John McCain has, as you are no doubt familiar, recently cut an ad framing efforts to educate children on inappropriate touching as ’sex education’. This is not a popular position - in fact, most Republicans will unreservedly support programs like the one Obama voted for.

Why?

This has been the question on everyone’s mind. Why on Earth would John McCain put his seal of approval on an ad calling a program to prevent child molestation ‘teaching sex to children before they learn to read’? (Of course, as Adam Cadre points out, the fact that McCain evidently believes a 5-year-old shouldn’t be taught to read speaks wonders in and of itself.) It seems like an unparalleled misstep, a violent and self-destructive policy with no possible constituency.

I argue that McCain blundered, but it was not a miscalculation - it was a misapprehension. It is truly rare to have a national candidate running from a constituency with such profoundly dominant political and economic realities that they have never in their careers been forced to choose between rival interests. For John Sidney McCain III, those realities are the realities of the American southwest - growth, emigration, and homeownership. Much has been said about the sort of elaborate Ponzi scheme in which moving from a neighborhood without a high school to a neighborhood without a library and taking yourself three hours farther from work in the process increases your personal worth. For some states occupying a sort of economic faultline - California, say, where the needs of the big cities are in increasing competition with the needs of the exurban sprawl - this has always been contentious and is only getting worse; for others, like my own, the ecological and resource consequences of sprawl are so severe that even its most shameless profiteers are a little afraid of what the future holds for it.

Arizona is a little Shangri-La of suburban and exurban development; people move there for no clear reason to get jobs that do nothing useful and continuously shuttle from house to house, moving farther and farther from civilization and isolating themselves further and further from other human beings. Arizona is the vanguard of iron-lung service capitalism; its economy has been exclusively dependent on mortgages, homeownership, and real estate finagling since the 1960s, and John McCain’s constituents are people for whom interacting with anyone outside of their own family and close coworkers is a rare and somewhat hostile experience.

Part of the entire appeal of homeownership is that kind of escape - and exurbia depend on that kind of escape being socially viable. If you don’t inhabit a dangerous, horrifying nightmare-world, the idea of being insulated from humanity 23 hours a day is preposterous; if you do, it’s necessary - and 24 would be preferable.

Let us ignore, for now, the possibility that McCain’s closest political associates may just belong to the religious subculture in which authority is a product of the divine and teaching children to be wary of the behavior of their elders and other authority figures is an impossible blasphemy; let us also discard the other probable reason nobody in McCain’s staff put their foot down on this stupid, self-destructive ad before it was ever released, which is a kind of self-conscious and disgusting racism in which all decent people should naturally be afraid of a black man destroying their precious children’s innocence.

I believe, and I think the record justifies this, that McCain cut that ad because he has spent his entire political career in an economic culture that demands the world be seen as hostile, dangerous, predatory - and that any possible predator be inflated to comical size. The increasingly marginal land available to the exurban project makes a social ideology of insulation a necessary component of the economy; it takes a lot of doing to justify moving your family somewhere where the only place for kids to hang out is a Fry’s an hour away. McCain is part of the complex doing the justifying, and to him - and to his most loyal, most powerful backers - the Neighborhood Watch / Amber Alert / Megan’s Law social complex is second nature. John McCain’s Arizona is a world of manufactured crises, inflated criminality, and Mean World Syndrome as the psychological norm. The ugly truth is that he would rather a few children get molested than people come to terms with molestation being a primarily family affair. If the man in the trenchcoat or balaclava didn’t exist, it would fall on people like America’s Most Privileged Failure to create him.

McCain did not miscalculate the ease with which sex-fearing Southern Gothic fundamentalists would adopt the ‘teaching sex in kintergarten’ narrative. Maybe some people within his campaign did, but he did not. McCain operated under a fundamental misapprehension - that is, that the élite of American society have the same economic and social ideology as the élite of the develop-and-flip plutocracy he’s familiar with. People like his biggest domestic backers - people who would love McCain even if he hadn’t thoroughly forced the idea of himself as a tough-talking maverick into the public sphere - probably called him up the day the ad ran to thank him for taking such a tough stand. He wouldn’t have understood - he, like Palin, has never been in the habit of communicating with anyone even remotely outside his own political, social, and personal sphere - but he knew why he had made the right call.

He is now finding out, no doubt to his profound displeasure and serious confusion, that the rest of the country isn’t quite so ready as his own base to accept a child getting raped here or there to get Oak Pines flipped. But don’t imagine, even for a moment, that this was just a simple gaffe. The same ad, run to support a campaign in Arizona, probably wouldn’t have been noticed at all.