But don’t be fooled. This is Occupy as reconfigured in the subconscious of Thomas Friedman: The country’s problems can be solved by promoting technological wizardry and unleashing the potential of everyone’s inner risk-taker in a sink or swim economy. Think Americans Elect, for kids.

The Campaign for Young America is backed by Young Invincibles, an inside-the-Beltway organization backing the healthcare reform law and tied to a number of mainstream liberal groups. Fix Young America is a product of something called the Young Entrepreneur Council, which seeks to “help rebuild the economy” by unleashing an “entrepreneurial revolution in America.” The latter has a book of proposals out today with a vision to restore the American dream by teaching young people JavaScript; giving student loan forgiveness — if the students are “entrepreneurs who start businesses that create jobs” — and “teaching entrepreneurship to ALL young Americans, including at-risk youth.”

This book proposes fixing the American economy and the youth jobs crisis by creating more IT start-ups: Silicon Valley to the rescue.

In other words, they are nothing at all like Occupy Wall Street: The groups have no real criticism of the American economic order, they are not democratically run, and they seem to focus on providing Monster.com-like service of helping individual people find jobs.

The book even includes a contribution from Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., the conservative legislator who last May infamously accused Elizabeth Warren of being a liar.

There is certainly a place for entrepreneurialism: Research shows that start-up cultures are important for spurring innovation in technological industries. But to think that making cheap capital available to a young entrepreneurial elite will solve youth joblessness is dead wrong, and a distraction from what should be the priority: ending budget-cutting austerity that has decimated opportunities for jobs and education.

Secondly, the idea that the jobs crisis in this country can be solved by turning everyone into an entrepreneur is just as wrongheaded as the notion that sending everyone to college will result in widespread gainful employment. For young people with crushing debt loads this can actually be a recipe for yet more risk and dislocation: The majority of new business ventures fail within five years. This may be a solution that appeals to centrist lawmakers, but it is a sorry substitute for real public investment when it comes to creating a sustainable labor market that can begin to heal the scars inflicted on recent cohorts of young adults.

Finally, it is a big mistake to think that the tech sector is a panacea for the jobs crisis. University of Michigan professor of business and sociology Gerald Davis has examined the data and found that the job-producing high-tech’s potential is consistently overplayed.

“Although the handful of teen billionaires who manage to cash in on the latest app may suggest otherwise, surprisingly few people actually work in the high-visibility success stories of the tech economy,” Davis writes in an article to be presented at the American Sociological Association meeting. “The combined global workforces of Google (32,467), Apple (63,300), Facebook (3000), Microsoft (90,000), Cisco (71,825), and Amazon.com (56,200) — 316,792 as of the end of 2011 — are smaller than the U.S. workforce of [grocery chain] Kroger (339,000). Notably, a recent survey of college graduates under 40 found than one in five listed Google as their most preferred employer, followed by Apple and Facebook. They might as well have chosen the NBA as Facebook, given the firm’s minuscule employment, and Apple’s recent surge in net jobs is almost entirely attributable to the roll-out of its retail stores, where most of its current employees work. The Computer and Electronic Products industry has seen a loss of 750,000 jobs since 2000 as production has been almost universally offshored. But even the Information Services sector, which includes telecommunications, broadcasting, publishing and data processing, shed over one million jobs during the same period.”

Fix Young America’s proposals are as bold or visionary as any piece of conventional Wall Street-to-Washington wisdom.

Occupy criticizes the two-party order. These two groups, by eschewing “partisanship,” embrace the most noxious aspects of the bipartisan status quo. Fix Young America even seems to implicitly knock Occupy’s political edge on its website, chiding that “only the loudest negative voices in the room are getting mainstream media attention.” Likewise, YEC founder Scott Gerber complains that “the government seems to only care about partisan politics.”

And in a fairly weird turn, the group is mounting a campaign to demand that Stephen Colbert speak publicly in favor of their “movement.” Sadly, fake and well-funded centrist social movements that promote the status quo as the answer to our nation’s problems are very much en vogue in elite circles.

