they have run the kind of candidates who seem like the safer choice -- socially moderate, pragmatic and fiscally hawkish. They, or any party, will run astray if they threaten the mood of chastened sobriety that has swept over the subdivisions.
Patio Man wants change. But this is no time for more risk or more debt. Debt in the future is no solution to the debt racked up in the past. This is a back-to-basics moment, a return to safety and the fundamentals.
David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. Copyright 2008 The New York Times.

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