But that’s no here no there. I think geographical segregation expands beyond merely one’s location or school outward to modes of transportation. Mass-transit is the refuge of the working poor, with it often serving no greater purpose than busing the poor to work into wealthier areas and then shipping them back out at the end of the shift. And the worse thing about is the bubble effect of driving a car everywhere from one destination to the next.

The question is to what extent will this be social engineering. Not unlike the desegregation of schools (which are still effectively segregated in many places), attempting to force or even prod individuals into a shared communal experience might engender a large amount of backlash, and the clarion call of socialism/communism/fascism and assorted nonsense. But its clear that public policy today favors the atomization of the individual, mostly I think in an unintentional manner, but it still pounds on nonetheless.

Maybe what I saw was not a sufficient sample from which to be making such generalizations. In fact, after I started looking closer at this phenomenon, on my last day there I saw what looked like a gated community going up outside of Auburn.

Regardless of whether my generalizations were correct, it called my attention to the fact that I enjoyed the apparent economic diversity on those rural roads. And like you suggest, that can be healthier for democracy, too.

(Yeah, I did think about the racial issues in Alabama, too, and how race relations were in some ways a little different than back home.)

The increasing class disparity is facilitated by Television and it’s vicarious agora because those who are increasingly marginalized continue to think they are part of a culture broadcasted on the airwaves. Personal craftsmanship, personal participation in an economy, personal participation in agriculture….personal participation across a broad spectrum of the constituent parts of a culture is subsumed by the vicarious agora and the give and take of a Republic erodes. One of the few productive reasons to watch television, or what passes as Television “journalism” is to monitor Conventional Wisdom to help one assemble a partial hold on reality by identifying the opposite of what is propounded as truth or writ on the little screen that has grown big as life.

Of course, like the larger culture, not all of television or the media is subversive of civilization , just the great majority of it. In Watching We Trust. Ennui is the spirit of the age. Paranoia insidiously gestates because a sentient being knows insentience when it sees it. This is one of the many reasons that Fear is surrendering to authoritarianism at such a rapid clip. The Skinner Box has High Production Values.

The crowd cast aside Papa Doc as the son of a prosperous two-parent family, educated at the prestigious Cranbrook Academy in wealthy Oakland County (the 248). 8 Mile Road serves as the “tracks” that separate the white 248 to the north from the black 313 of the city of Detroit.

Sadly, the movie didn’t futher explore the added complexity as one moves further east along 8 Mile–the 586 of Macomb County, the white working class home from which Eminem emerged. The class issue was dramatically condensed to Black/White, with the border porous (negro Papa Doc is now 248 White, caucasian Rabbit is now 313 Black). But is 586 Macomb County (working class White America) really closer to 313 Detroit (working class Black) or to 248 Oakland (ruling class White)?

Perhaps Eminem and Curtis Hanson will sort it out next time.

Perhaps you could take a moment to clarify what you see as the problem.

In places, it seems your critique is directed against economic stratification per se as a threat to healthy democracy. I’m not sure there would be sufficient evidence to back up that claim (and I don’t think this is your claim, though I’m not entirely sure–hence the request for clarification). It is not immediately obvious that the presence of clearly distinguishable economic classes is harmful to a community–cf. the charming symbiosis of this traditional English village (all three links cover the same story, but all are brief and each has different tidbits that help paint the picture):

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090316/od_nm/us_britain_village

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29757970/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7949319.stm

I think, though, that your main argument is not against economic stratification per se, but against the communal segregation that often results from this stratification, especially in America. Hence:

“Given that a certain amount of economic stratification is inevitable in a democracy, Tocqueville saw how the daily interaction among different classes does more than just mute class resentment. It points everyone, wealthy and not-so-wealthy, toward the idea that our different material standings are less important than our shared citizenship. Rich or poor, we all vote at the same polling stations — and we all end up at the same prom.” Or the same harvest celebration, as the case may be; as with Pretty in Pink, in the above story of the English village, the shared citizenship goes much deeper than equal suffrage.

Have I interpreted your piece correctly?

(Let me be clear that my comment should not be interpreted as a call for return to an aristocratic communal model. There are few places left in the Western world where such a model could work anymore, and America certainly isn’t one of them.)