Indeed, both groups seem like mini-me’s of Americans Elect, the “centrist” group fawned over by Thomas Friedman and funded by considerable Wall Street largess ($9 million of which went to its website), which pledged to field a “nonpartisan” presidential candidate — and miserably failed. Americans Elect, Alex Pareene wrote in Salon, is in thrall to the “common elite myth” that “Americans as a whole are crying out for ‘bold,’ nonpartisan political leadership, and that their strong desire for moderate, independent solutions is stifled by the two-party system.”

America’s elite “moderates” are bafflingly dissatisfied with the deeply centrist Obama, terrified by Occupy Wall Street and betting that, as H.L. Mencken said, they won’t lose “money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Banks are still making plenty of money, and young people are just plain unemployed. So last year, Fix Young America’s Gerber made a pilgrimage to Wall Street — not to protest, but to be honored at a NASDAQ closing bell ceremony.

Take, for example, Pennsylvania. Democrats there are already hard at work to tie Mitt Romney to Gov. Tom Corbett, whose antiabortion statements and austere budgets have proved unpopular in the state.

“He is becoming a more polarizing figure,” says Muhlenberg College political science professor Christopher Borick, who calls the gender gap a “treasure trove” for Democrats. “If I’m putting an ad out in Pennsylvania and I want to show Republicans to be opposed to women’s issues, I run sound bites from Tom Corbett next to those of Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh, and anybody else I can find.”

The Democratic National Committee did so in April in an advertisement released after Corbett endorsed presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, replaying the governor’s Internet sensation of a statement that women forced to watch a pre-abortion ultrasound “just have to close your eyes.” The ad called both “too extreme for women.”

The same is the case in Ohio and Wisconsin, where Republican governors have waged aggressive campaigns against public-workers unions. Romney hasn’t taken any chances with the potentially toxic ally in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: Despite Walker’s endorsement, Romney did not appear with the governor during his primary fight against Rick Santorum.

“Walker is a vulnerable Republican,” Nation reporter John Nichols told “Democracy Now.” “And so, especially in the case of Mitt Romney, being photographed a lot with Scott Walker, only to have Scott Walker turn around and be defeated a month or so later, is not necessarily a positive, either.”

The diminished regard for these swing-state governors is a reflection of the shift in conservative politics from Washington to the statehouses. Unlike their obstructionist counterparts in D.C., conservative governors and statehouses have leveraged total control over government to attack organized labor, gut aid to the poor and disabled, slash spending on schools and universities, push through antiabortion restrictions, chip away at environmental protections and weaken gun control laws. Just as Democrats have transfigured the Republican social agenda into a politically serviceable “war on women,” the conservative attack on unions, public education and the safety net could likewise become a liability in an election season defined by a debate over economic fairness and inequality.

“As the general election campaign commences more fully I think you’re going to find voters really paying attention to what’s gone on within their state and how that affects their willingness to vote for one party or another,” says Paul Beck, a political scientist at Ohio State University. “The Democrats are going to push very hard that the Republicans are simply too extreme and that Romney is more conservative than the public, and try to connect him to what’s going on within the various states.”

Corbett is a case in point. The low-profile governor gained widespread attention in January when he announced new restrictions on the food stamps that feed 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia: people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets (homes and first cars excluded) would be barred from receiving aid, and those over 60 would have a $3,250 cap. The conflict got widespread attention because it echoes a national debate: U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, proposed slashing $127 billion from the federal food stamp program, while Newt Gingrich’s invocation of the “food stamp president” proved an effective line to the Republican base. But in Pennsylvania, the outcry from hunger advocates and Democrats was swift — and eager.

“This is one of the most mean-spirited, asinine proposals to come out of Harrisburg in decades,” said Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter. “I literally cannot understand what problem they are trying to solve.”

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack even jumped into the fray, noting food stamps are largely federally funded and that Corbett’s move would cost the state money. Corbett beat a hasty retreat, and the asset limits were raised to $5,500, and $9,000 for the disabled and elderly.

But the governor’s conservative agenda has taken a toll on his popularity: A March poll from Quinnipiac University found that just 41 percent of respondents approved of Corbett’s performance  (down from 47 percent approval in December), with 41 percent disapproving. And while 48 percent of voters oppose mandatory ultrasounds (42 percent support them), this year’s austere budget, and a proposed budget for next year heavy on cuts to higher education and welfare programs, have prompted even greater opposition: 49 percent oppose his handling of a budget that cuts services to the poor and disabled (36 percent support them); and a full 65 percent oppose his proposed cuts to public universities.

