Trains and liberty

Here's Matt Yglesias being chock full of good points about transit policy:

[T]he conservative discourse about mass transit simply illustrates the fact that it’s an ideology driven by inchoate resentments rather than any ideas about policy or the role of government.

This is very true.

Either way, this error-ridden paragraph from Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, two of the movement’s shining starts, underscores the point:

The Left’s search for a foreign template to graft onto America...[can be heard] in all the admonitions from left-wing commentators that every other advanced society has government child care, or gun control, or mass transit, or whatever socialistic program or other infringement on our liberty we have had the wisdom to reject for decades.

Matthew Schmitz ably handles the allegation that mass transit is a “socialistic program” or “infringement on our liberty” by asking compared to what?

Presumably they think this because mass transit is built and administered by the government and supported, quite often, by taxes. But the exact same thing is true of highways. Would Lowry and Ponnuru denounce the Interstate system as socialistic on the same grounds?

But of course they have nothing to say about genuine infringements of liberty like minimum parking requirements, maximum lot occupancy rules, building height limits, prohibitions on accessory dwellings, etc. that are mainstays of America’s centrally planned suburbs.

Also very true. How are trains an infringement on our liberty? Do they reduce people's freedom to go where they please, when they please? Not at all, because A) the existence of trains doesn't make it illegal to drive your car, and B) trains are more convenient in many cases because you can walk around and not have to worry about getting back to where you parked your car.

Also, trains let you go home drunk. If that isn't freedom, I don't know what is.

Yglesias also notes that trains were a classic American technology until conservatives began their anti-train jihad:

The world’s largest subway systems are in Japan and South Korea—not socialistic Europe—followed by New York City right here in the United States. Multiple-unit train control was invented in Chicago, as part of the world’s first electrically driven railway. I believe that all of the world’s 24-hour rapid transit systems (NYC Subway, Chicago L, NY-NJ PATH) are in the United States of America.

Also true. And railroads, not cars, were the technology that originally built us into the industrial power we are today.

But I think Matt whiffs just a little bit when he tries to ascertain the reason that conservatives hate trains:

But here the problem is that merely being located in the United States of America isn’t good enough to pass the inane identity politics litmus tests of the contemporary right—New York City isn’t America...nor are Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, DC, etc “really” American. So therefore mass transit is un-American and therefore it’s socialist[.]

I doubt that conservatives despise trains purely because places that already have trains vote liberal; if that were the only reason, you'd see them putting trains in Houston.

No, the reason conservatives hate trains is because of the culture trains create. When you sit on a train, you come into close contact with people of many different races, social classes, religions, etc. Not just that, but you form some slight bond of commonality with those people; you're all just trying to get where you're going, and you're all dependent on the same machine.

Conservatives hate that bond of commonality. American conservatives have spent the last few decades trying to make America into the kind of country where a minority can shut itself up into homogeneous gated communities, defend itself with guns against intruders, and drive to work in SUVs that provide massive armor-plated protection against contact of any kind with the teeming polyglot of America outside. More than anything else, they want enclaves where you can grow up as a white evangelical Christian and almost never have to interact with anyone who is not a white evangelical Christian.

THAT is the liberty that conservatives want to defend, with gun rights (which, to be fair, I support), with government-planned suburban sprawl, and with government subsidies for larger and heavier vehicles. And THAT is the liberty that trains threaten. Not the liberty of an individual, but the liberty of an ethnic group to collectively withdraw from the rest of America.

But we must deny them this liberty. America is about the freedom of the individual, not of the ethnic collective. There are plenty of individuals who grow up in all-white all-evangelical bubbles, who deserve the opportunity to at least take a tiny peek at how the other side lives. Trains are one way of giving them that opportunity.