Zoning and elections: Prince William County Virginia

In the general elections of 2008 Virginia voted democratic in a general election for the first time since 1964. The Obama victory in Virginia was a manifestation of a demographic shift more than anything else, although other factors undoubtedly played a part. I contend that this electoral shift reflects the inherent contradictions between networked neoliberal economic geographies and the political geographies of power.

In the “Communist Manifesto” Marx claimed that capitalists would be their own gravediggers. In hindsight, this observation might not have been particularly astute given the trajectory of twentieth century socialism—but in a limited way it might apply to the declining political fortunes of a once ascendant Republican Party in the state of Virginia. As the results of this exploratory study show, the economic logic of the micro-politics of land use and zoning prefigured political change. Baudrillard notes that in the postmodern condition, “it is the map which precedes the territory… it is the map that engenders the territory. . .” (2006: 1). Zoning classifications as discrete entities on a map structure changing residential patterns in accordance with the logic of capital accumulation, accumulation shaped in recent years by neo-liberalization at both the local and global scales as the case of Prince William County illustrates.

It is ironic that what is in the best economic interests of individual landowners in Prince William County directly contradicts those same land owner’s avowed political interests and ideology; conservative, nationalist and anti-urban. A business friendly environment such as the one promoted by governing elites in Prince William County is however, very amenable to the types of residential development which attract exactly the demographic which is the electoral base of the Democratic Party: Black, brown, working class and foreign born. This contradiction between economic self interest on the individual level is resolved ideologically and programmatically at the aggregate through the implementation of draconian anti-immigrant legislation. The activities of nativist and neo-nazi paramilitary groupings attempting to discourage settlement in Prince William by non-white and non-english speaking minorities deflect attention from the economic factors driving exactly those demographic changes they claim to oppose. Since zoning classifications precede development, I assert that a correlation between zoning and election outcomes is causal; an example of what Edward Soja calls “the socio-spatial dialectic” or the social production of space.

Two major battles of the civil war were fought in the outskirts of Manassas located at the crossroads of two major rail lines at the center of the county.In the case of Prince William County local identity might be grounded in the imaginary of the yeoman farmer and the war for Southern Independence This historical landscape is succumbing to encroaching suburbanization driven by high technology industries, and the specific requirements of these industries linked to national security..

American defense contracting acts as a huge, implicit regional-industrial development program, with one of its central instruments being the support and relocation of scientists and engineers (Ellis, Barff, Markusen: 1993). Economic development spearheaded by the cold war defense spending and suburbanization reshaped settlement patterns, the economy and politics of the south, including the state of Virginia (Lassiter 2006).

In Northern Virginia, high technology cores are concentrated in Fairfax, most notably in vicinity of Tyson`s Corner, and along the Dulles corridor. New clusters will coalesce as DoD related agencies and contractors respond to new security guidelines and base realignment directives, moving such key agencies as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to Fort Belvoir. County and municipal elected officials and planning authorities across the region vie for these lucrative industries, Prince William County being no exception.

As well as being magnets for highly educated workforces of the information society, developing urbanized cores like those found in Northern Virginia are also attracting low skill workers in a global labor market. Northern Virginia is what Audrey Singer calls a “New Immigrant Gateway” giving rise to contentious politics and conflicting images of what the region is and what it will become. Many find the brave new globalized world to be threatening and alien to their imaginary of place and nation, but are unwilling to question its underlying assumptions or causes. One could speak of a politics of fear directed toward a dehumanized Other. In Prince William County, this fear has driven the implementation of draconian anti-immigrant legislation among an increasingly threatened coalition of property owners long allied with the Republican party unified by an ideology of color blind racial exclusion.

The data examined include the 2008 boundary files for voting precincts in Prince William County, 2000 zoning classifications and boundaries, and precinct level voting results from the state of Virginia for the 2000 and 2008 general elections. Several statistical and geo-statistical methods were used. The geographies of election precincts and zoning are independent of each other and are not directly comparable. A solution to this problem can be found in interpolation, converting election returns into a surface and extracting values onto the zoning features to produce a table for further analysis. As a part of my preliminary analysis a Chi square test was used. Zoning classifications are at the nominal level of measurement while election outcomes can be made dichotomous, reducing the data to a 2 by 2 table.The centroids for zoning area polygons were used as sampling points for the values of the interpolated surface and added onto the attribute table for the zoning feature layer.