Progressive activists, however, concede Corbett’s political savvy: He avoided the national notoriety attached to counterparts like Walker during his first year in office, placating powerful public-employee unions by signing a four-year contract in 2011 and backing down from his initial call for a cut in wages.

“I think that Governor Corbett is amazingly unknown in the state of Pennsylvania for someone who has pretty successfully started to dismantle the public education system,” says Gabe Morgan, president of Pennsylvania SEIU State Council. “I don’t really see him as being able to move votes in either direction. He’s been pretty lucky to be unnoticed.”

Yet Jennifer Stefano, Pennsylvania state director of the Koch brothers-funded conservative group Americans for Prosperity, contends that Corbett’s low profile is hurting his popularity.

“If he just allows the ‘we’re cutting higher ed’ to stand, he will continue to lose in the court of public opinion. This governor is failing to get out among the people, and it’s causing not only resentment towards him, but also allowing the other side to win the P.R. battle. The governor should talk about the excessive salaries, benefits and ‘jobs for life’ state university professors receive.”

Stefano also faults Corbett for moving to implement the insurance exchanges required under the embattled health care reform act and, like other conservatives, is frustrated that he has not addressed “union abuse issues.”

It’s Corbett’s ultrasound comment, however, that could prove a media-friendly albatross in an election defined to an unexpected degree by women’s health issues. A recent poll showed Obama’s lead over Romney in Pennsylvania opening up to eight points, even as it diminished in other important swing states. The reason for Obama’s surge is new support among women voters. And women, according to polls, oppose Corbett’s proposed cuts to higher education by an even greater margin than they oppose the transvaginal ultrasound. When it comes to Republican-led austerity, it seems that Pennsylvania women will have their eyes wide open this November.

The billions of new dollars spent at casinos represent a net transfer of wealth to big business and to pay workers whose labor is not as productive as, say, repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Casino capitalism is an apt metaphor exactly because — whatever one might think about legalized gambling — it is not generally perceived as a sound operating principle for the entire economy. Yet the steady march of casino gambling now sketches an eerie facsimile of our political economy writ large. In fact, casinos thrive amid economic misery.

Industry leaders tout casinos as a tool for creating jobs and increasing revenue, and recession-weary politicians are listening.

“When you’re in recession, what that normally means is that state government suffers with regard to the revenue they have available to fund public services,” says Frank Fahrenkopf,  CEO of the American Gaming Association, the industry trade group. “When the state legislature needs revenue, this has proven over the years to be a very successful way to bring in capital investment, economic development, jobs, and tax revenue.”

The United States has since the early 1990s undergone a piecemeal but profound social and economic transformation: casinos, nearly prohibited nationwide in 1910, are now legal in some form in 40 states, including 24 with legalized commercial operations. The companies involved make a tidy profit: Of the $34.6 billion in revenue (and again, this figure is in addition to the $26.7 billion generated at the nation’s 448 tribal casinos), casinos paid just $7.59 billion in taxes and $13.3 billion in wages and benefits.

With budgets tight, “the governor will get the bright idea that he can open casinos and then not have to raise taxes,” says Earl Grinols, a Baylor University economics professor and gambling critic. “We have a new round of expansion in New York, in Pennsylvania, in Massachusetts. The industry uses every recession as an opportunity for expansion.”

In Illinois, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pressing for a casino to make up for a budget shortfall. In Detroit, which continues its slide into oblivion, casinos grossed $1.378 billion in revenue. In Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, a new Sands casino opened in 2009 at the site of the shuttered Bethlehem Steel mill. Though the casino won’t come close to replacing Bethlehem’s 31,523 unionized steel jobs, residents of the depressed city packed the casino on opening day to revel in the possibility of revival.

“Even in this economy, people still want to challenge luck,” a pleased Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson told the New York Times.

Many gamblers end up unlucky, and much of the casino debate has hinged on the question of social costs: whether casinos cause more crime and create more gambling addicts.

