Poor Mojo's Newswire

A 49-year-old Portland man on his way to San Jose was arrested last night after he took off all his clothes at a checkpoint in what he said was a protest against security procedures. John Brennan, whose name I'm using in hopes that he will become a national hero, told the San Jose Mercury News that he did not feel especially harassed by the TSA workers in question, but had stripped to protest the whole process. "They are just doing their job," Brennan said, "and as a citizen of the U.S. I'm doing my job to protect my constitutional rights to privacy [among others]." Brennan had declined to walk through one of the TSA's body scanners, which he has the right to do (I personally have declined every time and so have never walked through one). A patdown does follow that decision, and TSA workers administered one, as well as one of those pretend explosive tests. When they said Brennan has tested positive for nitrates, he decided he'd had enough, and proceeded to demonstrate that he was not carrying a bomb or anything else under his clothes. Of course, the same people who had previously wanted him to walk though a scanner that would let them see under his clothes then objected when he let them see under his clothes. They called police, who also objected, but by this point it had become a protest. "I stuck by my guns," Brennan said. He said that the Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that nudity is protected speech, and especially in this context he's almost certainly right. See "Strip Club Teases Small Oregon City," ABC News.com (Oct. 22, 2008) (discussing that court's "liberal rulings on obscenity"). Brennan is well aware of this, so others in his vicinity might also want to be. "I know that public nudity is one of my [protected] forms of protest," he said, "and I carry that in my back pocket." So to speak.

Reading Tom Vanderbilt’s series on the crisis in American walking, I noticed something about the cities with the highest “walk scores.” They’re all liberal. New York, San Francisco, and Boston, the top three major cities on Walkscore.com, are three of the most liberal cities in the country. In fact, the top 19 are all in states that voted for Obama in 2008. The lowest-scoring major cities, by comparison, tilt conservative: Three of the bottom four—Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth—went for McCain. What explains the correlation? Don’t conservatives like to walk? You might think it’s a simple matter of size: Big cities lean liberal and also tend to be more walkable. That’s generally true, but it doesn’t fully explain the phenomenon. Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are among the nation’s ten largest cities, but they’re also among the country’s more conservative big cities, and none cracks the top 20 in walkability. All three trail smaller liberal cities such as Portland, Denver, and Long Beach. And if you expand the data beyond the 50 largest cities, the conservative/liberal polarity only grows. Small liberal cities such as Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley, Ca., and Paterson, N.J. make the top 10, while conservative cities of similar size such as Palm Bay, Fl. and Clarksville, Ten. rank at the bottom. Substituting density for size gets us closer: Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are notorious for sprawl, while New York, San Francisco, and Boston are tightly packed, partly because they are older cities whose downtown cores developed in the pre-car era. As they grew, their borders were constrained by those of the smaller cities and towns that surrounded them. That’s not the case with many Southern and Western cities. Jacksonville and Oklahoma City, for instance, are vast in terms of land area, encompassing suburban and even semi-rural neighborhoods as well as urban ones. That still leaves the question of why urban density should go hand-in-hand with liberal politics, however. I see four possible categories of explanations. 1) Liberals build denser, more walkable cities (e.g., Portlanders supporting public transit and policies that limit sprawl). 2) Liberals are drawn to cities that are already dense and walkable (think college grads migrating to Minneapolis rather than San Antonio, or young families settling down in Lowell, Mass., with a walk score of 64.1, rather than Fort Wayne, Ind., with a walk score of 39. 3) Walkable cities make people more liberal (by forcing them to get along with diverse neighbors and to rely on highly visible city services such as parks and subways). 4) The same factors that make cities dense and walkable also make them liberal. My guess is that it’s mostly 4), with some of the other three thrown in, depending on the situation. What do dense, walkable cities have in common? Besides being older, they also tend to be on the coasts. New York (#1), San Francisco (#2), and Boston (#3) sprang up as port cities—hubs of international commerce and immigration. That leads to both dense development along the coastline and to an atmosphere of diversity and tolerance. Those three cities top the list because they’re both old and coastal. The others in the top 10 are mostly one or the other. Seattle (#6) and Miami (#8) are diverse coastal ports. Chicago (#4), Philadelphia (#5), and Minneapolis (#9) aren’t coastal, but they are ports, and more importantly, they’re relatively old and industrial.