The gay/hipster index

Gays seem to be the perennial target. And asides like gay marriage have served to organize and energize all sorts of crazy agendas.

Gays and to a lesser extent women and to some degree immigrants, but gays most of all, become the target of all of this hatred. But it's not hatred that comes out of thin air: It's fear. It's fear that the economy is going somewhere that gives advantages to these people who live in gay neighborhoods, who live in places like Washington, D.C., who have all of these advantages -- education, skill, cosmopolitism and abilities. And if they're not gay, they surely must be French. So that becomes a scapegoat issue and a way to organize.

And then progressive political forces are saying, "You know what, the gays cost us the elections," or "You know what cost us the election? It's that women's rights stuff. Ah, it doesn't really matter if women don't have a right to have control over their own bodies. Ah, the hell with them ..." It's that sort of reaction that leads to this stalemate. What the progressive forces in this society have to do is ameliorate that fear and that anger.

The point is that if all this continues, America's economic advantage is gone. It'll become an intolerant place, the kind of place where lines are drawn in the sand, where gays don't feel comfortable, where young people don't feel comfortable, where immigrants and newcomers don't feel comfortable. The fact is that according to our rankings, the U.S. is 20th in tolerance out of 45 countries. As a country we're not ranking with the equivalent of the San Franciscos or Austins, we're ranking with the equivalent of the conservative Southern areas. And that's a huge problem.

If we fail to address this fundamental class divide -- on which these evangelicals and social conservatives and all this stuff is being promulgated -- if we can't address that class divide, we are in very deep shit. And it's not enough anymore to just say, "Well, we're going to tweak our immigration policy," or "We'll take a closer look at what's happening to our cities."

Yet for all that crisis talk, the book ends on a hopeful, or perhaps even utopian, note, depending on the reader.

At the end of the day most Americans are very open-minded people. Many Americans are terrified and the ones that are scared are the ones who have the fewest advantages. The ones that are rallying around the Christian Coalition and the evangelical cause and the social conservatives, the ones that elected Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, those people are petrified.

Yet despite all that, there are very positive points in the American political and economic horizon, but they're local, they're not national. And what puzzles me, after living in Washington, D.C., for nine months now, is the absence of any real conversation about this. And it's not just in Washington policy circles -- the media is completely out-of-touch as well. We have the same dozen talking heads appearing on talk show after talk show discussing national policy debates like Social Security or tax cuts, completely divorced from the economic transformation this nation is wrenching itself through.

The great hope in the American political system is the fact that there are people working tirelessly in the states and localities. The big disconnect is in Washington, in the House, in the Senate, and in the Bush administration, which is the most disconnected of all. But there are people of both parties at the local and state level working really hard to try to build exciting and creative solutions. The big debates in our cities are about housing affordability and about maintaining accessible neighborhoods. And in older industrial towns, they're wondering how to make their city a more exciting place that retains young people. And one thing the last century and a half of history has taught us is that you can never underestimate the transformative power of the United States.

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