“The social costs clearly outweigh the social benefits,” says professor Grinols. “The only people who benefit from casinos are the owners.”

Pennsylvania’s I-95 corridor is now crowded with gambling houses: Parx casino in Bensalem, SugarHouse on Philadelphia’s Delaware River waterfront, and Harrah’s in Chester, where the school district is virtually bankrupt. Harrah’s general manager said the customers in its database visit the casino an average of 4.5 times a week, while the state’s news media have fixated on the troubling trend of parents  leaving their children locked in parked cars when gambling in Bensalem.

A significant portion of gambling revenues — one-third to one-half — is derived from problem gamblers, says Grinols, who, in a 2006 Review of Economics and Statistics article concluded that 8 percent of crime in casino counties can be attributed to the presence of legal gambling.

But Fahrenkopf, a lawyer and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, says that Grinols and allied academics rely on flawed data. “They no longer argue the morality of gaming, because the American people are way past that. So they argue about social costs,” says Fahrenkopf. “As my old boss Ronald Reagan used to say with regard to the Russians: trust but verify.”

Indeed, the literature is conflicted. Some academics, like Harvard Medical School’s Howard Schaffer, say that the number of gambling addicts has not increased alongside casino expansion. Douglas Walker, a professor of economics at the College of Charleston, has criticized Grinol’s methodology in studying casino-related crime.

But the larger problem is indisputable: The growth of the gambling industry feeds on America’s job insecurity; people, whether gambling or seeking employment, have fewer viable ways to make good money. As the country has deindustrialized since the 1980s, and unions have been marginalized, real wages stagnated and then declined. At the same time, a deregulated and ascendent financial sector offered easier-than-ever credit cards and home mortgages, leading Americans desperate to maintain their lifestyle deep into debt.

Sociologists Kevin Leicht and Scott Fitzgerald have dubbed these people “postindustrial peasants,” tied to debt — from subprime mortgages to the high-on-student debt but low-on- job-prospects for-profit colleges — in the manner their agrarian forebears were tied to land. Meanwhile, the poor depend on an array of “alternative” and usurious financial services like pawn shops, payday lenders and check-cashing stores to stay afloat.

“At the same time that work has become less secure, there has also been this massive move to privatize the financing system for the two traditional mechanisms of economic mobility: homeownership and education. All these industries have grown by trading on people’s efforts — sometimes concerted, sometimes desperate — to get ahead in a world where opportunities in the labor market are hard to come by,” says Adam Goldstein, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the financialization of the American economy (and a friend).

Bad bet

When it comes to the real economy, legal gambling has the same limitation as Wall Street speculation: It doesn’t make tangible things that we need or foster broad-based prosperity.

In fact, the gaming economy may be reaching its outer limits, as new casinos cannibalize revenue from preexisting operations. In Atlantic City, casinos have experienced a $1.6 billion decline in revenue and hemorrhaged more than 96,000 jobs since Pennsylvania opened its first casino in 2006. The depressed business reduces the tax revenue generated for desperate state coffers and prompt government to take ever more desperate measures. The $2.4 billion Revel, Atlantic City’s newest resort and casino slated to open in May, was only completed after Gov. Chris Christie delivered a $261 million tax credit to the project.

The American Gaming Association, says Fahrenkopf, does not get involved in statehouse debates because they so often pit his members against one another.

In states that legalize gambling, casinos no doubt create jobs but they don’t necessarily stimulate the larger economy. A 1999 report by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission found that “few businesses can be found more than a few blocks from the Atlantic City boardwalk. Many of the ‘local’ businesses remaining are pawnshops, cash-for-gold stores and discount outlets. One witness noted that, ‘in 1978 [the year the first casino opened], there were 311 taverns and restaurants in Atlantic City. Nineteen years later, only 66 remained, despite the promise that gaming would be good for the city’s own.’”

The destruction of Main Street America in the age of Wal-Mart cannot, of course, be blamed entirely on casinos.

“You always get that sort of thing, and it’s not only in this industry,” says Fahrenkopf. “When a new mall is coming into a community, it’s going to have chain shoe stores, chain restaurants. The small town businesses are going to face the same — I don’t know if you want to call it capitalism — the same free market challenge.”

