Much has been made of the factors that we discussed, from decaying institutions to white identity crises and the Internet's role in providing a community for conspiracy theorists and hate groups. I do not intend to write about any of those--anything I add to that conversation would be less informed well-written than pieces that are already in the ether. Instead, I have not been able to stop thinking about mobility.
New World democracies have long been characterized by a multigenerational tendency to do what Jeanette Walls recalls her father describing as "the skedaddle" in her memoir, The Glass Castle. This tendency is codified in popular culture as well as American folklore. It begins in grade school with "Manifest Destiny" and bubbles up in songs, movies, and shows from every era. It appears in music, from Billy Joel's "Movin' Out" to The Lumineers' "Dead Sea" and "Sleep on the Floor"; in literature, with Alice Munro's Runaway and Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road"; in shows as old as "That Girl" and contemporary ones like "New Girl". When the story line isn't frustrated easterners journeying west, it's small-town folks following opportunity into the big city. The prevalence of the skedaddle in our culture is not coincidental: it speaks to who we are, and how we view fulfillment.
Very few Americans (and for that matter, Canadians) can go more than a generation or two back in their family before encountering the skedaddle. I can't even begin to count backward: my parents already moved out of my hometown; only one of my seven siblings is left there, and he spent nearly a decade on the east coast before moving back. My mother was born in Oklahoma and would have to start counting on both hands if you asked her how many cities, states, or countries she called home before graduating high school. My father (who was born in Wyoming) claims Knoxville, Tennessee as his hometown, and traveled up and down and between both coasts before settling down in the Pacific Northwest. The skedaddle is a family tradition. Or, as my grandfather put it when my dad moved to my teeny-tiny hometown: "Our family has been killing ourselves for generations just to get out of the hills."
But the skedaddle seems to be losing its touch. As Jed Kolko of CityLab noted a few years ago, the percentage of U.S. residents living in a new home from 2012 to 2013 was an all-time low of just over 11%. This number was at 20% in the 1950s and '60s. Arthur Brooks emphasized in a May New York Times column that the last 25 years have seen a near-halving of Americans moving between states. I mention this out of more than mere nostalgia: this has serious economic implications. Declining mobility leads to lower social mobility and greater regional income inequality. From personal experience, moving to a new area provides wider perspectives that couldn't be gained by staying at home.
My visit to Montreal: Brought to you by the skedaddle
That brings us to current political trends. As Cracked's David Wong articulates in language exclusively befitting of a Cracked article, "rural areas have been beaten to shit." Small towns, like my hometown, are dependent on a single industry, often through a single business. For any town of that sort, in the long run, you either grow or die. In a mobile country, that is depressing, but it is not debilitating: people would just move when the mine closes. When people are moving less and staying longer in each home than ever before, that's devastating. It is the type of event that makes you want to engineer a return to a different time.
Again, I do not think that this is the sole cause of Trump's political success, Brexit, Bernie Sanders's popularity, or the recent rise in white nationalist groups. I know better than that. These political trends are multifaceted. But it is hard to deny that unprecedented geographical stagnation plays a role.
Perhaps we need to make America skedaddle again.
