Will the Real Plano Please Stand Up?

Unbeknownst to me, there's been a debate raging online about the true nature of Plano, Texas. The main participants are Mickey Kaus of Slate and blogger and widely published journalist Virginia Postrel. The issue, as summarized by Postrel, is: "1) Is Plano really a conservative (or socially conservative) place? 2) Does it say anything about liberal causes that Brokeback Mountain and An Inconvenient Truth did well in Plano?"

I went to high school in Plano and then lived in the general area again for a few years after college, so it's a debate that interests me, partly because Plano is indeed the prototypical exurb of the 21st century, and I see its influence creeping up everywhere, from other cities in Texas to the areas of Long Island where I grew up to even Brooklyn.

As far as I can tell, Kaus initially said that the success of those movies proved that Plano is not a "conservative bastion." Postrel, who lives in nearby Dallas, begged to differ with a more detailed analysis of the place. One of Kaus' posts can be found here, and Postrel's take on her blog is here. She also wrote a longer piece in Texas Monthly, which is available by subscription only.

For those of you who happen to subscribe, here's the link. For those who don't, allow me to summarize. Postrel writes that in the midst of the culture war this time last year:

...New York Times columnist Frank Rich momentarily called a cease-fire. Brokeback Mountain was a heartland hit, he told anxious liberals. It represented “a rebuke and antidote” to President George W. Bush’s support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The movie, which he acknowledged has “no overt politics,” was “not leading a revolution but ratifying one.” After all, it was even doing well in Plano, Texas.

Nonsense, replied Los Angeles-based blogger Mickey Kaus, of Slate. Plano is no indicator. It’s not the land of pickups and gun racks; it’s just a bunch of yuppies. Kaus, an iconoclastic Democrat, quoted a reader who wrote, “Plano, TX is NOT the heartland. It’s a ritzy, upscale, SUV-choked, conspicuous-consumption-driven Dallas exurb populated by more east-coast ‘expatriates’ than native Texans.” In other words, this suburb isn’t Middle America. It’s an affluent island of educated blue in a sea of ignorant red. It’s a bunch of people who think more or less like Kaus and Rich. ... “What is Plano really like?” suddenly became a hotly debated question in the political blogosphere. The answer matters not because online pundits are considering relocating but because Plano has come to symbolize the fast-growing territories of Red America. As Plano goes, perhaps, so goes the nation. It’s the quintessential “boomburg” and the new Peoria: the touchstone Middle American town, a bellwether for retailers and culture watchers alike.

Postrel goes on to describe Plano pretty accurately:

It allows residents to live a scaled-up, globalized version of the family-centered life of the postwar suburbs, a twenty-first-century Wonder Years. While you can find a $7 million estate in Plano, you can also buy a perfectly reasonable vintage ranch house, possibly with a pool, for less than $200,000. From that address, you can send your kids to excellent public schools. By contrast, on Kaus’s modest street in Venice, a tiny two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow was recently on the market for $754,000, making it one of the cheapest houses in the area (and the schools are lousy).

The economics of Plano change the sociology and the politics. Plano is more conservative than Silicon Valley at least in part because its cheap real estate and good public schools support a more traditional lifestyle. Many families don’t need a second income to live a comfortable middle-class life. Mothers can stay at home or work, often part-time, for personal fulfillment and luxuries like family vacations. These educated women also provide a safety net in hard times, like the tech crash. You don’t have to be work-obsessed to live in Plano, and at least in some circles, a work-oriented life seems rather eccentric.

Most Planoites would never ostracize the irreligious, if only because that wouldn’t be polite. But they also don’t really understand resolutely secular people—just as the New York Times has trouble grasping that smart, good-hearted, well-educated people can be conservative Christians. Cosmopolitanism, in both varieties, has its limits.

But I think Washington Post style writer Hank Stuever, who Postrel quotes, got it closest to right with the fewest words when he wrote that Plano "(embodies) everything both dreamily enviable and vaguely unnerving about modern paradise.”