Casino jobs are comparable to those created throughout the American service economy: They are no replacement for vanished manufacturing employment, and wages can be quite low if unions don’t fight their way into the picture. In Las Vegas, Culinary Workers Local 226 (part of UNITE HERE) has organized 60,000 casino and hospitality workers, boosting wages and benefits far above those that prevail in non-union Reno. But Atlantic City’s downward spiral shows the fragility of labor success in the service economy. Most of the 5,500 permanent employees at the Revel will, in a first for the heavily unionized boardwalk, have to reapply for their jobs every four to six years.

Likewise, the prospect of casinos driving net job growth nationwide seems unlikely. While commercial casino revenues nationwide have increased by 73 percent since 1998, employment grew by just 5 percent, or 15,132 jobs, to 340,564. In New England, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine and Rhode Island are rushing to expand casino gambling and outcompete their neighbors. But as casinos expand, new profits are by-and-large net transfers to casino magnates who, flush with cash, leverage political muscle at the statehouse. In New York, Malaysian billionaire KT Lim, chairman of gambling empire Genting Berhad, has poured a large but undisclosed sum into a high-end lobbying operation to expand gambling in New York with the goal of remaking the “racino” at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens into a multibillion-dollar casino resort and conference center.

In Florida, legislation to legalize casinos was last month defeated in large part because of Disney World’s behemoth opposition: Their lucrative version of tourism is based on a “family friendly” brand. The political viability of casino gambling may be determined less by popular will and more by the balance of power between moneyed interests in any given state. In New York, major business groups like the Partnership for New York City, the Committee to Save New York, the Business Council of New York State — and, now, decisively and after long-running opposition, magnate Mayor Michael Bloomberg — support the legislation. Meanwhile, racetrack owners in New York and other states are scrambling to obtain a monopoly on expanded gambling.

The expansion of casino gambling can engender fierce opposition. And it can make for strange political bedfellows too, as progressive social justice advocates and Christian anti-gambling moralists join forces. In Philadelphia, activists organized a diverse, if ultimately unsuccessful, citywide movement against SugarHouse. But other neighbors welcome the casino and the largess they deliver via “community benefit agreements” through which casinos pay for school books, libraries and programs for senior citizens and veterans. Functions that in the past were expected from government are now delivered by corporations under a halo of philanthropic beneficence.

The limits of casino capitalism are nowhere more evident than in the birthplace of legal gambling in America: Las Vegas. Wall Street investment fueled the rise of modern Las Vegas casinos. In the 1980s, Steve Wynn was the first casino magnate to fund the construction of a new casino through Wall Street-issued junk bonds, displacing the mafia as legalized gambling’s patron of first resort.  Wall Street also funded Las Vegas’ meteoric housing boom, which has ended in one of the country’s largest busts: housing prices in the city more than doubled between 2000 and 2006. When the bubble burst, Las Vegas spent 22 months as the nation’s foreclosure capital.

And so casino capitalism spreads relentlessly even after Las Vegas, the brightly lit neon dream of a post-industrial America, has come crashing down.

“Ending welfare as we know it,” as Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans did in 1996, is one thing. “Ending Medicare,” Republicans were last year reminded, is something else altogether. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare,” declared a 2009 Tea Party town hall attendee who today might very well be an ardent supporter of Gingrich’s assault on food stamps. It is a political lesson that free-market fundamentalists have to relearn with some frequency. It was only 2005,  after all, when President George W. Bush launched his ill-fated proposal to privatize Social Security — a setback he later called his greatest failure.

Yet as more government programs of any sort are framed as pernicious, laissez-faire ideologues are again emboldened to get rid of everything.

As recently as November 2009, the New York Times reported that stigma around food stamps had faded; the program received strong bipartisan support as millions of newly impoverished Americans reached out for food assistance. But temporarily cautious politicians had only stashed the old playbook on the top shelf, and the revival of welfare queen demagoguery made for quick political results. Nationwide, state legislatures are moving to impose drug testing of welfare, and even unemployment insurance, recipients.

“If you go apply for a job today, you are generally going to be drug-tested,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in October 2010. “The people that are working are paying the taxes for people on welfare. Shouldn’t the welfare people be held to the same standard?”

