...is interestingly reviewed by left-leaning Michael Kinsley here.
Near as I can tell, Brooks's argument is a variation on the famous Turner thesis. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893, just as America's western expansion was more or less complete, that the empty West had served as the country's defining fact and safety valve. The ever-present possibility of picking up and moving west had made Americans free and equal, and had spared us the conflicts of class and nation that infected the Old World of Europe.
Brooks's thesis -- to give it more clarity than he does, at the risk of getting it wrong -- seems to be that the suburbs and exurbs play a similar role in 21st-century America. Although sometimes he seems to be saying that the "move on" energy of Americans comes from technology like the Internet, or is more spiritual than geographical or material anyway. In any event, our defining -- and uniting -- characteristics as Americans, according to Brooks, are that we'd rather leave than fight, and we're always thinking about the future instead of dwelling on the past. That means the enormous gulfs in values, aspirations, understanding of the world and food preferences he outlines so wittily in the first part of "On Paradise Drive" don't turn Americans against one another (as they would the folks of some clotted and backward Old World nation). We all prosper in our various cultural cul-de-sacs (or as Brooks puts it, much better: "Everybody can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus"), and we don't trouble ourselves about what the folks in the next cul-de-sac might be up to.
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