Say the powers-that-be determine to site something truly noxious—a radioactive waste dump, a halfway house for child molesters, a data center—in your neighborhood. (These almost inevitably will be government projects or enabled by corporate welfare and subsidies to developers.) You protest. Instead of meeting your sincere remonstrations with arguments, you will be sneeringly called a NIMBY—a Not in My Backyard obstructionist.
This epithet can be disorienting. Not in My Backyard? Well, yeah—not in my backyard. What’s wrong with caring about my backyard?
This objection never occurs to the smearers. For they are likely to be the sort of placeless people who manage the huge impersonal entities that propose to run our lives, whether government agencies or large corporations or bureaucratic nonprofits, or they will be the paid propagandists for those entities—transient policy wonks or talking heads encased in antiseptic bubbles, people who have no backyards, whether literal or metaphorical, and therefore think that calling someone a NIMBY is a poison dart.
Of all the cretinous slurs hurled at dissidents in the Land of the Free, NIMBY stands out for its goofiness (it sounds like a mash-up of namby-pamby and Gumby) and its breathtaking perversity.
In 1992, the USC professor of urban and regional planning Michael Dear committed a classic invidious explication of the NIMBY phenomenon. Setting the stage, he reminded readers of the American Planning Journal that “prejudice and discrimination are nothing new. Latin manuscripts from the twelfth century identify homosexuals and Jews as nonconformists, threatening the social order.”
The modern heirs to these bigots of the Middle Ages were said to be those whose small-minded carping makes it so hard to “build or locate vital facilities.” He meant halfway houses and the like, but NIMBY-catchers cast a far wider net than that sewn by Professor Dear.
Slighting the option of “cooperation between operator and the host community,” Dear suggested “acting independently of the host community”—that is, shoving the unwanted intrusion down the throats of those who have the unmitigated gall to care about their neighborhoods.
It doesn’t always work, of course, as famously demonstrated in the late 1950s by the valorous defense of Manhattan’s Washington Square Park mounted by Jane Jacobs and “a bunch of mothers!” against the diabolical expressway-building city-destroyer Robert Moses. But the n-word acronym is sure to fly wherever place-conscious citizens defend their turf.
The thin line between derisive dismissal (Moses’s “bunch of mothers!”) and the dehumanization of backyard-lovers was crossed in this diagnosis from a 1991 book: “The NIMBY syndrome is a public health problem of the first order. It is a recurring mental illness which continues to infect the public. Organizations which intensify this illness are like the viruses and the bacteria which have, over the centuries, caused epidemics such as the plague.”
Resisters compared to viruses, bacteria, and plague rats. Gosh, where have we heard this before?
There are also parallels to the postwar Vital Centurions who pathologized dissent from the Cold War liberal consensus. The Soviet Union actually sent its Vladimir Bukovskys and Zhores Medvedevs to mental hospitals, but our stateside political psychoanalysts preferred merely to ascribe dissent to mental illness and let stigma do its work.
Isolationists—that is, those who adhere to what used to be the default position of most Americans: that their country’s government should refrain from military involvement abroad—were said to have come by their antiwar sentiments not out of patriotism or religious conviction or distrust of overweening government but rather the status anxiety and “authoritarian personality” allegedly characteristic of the lower-middle class.
The traditions of rural pacifism or Main Street mind-our-own-business-ism were now beyond the pale. A reluctance to kill or be killed by foreigners was evidence that you were either crazy or a pitiable, resentment-reeking loser. This crested with the historian Richard Hofstadter’s influential essay and later book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, whose title became a cliché used then and now by pundits and publicists (most of whom had never read the book) trying to suffocate populist movements in the crib.
Hofstadter’s book was in part a response to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. Goldwater he deemed a “pseudoconservative”—the prefix was big in those days—who deserved to be shunned for such statements as “I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow.” His movement was said to be inspired by “paranoid suspicions.”
Goldwater, at least in 1964, was something of a belligerent nationalist in foreign affairs, but Hofstadter had leveled similar charges ten years earlier, when he ridiculed the last remnants of the Old Right for such proposals as barring the stationing of U.S. troops in foreign lands, which he held up as an example of the “extreme demands” of “isolationists” who do not support “an adequate military establishment.”
Those who object to the Empire’s wars are still subjected to vile slander—just ask the heroic Thomas Massie—but at last count, the NIMBYs have stopped $18 billion worth of data centers and delayed another $46 billion of these AI death stars. I’d say the NIMBY virus is going viral.
Read the full article here