And and then came the push for cuts. Few noticed in April  2011 when House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proposed cutting $127 billion from the food stamp program. The same went for the proposed dismantling of Medicaid, the healthcare entitlement for the nation’s poorest, which would be transformed into a block grant to the states with no coverage requirements.  Everyone was focused on Ryan’s audacious proposal to privatize Medicare, and conservative pundits were eager to sink the popular entitlement under the banner of pragmatic fiscal seriousness. “The Ryan budget,” David Brooks wrote at the time, “will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.”

Republicans quickly backtracked. But the effort to dismantle the “poor black people” entitlements continues unabated. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett this month announced that people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets — cars and homes generally excluded, savings very much included — will be barred from receiving food stamps. The move elicited widespread criticism from anti-hunger advocates but little concerted political resistance. Corbett’s administration also cut 88,000 Pennsylvania children from Medicaid.

But politicians have more trouble getting away with criticism of less stigmatized benefits. Corbett suggested on the campaign trail that “The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there.” Democrats pounced and he rushed to issue a clarification, though a  conservative think tank eagerly backed up his original position.

Unemployment benefits, however, are on the political cusp: Once somewhat invincible like Social Security and Medicare, some states have made cuts amid the campaign of stigmatization.  In South Carolina, state-funded jobless benefits were reduced from 26 to 20 weeks. Republican state Sen. Kevin Bryant blogged, “I’m disappointed that we have a significant segment of our society leeching [off] the system.” Arkansas, Missouri, Michigan and Florida have also reduced benefits. Yet it was just two months ago that Republicans suffered their greatest embarrassment of 2011 after nearly blocking the extension of unemployment benefits.

Welfare was “reformed” in 1996 because politicians, and many white Americans, were convinced  the program’s beneficiaries weren’t meritorious. Indeed, the entire history of  the American safety net is one of programs losing popularity as they are associated with poor black people. Initially blacks were largely excluded from New Deal welfare. It was when the War on Poverty broke down racial barriers that white public opinion turned against it. “Increasingly associated with Black mothers already stereotyped as lazy, irresponsible, and overly fertile,” writes Northwestern School of Law’s Dorothy Roberts, “it became increasingly burdened with behavior modification, work requirements, and reduced effective benefit levels.”

The same was true for public housing, which once received broad-based support. But in the 1950s, whites moved to segregated suburbs and blacks were left behind, and the projects became unpopular and underfunded. Housing benefits for upper-income Americans, like the mortgage interest rate deduction, are not, to be sure, subject to such negative stereotypes, and neither are the billions in federal and state dollars that have been spent on highways and federally subsidized mortgages for disproportionately white homeowners.

Or take public schools. If all of our children, black and white, rich and poor, were in one big system, that system would get ample support. But since many poorer students of color are segregated into separate, unequal and low-performing districts, policy solutions like charters and an obsession over standardized testing that would never pass muster in a wealthy district are advocated as pragmatic solutions.

Count yourself lucky that rich people still (for the meantime) breathe the same air as everyone else.

Rick Santorum has declared, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” (He now says that he said “blah” people.) On Social Security, Santorum is making what appears to be a safe argument for reform: cutting rich people out of the program. Right now, Social Security belongs to everyone. Cutting rich people out is the first step to making it a program for the poor. Making something a program for the poor — see food stamps, Medicaid and welfare — is the first step toward eliminating it. While crazy Newt Gingrich talks about black people and food stamps, Mitt Romney (whom Brooks, of course, calls “serious”) resurrects a big idea: privatize  Medicare. That, of course, is why conservatives so fear single-payer universal healthcare: They know that once we got it, we would never let them take it away.

If some whites reap some cold comfort from Gingrich’s performance, the racial hostility on display comes at a much higher cost to the American people as a whole. We have long since traded the possibility of a decent society for fear and resentment. So watch out for the next attack on “the food stamp president.” The entitlement they end might be your own.

Gingrich’s comment is an example of surviving remnant of dog-whistle politics that demonize urban residents; recent examples include new state laws to drug-test those on public assistance and the ongoing effort to cut food stamps (and Gingrich did call Obama the “food stamp president”). The specter of the black ghetto still scripts urban dwellers as villains (often as thieves robbing the citizen either directly, or as in this Rick Santorum comment, indirectly: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money”). But unlike the era of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, today cities are more ignored than attacked. And this goes well beyond Iowa.

