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SEIFFE:  What Happened On Lake Avenue?

Friday, March 17, 2006

By Ralf Seiffe

Lake Avenue is the main east-west route through Wilmette, one of Chicago’s wealthy, northern suburbs.  It is a delightful street graced by massive old trees and even older, single family homes.  The village is more than 130 years old and has been an upscale bedroom community for the city for most of that time.  One can imagine University of Chicago professor Thorstein Veblen taking the train to Wilmette in 1899, looking around and beginning work on his magnum opus, The Theory of the Leisure Class.  

Even then, Wilmette was an exclusive neighborhood with home prices starting at twenty times the average American’s family income.  Lake Avenue, which connects the conveniently named Edens Expressway from Chicago with the lakeshore, handles a considerable automobile traffic load.  During election season, politicians never miss this opportunity for “free” media and ask their supporters to place signs in yards advertising their candidacies.  This has been going on forever but, in the last several years, the signs in Wilmette ’s expensive yards have changed from touting mostly Republican to mostly Democrat office seekers.  

This is a curious thing.  Once, this was a dependably Republican district that sent Don Rumsfeld to Congress and with the exception of a couple of terms with Abner Mikva, it’s been Republican ever since.  What most people living here have in common is they have translated personal achievement into the rewards our society bestows and that translates into typically Republican characteristics: enviable household income, well-kept homes and superior schools, including the famous New Trier High School.  Indeed, residents are so proud of their school system that the current Congressman Mark Kirk prefers to use the high school rather than the U.S. Capitol as the background in his advertising.  

Local politics are inconsequential.  Last year the village’s major controversy was whether we should adopt an ordinance to control tree cutting.  Now, no one in this town would gratuitously fell a tree but local do-gooders felt compelled to make the rest of us feel just as good.  Surprisingly, the usual emoters recognized the downside of this plan and put their own yard signs up saying “Trees--Yes  Ordinance--No!”   The local trustees defused the issue by passing a watered-down version that eliminated most of the noxious provisions.  

My friend Tina watches and thinks deeply about local political trends.  She confirms the message that accumulates from all those primary season yard signs; the area is now a net producer for the Democrats.  She believes the reason for this is that the neighborhood is trending richer, younger and more Jewish.  She subscribes to the notion that these characteristics are usually reliable indicators of liberal political leanings.  

Of these three, I leave the last to Dennis Prager who published a brilliant political taxonomy of his religion this week but what do the other two factors explain?  Or, is there some other development that explains the changing political nature of this lakefront suburb?  

Certainly, one of the reasons for the neighborhood’s change might simply be a reflection of the American economy-at-large.  Our manufacturing and mass-marketing economy once featured solid organizational hierarchies and well-defined paths to success.  Now, successful folks are more likely to be masters of lower-capital and/or intellectual enterprises like law or medicine.  It takes a fraction of the capital to create a web site than it does to build a ball bearing plant and the speed of the Internet means success comes much faster.  Capital is more fluid too, mainly as a consequence of the Republican’s tax cuts.  Ironically, the smartest Congressman from Illinois, Rahm Emanuel, made his fortune as an investment banker unlocking capital tied up in Illinois companies and shipping jobs out-of-state. 

These conventional explanations undoubtedly contribute to our understanding of the changes here in Wilmette but they do not entirely satisfy.  One would think the Republicans are doing everything right for upscale voters; they have increased the value of portfolios and real estate while, at the same time, diminished the tax burden on income and capital.  Nevertheless, the Republican’s situation in Wilmette continues to decline.  

There are probably very complex reasons for the party’s local deterioration but one explanation may relate to its more widespread success.  It is also a reason that is congruent with the reason people aspire to our tree-lined streets in the first place--exclusivity.  

Once, the local perception of Republicans was the country-club party whose idea of sociability was cocktails not controversy.  This exclusive group appealed to local people and made it worth identifying as a Republican because membership reinforced the aspirations of those who sought the exclusivity of living here.  There were certain rules or manners that prohibited any serious discussion of politics or religion with the exception, as I remember it, taxes.  This made everything pleasant, did not require much thought and suited everyone. When Ronald Reagan emerged, however, the once exclusive Republican Party began to change.  Blue collar Democrats began to become Republicans for economic reasons.  Later, social conservatives became important Republicans, further diluting the party’s exclusivity.  

This was an unwelcome development for upscale suburbanites; their worldview did not permit shaking callused hands or suffer a lecture delivered by a born-again, pro-lifer.  The consensual Chuck Percy gives way to passionate Allan Keyes and Lake Avenue sprouts Barack Obama signs.  

At the same time, the Democrats have made progress with exclusivity seekers because they are beginning to offer the same appeal that was once the province of the Republicans.  As those who recognize international threats, as private sector, union membership disappears and as the faithful increasingly reject the notion that abortion should be the prime objective of Democrats, they’ve moved on.  That has left a party of the very wealthy at the top and the poverty stricken at the bottom with little in-between.  This appeals to exclusivity seekers because it lets them identify with the stratospheric wealth of the Emanuels, Corzines, Lautengbergs and Kennedys while the party’s membership gulf isolates them from any meaningful contact with “non-exclusive”.  That’s exactly what the Republicans did for them, circa 1975.  

© 2006 Ralf Seiffe

Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois and is a political analyst and columnist for the Illinois Leader and Illinois Review.