Neoliberalism and neoliberalization

   The ideology of neoliberalism owes a lot to the cold war. ”Neoliberalism – as a political and utopian project–  has its origins in transnational discussions about socialism that could take place only within liminal spaces dominated by left-wing scholars and activists. Right-wing activists later appropriated these spaces and their knowledge about markets and planning for battles in their own countries” ( Bockman 2007:344). Neoliberalism was a response to a crisis within the Keynesian system of institutionalized liberalism in the west at the same time state communism was unraveling. “If the period of the cold war is over, it is perhaps less because one side has won than because the legitimation of each political discourse found itself fundamentally challenged by material developments themselves” (Buck-Morss 2002:39). Neoliberalism is an ideology; the term was coined by Alexander Rostow in 1932, developed by Walter Lippmann, Fredrik Hayek and Milton Friedman (Hartwich 2009) coalescing in the 1970s and 1980s as free market liberalism linked to right wing populism of traditional values, low taxes and individualism (Harvey 2005).

   Neoliberalism however, is less of a coherent general strategy than a series of tactical maneuvers crystallizing as the Washington Consensus in the early 1990s (Harvey: 2005). The Washington Consensus is “a systematic program of decreasing state involvement in the economy through trade liberalization, privatization and reduced public spending” (Onis and Senses 2003:2). Its features are clearly evident as outlined by Bourdieu even if neoliberalism was not the product of right wing activist interventions on a global scale as Bourdieu suggests (1998a, 1998b).The neoliberal project is both utopian and political; a theoretical project to reshape international capitalism or a political project to restore conditions for capital accumulation and class rule (Harvey: 2005:19) in the context of a uni-polar world system that emerged out of the collapse of the USSR and Keynesianism.

  Harvey traces the parallels between two September elevenths…Chile in 1973 and the invasion/occupation of Iraq following the collapse of the twin towers in 2001. Harvey notes that US military power was behind both these forced restructurings, at radically different times and places. Paul Bremer`s orders in Iraq under the auspices of the Coalition Provision Authority included privatization of state enterprises, full ownership rights for foreign firms, repatriation rights for these firms, banking open to foreign control, and elimination of all trade barriers (Harvey: 2005:6) This echoed state measures after the coup in Chile; the adoption of Milton Friedman’s theories in tandem with the IMF. Chile was the first test case for neoliberalism under the direction of the Chicago boys.

  Nik Theodore suggests we need to make a distinction between neoliberalism and neoliberalization (Brenner and Theodore; 2002a). Theodore finds that as an accumulation regime neoliberalization is path dependent, meaning that free market liberalization is not inevitable and the extent to which privatization, deregulation, de-unionization, paramilitary policing, and free trade regimes are implemented is dependent on the degree of resistance to these policies (Brenner and Theodore 2002a).

  Brenner and Theodore…“emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path-dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market-oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neoliberalization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political-economic space at multiple geographical scales”… (Brenner and Theodore 2002a: 349)

  Theodore identifies three periods of neoliberalization in the US at the level of the nation-state: shock, roll back neoliberization and roll out neoliberalization. The first was the Volker shock during the Carter Administration, the roll back period occurred during the Reagan years while the roll out neoliberalization was characteristic of the Clinton years and beyond (Brenner and Theodore 2002a).

  One of the characteristics of neoliberalism is the recycling and repositioning of institutions to serve as a vehicle to create "restructuring generated crises" (Harvey 2005). Decision making has been bumped up to the transnational level and down to the local scale, replacing government with governance at several scales complete with quasi-private entities outside of direct electoral oversight with implications for analysis and/or political action(Brenner 2004; Brenner 2002a ;Brenner 2002b;Jessop 2000;Green and Huey 2005). Metropolitan areas are being reshaped to accommodate new demands and new functions in an increasingly fragmented polity (Hackworth 2007; Knox 1991).

  One common factor links all variants of neoliberalism: a political threat to elite rule (Harvey: 2005:15) requiring a strong response. Redistributive efforts have yielded results, massive social inequality and a concentration of wealth has resulted in a restoration of class power (Harvey: 2005:16). Neoliberalization as an ongoing process of creative destruction has not resolved the problem of long term capitalist growth, but has succeeded in reworking the institutional framework, cities or urban regions are central to this project. (Brenner and Theodore: 2002).

  Neoliberal restructuring was a response to a deepening crisis of the post war Keynesian order of “embedded liberalism” (Harvey: 2005:11) which delivered high rates of growth until the late 1960s. At the end of the 1960s, signs pointed to a crisis of accumulation, inflation and unemployment coexisting together. The Bretton Woods system collapsed, the gold standard was discarded and exchange rates were allowed to float (Harvey: 2005) paving the way for the emergence of a globalized economy.

references:

Bockman J (2007) “The origins of neoliberalism between Soviet socialism and Western capitalism: “A galaxy without borders’”. Theory and Society (36)343–371

Buck-Morss, S. (2000) “Dreamworld and catastrophe: the passing of mass utopia in East and West” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bourdieu, P (1998a) "Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market". New York: Free Press.