“The core of the Republican constituency in metropolitan America are the growing, racially and economically exclusive ‘outer suburbs’ whose privileged status Republicans seek to protect at all costs,” says former mayor of Albuquerque David Rusk, now a consultant. He cited New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as an exemplar of the trend.

Today’s Republican candidates are rarely city-dwellers.

Gingrich owns a Northern Virginia cul-de-sac mansionette that “tends toward the ornate” and includes a master bath entirely covered in mirrors, according to a recent New York Times article on candidate homes. Rick Perry moved into a high-end gated community in exurban Austin, Texas, while the governor’s mansion was under construction. Michele Bachmann lives in a McMansion with a builder’s description that “reads like a synonym finder for nouveau suburban glory, touting the home’s arched stone entry, hand-scraped walnut plank flooring, and a fully paneled library with see-through fireplace.”

Romney rose to the pinnacle of Massachusetts politics from the leafy and high-end Boston suburb of Belmont, where he had a bathroom with “vaulted ceilings and a soaking tub some might mistake for a lap pool,” a residence “heavy on cream-colored upholstery crowded with pillows. The curtains are pleated so precisely you might think they were styled by Mr. Romney’s barber.” The house, until recently one of four owned by Romney, has now been sold.

While Romney’s father, George Romney, served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development in President Nixon’s administration, the candidate has said nothing in particular about cities. As with so many other things, Romney once had a different opinion. According to the New Republic, he was a devotee of smart growth during his years in the governor’s mansion — transit-oriented development and anti-sprawl measures included. “We don’t want to become like Houston,” said Romney. “Not that there’s anything wrong with Texas.”

The neglect of the cities can be traced back a half-century to the apogee of mid-20th-century American liberalism. In the 1950s and 1960s, the captains of municipal state, flush with federal funds and armed with great confidence in modern planning and architecture, bulldozed miles of “blighted” neighborhoods (often non-white) and rammed highways through the centers of many American cities. The feverish remaking of the cities was a desperate attempt to compete against the suburbs and woo back the middle class, which had departed thanks to the federal dollars propping up millions of (whites only) mortgages and miles of highways. Tragically, it was the liberal federal government’s funding of suburban homes and highways, and bulldozer-heavy urban renewal programs, that paved the way for Nixon and Reagan’s abandonment. Black people and the left were suspicious, the rising conservative tide was contemptuous, and politicians changed the subject. So, then, went the neighborhood.

It was from these very suburbs that modern conservatism arose, then proceeded to wage war on the city. In 1964, Orange County suburbanites reaping the benefits of government-financed defense jobs mobilized against fair housing legislation, and for their Sun Belt champion, Barry Goldwater. Nixon’s more successful 1968 silent majority was a suburban one, legitimating the postwar success “earned” by white elites. He promised protection against school busing, and promised that they were not, like George Wallace’s rural poor disciples, bigots. Just because suburban conservatives had backed off from de jure segregation doesn’t mean they wouldn’t attack urban blacks: take, again, Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen.” Save for Buffalo congressman, H.W. Bush HUD secretary, and 1996 vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp, cities would get little Republican attention. In the two decades since the Los Angeles riots, urban issues are more often ignored. Concerns and paranoias now seem more abstract or diffuse: Shariah law, or the Mexican day laborer in the parking lot of your local Home Depot.

On the policy level, Reagan’s 1980s cutbacks were followed by modest and private-sector-focused initiatives under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The programs, dubbed “enterprise zones” under Bush and “empowerment zones” under Clinton, were a clear repudiation of the direct government intervention that characterized Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Whether prompted by resignation or opportunism, urban policy now caters to business-minded solutions: tax abatements and special service districts to encourage downtown development, and a fervent belief that young “creative class” professionals (think Portland, Ore., as national role model) and tourism (think Baltimore’s Inner Harbor) could serve as the foundation for a new urban economy.

“Republicans saw little gain by reaching out to minority voters (the quixotic efforts of GOP maverick Jack Kemp excepted) and Democrats feared that if they put too much effort into solving urban problems,” says University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue, “they would reinforce their image as the party of ‘special interests.’”

