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The Target closest to where I sit is in Torrington, Conn. It’s next to a Home Depot, a Wendy’s, a Walgreens, a Walmart, a Chipotle. Driving is the only option here, unless you’re willing to take the one available bus from downtown and then walk along one of two large highways that bisect the area. If you drive down a few miles, roads without sidewalks appear, on which sit houses for sale—four bedrooms, new construction, two-car garages, and gray exteriors.
Places like this are the most common form of American life—as of 2017, 52 percent of Americans lived in suburbs. There are of course differences between, say, a suburb in Connecticut and a suburb in Texas. But they’re all variations on a formula, and lives lived in suburban areas tend to revolve around the same kinds of places, and the same kinds of ideology.
And so it makes sense that these are now the places where fascism grows; that’s what these places were designed for. The suburbs were invented as a reactionary tool against the women’s liberation and civil rights movements. The US government, in concert with banks, landowners, and home builders, created a way to try and stop all that, by separating people into single homes, removing public spaces, and ensuring that every neighborhood was segregated via redlining. The suburbs would keep white women at home, and would keep white men at work to afford that home. These were explicit goals of the designers: “No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist,” said the creator of Levittown, the model suburb. “He has too much to do.”