Little at Large

Picture this: John Wayne stars as the hero, cruising into the frontier dust clouds with a plan to civilize the wild west and the Southern badlands. His weapons: town planning software; Spanish language CDs; air conditioners. His deputies: media savvy Preachers, Urban Eco-Architects and post-Millennial Bebo starlets… That’ll be the day? Well, no actually. According to Mark Little (with the exception of John Wayne) it’s already here.

Little’s new book, The New America, identifies how, in the twenty-first century, it still has a “frontier”, which is made up of new kinds of communities that are going to transform the nation, Obama or not. He explores some of the new social inventions of the massive new “Boomburbs” – extended suburbs of completely new communities which now constitute the fastest-growing areas of the country.
According to the last census, the population of the United States has been moving south and west at a rate of three feet an hour, five miles a year. More importantly, the demographic make-up of this phenomenon, dubbed “The Great Dispersal”, is what will distinguish it from any previous population expansion: by the middle of this century, white Americans will be in a minority, and a fifth of the population will be multi-racial, á la Tiger Woods. The book makes interesting reading when you consider the outcome of the recent election.
“For example, 37% of the population of North Las Vegas are foreign born,” says Mark. “They’re bypassing the ghettos, they’re going straight to the suburbs. Those suburbs are literally crucible of 21st century America.” He also describes how the crucible differs from most people’s notion of the American suburban nightmares.
“The Sam Mendes film, American Beauty, for me sums up that emptiness at the heart of that life,” Mark continues. “But the thing about the new suburbs is that they represent the movement away from the old clichés. Environmentally, they are moving back towards the idea of living in real town centres. Cities like Denver have been transformed, and the new communities are about social interaction and activity. There are parks, cycle tracks and light rail systems. And you get these mega-churches, because people are craving some sort of social bond.”
“Interestingly, the Evangelicals decided that these growing suburbs are one place where hellfire extremism has never sold. So they copped on and came up with a new marketing technique. Now... you can go to church, buy a coffee, and get a free donut! So what began as a marketing tool became these preachers effectively selling a form of God and religion that is yours to shape.”
In the course of The New America, Mark meets both conservative and liberal Generation-Xers, now heading for middle age in their SUVs. He is charmed by the generation of the moment, the “Millennials”, born in or around 1980, who are the first in America to benefit from the online social networking and instant information that the Internet provides. This, says Little, is one development which has the possibility to fundamentally change the previously insular middle American culture.
“In the old days, if you wanted to exclude yourself, you could. In the modern world, there is that notion that every life in this digital age has to have a narrative that you share with other people. That’s going to re-wire consciousness of politics and of society, not just in the States, but here. And that means that every tendency to segregate and pull away from the world is countered by this intense desire to show yourself.”
The Millennials are also the generation earmarked by Barack Obama as the “Joshua Generation”, whose role it is to take on and carry through the promise of the idealism of the late ‘60s. Little quotes American historians Strauss and Howe, who call the Millennials “history’s correctives for the mistakes they perceived that their parents are making”.
On his journey, however, Mark also meets Babyboomer extreme-conservatives that are part of the super-rich layer of American society, who want no change whatsoever, and fear the encroachment posed by the new trends – and by non-white races. He encounters armed vigilantes patrolling the border with Mexico to protect their country, and the “gated communities”, or “Privatopias”, with their own self-governing associations.
“They are scary,” concedes Little. “But even within those places, there is a lot more diversity than there was ten years ago. Or twenty years ago in Texas. We see a gate, and we assume that behind it is this white anglo, rich, exclusionary racist group of people… but in actual fact, behind it could be something else happening.”
One thing that is definitely having major consequences at the moment in the United States is the abrupt turnaround in its economy.
“It’s an example of the other thing that’s going to change America. The shock of that impact is going to leave the country completely transformed. You can come up with positives and negatives. The negative is that you could get the rise of that suspicious, inward looking attitude where people will just want to say, ‘Screw the world, I’ve just discovered my life is very fragile and I’m going to retreat into that gated community.’ The other would be a realization that ‘we need to get on together’ – that there must be a much more collective, cooperative spirit in economic and social policies. That’s the millennium ethos. Americans saw what happened with Hurricane Katrina, now they’ve seen the financial crisis. The central message in all of that was, 'We should have had a Government that was acting in our interest, and we didn’t.' And I think it’s a great example of how America’s being transformed. The financial crisis at the moment is kind of turbo-charging all the other influential forces, generation, emigration and movement. That’s why it’s exhilarating – almost like being on a motorbike with no breaks.”
One thing that clearly emerges from the book, is that despite the negatives involved in any study of the United States – it is the positive, forward-looking possibilities of the new generation that fascinate Mark Little, both of whose previous books also focused on the subject.
“I love America – but I constantly check myself and make sure I’m not wearing rose coloured glasses,” says Mark. “For sure, there’s going to be a lot of nastiness as this new America takes shape. I don’t know where it’s going to go, but I’m leaning in a positive direction, where, through that current mixing of experience, will emerge the creation of a new, 21st century frontier in which everything blends, and something good comes out of it. That’s how I would describe America right now: dangerous but promising.”