__________ (1998b)”The essence of neoliberalism” Jeremy J. Shapiro trans. Le Monde diplomatique. http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu
Last accessed August 2009

Brenner, N and Theodore, N (2002a) "Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe". London: Blackwell.

_______________________ (2002b) "Cities and the geographies of `actually existing neoliberalism " Antipode (34) 349 – 379

Brenner, N (2004) "New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood "Oxford: Oxford University Press

Green B and Huey L (2005) “The Politics of Economic Restructuring: Class Antagonism and the Neo-liberal Agenda”. Critical Sociology (31) 639

Hackworth J (2007) "The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology and Development in American Urbanism" Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press

Hartwich, O M (2009) Neoliberalism: The Genesis of a Political Swearword
The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) Occasional Paper 114. http://www.cis.org.au/temp/op114_neoliberalism.pdf
last accessed August 2009

Harvey, D. (2005) "A Brief History of Neoliberalism". University of Chicago

Jessop B (2000) "The crisis of the national socio-temporal fix and the tendential ecological dominance of globalising capitalism" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (24) 323 – 360

Knox, Paul. (1991) “The Restless Urban Landscape: Economic and Socio-cultural Change and the Transformation of Metropolitan Washington DC”. The Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 81(2) 181-209

Onis Z and Senses F (2003) “Rethinking the Emerging Post Washington Consensus: A Critical Appraisal” ERC Working Paper in Economics 3(09)
http://www.erc.metu.edu.tr/menu/series03/0309.pdf
last accessed September 17, 2009

Defining fascism in the 21st century

  Defining Fascism is as contentious as the subject of study itself. Often definitions consider fascism only as a state form rather than as a type of social movement (Griffin, 2008). Fascist movements or state Fascism are considered in a narrow or broad way depending on the political point of view of author in relation to the classical fascism of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy (Griffin,2008). Post World War II fascist movements have not often been parties of state power.Today’s fascists indeed might not be oriented toward that goal in our current period of globalization and non-state actors. A definition of fascism therefore depends also on historical periodization, making distinctions and marking continuities with the classical period. A contemporary clerical regime or a military dictatorship might exhibit a family resemblance to Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, but differ substantially from those state forms. A definition of Fascism must take into account those movements own self-descriptions in order to be a useful analytical tool (Griffin, 2008).


  Two definitions are most useful, the definition adopted by the Comintern when confronting fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and the “new consensus” ideological definition that has emerged from fascist studies (Griffin, 2008). The former is useful in clarifying the historical fascism as a state form while the latter incorporates fascist self definitions to identify contemporary post war movements.

  The Cominterm definition as outlined by Togliatti in his “Lectures on Fascism” defines fascism as "the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialist elements of finance capital" in alliance with a petit-bourgeois mass movement (1976). Togliatti notes that within imperialism there is a tendency to reaction, particularly when faced with a systemic crisis requiring extreme labor discipline to restore profitability (Togliatti 1976). Given this uncertainty of outcome one way or another, the reactionary block of capital requires a mass base and movement to advance its most ambitious agendas. For Togliatti the key point is that contradictions in the class composition of fascist dictatorship are resolved through ideology- racist, nationalist, and expansionist (Togliatti 1976). Fascist ideology is the glue that binds the mass base with finance capital (Togliatti 1976) despite contradictions between the interests of a mass movement with a subaltern base and an organizational core found in the “power block” (Poulantzas 1977).

  The ideological or “new consensus” definition finds that fascism is “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism…a revolutionary and populist thrust towards national regeneration in a new order” (Griffin 89:2008). Fascism has transformed itself into a polycentric, utopian movement assuming a rhizomic form similar to other transformative social movements (Griffin 200:2008).

  The new consensus definition makes it possible to distinguish between fascist and non-fascist social movements, but does not address the issue of class composition or violence. Poulantzas defines class as aggregate groupings of agents located within a production process, and only in relation to contradiction or the class struggle. It includes the ideological and the political, a complex ensemble of social practices (Poulantzas, 1974).

  It is impossible to know with any certainty the class composition of contemporary neo-fascist groups, the composition of the classical fascist party formations is well documented. Kater claims that the Nazi party was indeed a party of the lower middle classes. Citing Wolfgang Sauer, Kater found that the lower middle classes were one of the major components of Nazi Party membership (Kater 1983: 236). One of Kater`s findings was the degree of elite over representation in the NSDAP from 1919-1945. According to his analysis, workers remained under represented in the party for its duration (Kater 1983: 238) and that class structures of 1918 continued after 1933 and on after 1945 (Kater 1983:239).