President Obama has encouraged smart growth and regional cooperation between cities and suburbs, but the efforts have been fiscally and politically modest, and far from high-profile. One promising initiative has HUD, the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency participating in a tri-agency Partnership for Sustainable Communities, which Rusk calls “an important initiative in re-orienting federal ‘urban policy’” toward metro-wide solutions. But he criticizes the Obama administration for being “much too cautious in setting their requirements” and called the $100-50 million in annual funding “a pittance compared with the $145 billion that the three federal agencies give out in annual grants-in-aid to state and local governments.”

One reason that cities don’t figure in today’s campaigns is simply because fewer people live in them: America is now a primarily suburban nation. But America’s suburban majority, which has also diminished urban clout in Congress and statehouses, distracts from something bigger and more important. As older suburbs decline and lose population to further sprawl, the line between urban and suburban issues blurs. The American electoral system obscures the shared conditions facing cities and older post-World War II suburbs.

“If the U.S. had a popular vote election, candidates would focus on saturating the major metropolitan media markets, a race to collect 51 percent of the votes by adding up the biggest population centers,” says George Washington University historian Christopher Klemek, author of “The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal.” “We wouldn’t be talking about swing states; in fact, we wouldn’t be talking about states at all. Cities — or at least the broad, decentralized (sometimes tri-state) metropolitan urbanized regions that most Americans now inhabit — would be at the center of the campaigns.”

Yet the political debate is dominated by the exurbs, the pell-mell ribbons of home and office development that snake along the nation’s highways. While the original postwar suburbs were built for well-to-do commuters to the city, today’s exurbanites commute from gated home to office park.

The folksy country patter of politicians is of course about the aberrational power that we have bestowed on the microstates of Iowa and New Hampshire. But the affectations continue well through the general election. It is not so much about the countryside at all, but rather an appeal to the constantly fleeing, new-home-buying, SUV-driving denizen of the exurb, the newest home of a deeply held, though deeply hypocritical, American pastoralism. While the suburban dream was anti-urban, the exurban mind-set is simply non-urban. At least, that is, in mind-set. The frontier spirit masks a deep interdependence.

“Cities and metropolitan areas are the engines of our economy,” says Robert Puentes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metro Program. “The top 100 metropolitan areas alone claim only 12 percent of our land mass but harbor more than 65 percent of our population, 74 percent of our most educated citizens, 77 percent of our knowledge economy jobs, and 84 percent of our most recent immigrants. They also generate 75 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.”

Rick Perry, for all of his thickly lacquered rural charm, in reality rules over one of the nation’s largest metropolitan conglomerates. “Growth in Texas,” Ryan Avent notes in “The Atlantic Cities,” “has really been about growth in its biggest cities,” Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. Texas is the most urbanized state per capita.

Those cities have labor forces that are powered by immigrants. But on the campaign trail, the perception that cities are harboring Mexicans is a great liability. Gingrich has declared that he will block federal funding to any “sanctuary city.” Romney has gone after bleeding-heart municipalities since 2007 when he ran ads criticizing Rudy Giuliani’s tenure in New York. In response, Giuliani noted that Cambridge, Mass., Somerville, Mass., and Orleans, Mass., had declared themselves sanctuaries. Cities, by virtue of progressive leadership or brown skin, still have the power to attract conservative opprobrium. Think about what Republicans mean to convey when they say “San Francisco.”

American cities also receive attention when a candidate visits New York to raise money or eat bad pizza with Donald Trump. Yet much of Manhattan — like San Francisco — is thoroughly gentrified, and the deepening and unresolved problems of urban poverty and violence are kept well out of sight. The same goes for Washington, D.C., where a rapid influx of young and party-going policymakers has demographically transformed neighborhoods where shootings once dubbed my home city “Murder Capital of the World” and prompted our NBA team, the Washington Bullets, to change its name to the deflating “Wizards.” The emergence of the city as playground for the young and well-to-do masks the fact that for poor and working class city-dwellers, nothing much has changed. This is just as true now that many live in the suburbs. But you won’t hear it from any Republican presidential candidate.