  Neo-fascists are but one variety of petit bourgeois social movements which generally have a tendency toward terroristic methods to achieve their aims (Lenin). The point is that fascist ideology is the glue that binds the mass base with finance capital (Togliatti 1976) despite contradictions between the interests of a mass movement with a subaltern base and an organizational core found in the “power block” (Poulantzas 1977). Fascism is an option when hegemony fails (Gramsci 1971).

references:
Kater, Michael H. (1983) “The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders 1919-1945” Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press

Gramsci, Antonio (1971) “Selections from the Prison Notebooks” London, New York: International Publishers.

Griffin, Roger (2008) “Ä Fascist Century” New York: Palgrave

Togliatti, Palermo. (1976) “Lectures on Fascism” New York: International Publishers

Poulantzas, Nicos (1977)”Fascism and Dictatorship” London: New Left Books

WWII memorial

 Reading the built environment as a text, reading Washington, both the ceremonial center and zones of a reshaped neoliberal urbanism echo historical reactionary modernisms. The World War II memorial and the streetscapes of revitalized downtown clusters suggest the unsettled questions of modernity, albeit in a one-sided conversation of stylistic conventions and discourses. Walter Benjamin found that “Fascism renders politics aesthetic, and communism responds by politicizing art” (Benjamin1970). The emerging built environment of Washington is scripted in a post modernism idiom, containing a-historical and yet historicized referents to both the beaux arts traditions of the classic nation state and to the futurist imaginings of Italian Fascism.

Crime waves and neoliberalization

A walk in Washington and a walk through literature, film, and philosophy are not so different, both are an exploration of the world that ultimately is shaped and classified by talk. Literary forms often express the quality of reality, which also surface in the genre of scientific writings concerning marginality such as texts by F. Fanon and M. Foucault. Jean Genet opens his book “Querelle” with a metaphor of the ocean, where murder is compared to waves; criminality is a function of the sea, and a characteristic of sailors and seaports (Genet1974: 4).

Across cultures and across time crime is associated with youth and young men in particular.Crime waves have been associated with changing demographics (Hirschi: 1983). In Washington both violent and property crime have been decreasing along with the general population and percentage of young people. In 2005 however, violent and property crimes increased, leading to the conclusion that fewer individuals were doing more. Other factors might account for this increase.

DC gentrification

The green zones and condominium canyons of Washington suggest the unsettled questions of modernity, albeit in a one-sided conversation of stylistic conventions and discourses. The emerging built environment of Washington is scripted in a post modernism idiom, containing a-historical and yet historicized referents to both the beaux arts traditions of the classic nation state and to the futurist imaginings of Italian Fascism. Urban space is contested; the commons is a battle ground on both the terrain of images and the streetscape. As constructed in the discourses of Foucault, and Fanon the marginalized become the object of study and possibly agents of change.
Like Genet, the poetry and films of Piero Pasolini explore the social worlds of deviance, creating an imaginary of the subaltern, the marginalized, and the dispossessed. “Mamma Roma” and “Acattone” depict in the grainy texture of post war Italian neo-realist film the experience of the periphery.  Manuel Castells writes of a “shadow economy”, of crime and criminality as a necessary by product of neo-liberal reforms in a networked globalized economy, foreshadowed by Pasolini`s exposure of the underworld and street crime.  While Pasolini depicts in his films an Italian reality, it is an Italian vernacular expression of a social imaginary now projected globally, a life world of marginality, violence and crime. Lyotard suggests that the post-modern condition is one where life follows art” (Lyotard: 1979). The urban street-scape of Washington is an exemplar of the emerging neo-liberal order, a network of interlinked urban regions (Sassen: 2000) which could be considered as “structured in dominance” adopting the language of Althusser (1970). Reading Washington, both the ceremonial center and zones of a reshaped neo-liberal urbanism echo historical reactionary modernisms.
Streetscapes are social constructions that reflect a specific historical moment as well as a factor in social reproduction (Soja: 1980). A close examination of a particular place illustrates these dynamics.  Examining the built environment is an archeology of the present: as sedimentations of social forces, reproducing and producing social relations. The “spaces of places and the spaces of flows” (Castells 2000) exist in the everyday as a class, race and gendered geography of the public sphere.  The street is a mirror, naturalizing dominance. Gentrification displaces entropy else where, infill development acts as a strategic embellishment in an asymmetrical binary, property owning classes occupy a privileged position.  The stylistic references of new infill development in the residential zones of Northwest D.C. are scripted in a retro-modernist genre, evoking futurism.