Strip Malls Are As American As Apple Pie

They may be ugly, but the people like these setups for their practicality and convenience

Tucker Carlson says he may be forced to oppose the Republican Party. His hostility is driven, in part, by the GOP’s apparent support for strip malls. “I don’t want any more f*cking strip malls that nobody goes to, no more karate studios and vape shops. Like, how about no?,” he told podcaster Shawn Ryan. Tucker mocked the free market principles that allow for these store fronts to be built and claimed a normal society would burn them down.

“I don’t know why they get to wreck our landscape and destroy our country, build shitty buildings, make everything ugly, desecrate God’s creation, and no one says anything about it,” Carlson said of the people who build Dollar Stores.

Strip malls are easy to hate. They’re un-aesthetic and commonly serve as grist for Euro criticism of America. I personally get a little depressed when driving around and seeing endless miles of them. But one shouldn’t make social and economic policy based on vague aesthetic sensibilities. Strip malls are a natural expression of American civilization, whether we like it or not. If your chief problem with capitalism is a complex with a Chipotle and a karate studio, you may not have serious qualms with our economic system.

Strip malls have been around for over a century, and the mentality behind their creation has been around for much longer. America has always prized practicality and function in its design and structures. As we spread westward, we had to build up civilization from scratch and provide goods to people in the most accessible way possible. We didn’t build grand structures to do this. A simple log cabin store was enough to get the job done. Pragmatism, rather than high aesthetics, was the chief virtue. It’s why many of the cities and towns in the heartland are characterized by plain, utilitarian architecture.

There’s no better representation of this mentality than the strip mall. These store fronts could house basically anything. A burrito place, a pizzeria, a barber shop, a dance studio, even a church. They’re monuments to utility and convenience. If one shop fails, something else–something even completely different–can quickly take its place. The strip mall fully accommodates the boom-and-bust cycle that defines our society. They’re easy to place along the roads Americans constantly drive on, giving busy citizens an place to shop without taking a lengthy detour.

Americans prize practicality and convenience over taste and tradition. That’s just the way we are–and that’s why strip malls now dot our country.

A trip to Europe or New England’s resort towns can make Americans pine for a different landscape. Being surrounded by long-standing, tasteful structures is a better experience than driving to the nearest strip mall to get some ice cream. But one can’t replicate Heidelberg on a national scale, especially not in America. It’s unclear what we are supposed to replace strip malls will. The people would also probably be upset at the sacrifice of convenience and utility to satisfy the aesthetic demands of dissidents.

There were some ordinary conservatives upset at Tucker’s comments, finding them to be “leftist” and “big government.” That might be a bit hyperbolic, but the average Trump voter would probably not be pleased by a ban on strip malls. Many of them operate a store inside one and shop at these places. It’s not a sacrifice they want to make, especially on the grounds of foggy sentimentalism.

This illustrates the gap between conservative intellectuals and much of the conservative base. The conservative intellectual pines for an organic society rich with apparent meaning and tradition, even if what they dream of never existed on this continent. The ordinary conservative, as exemplified by the used car dealer, has far more practical concerns. He simply wants low taxes and the government off his back. He’s fine with strip malls and loves capitalism. The intellectual is horrified by strip malls and uncomfortable with the free market. Consumerism bothers the right-wing intellectual, while the ordinary conservative relishes it. The intellectual wants grand architecture and high aesthetics while the ordinary conservative just wants a good deal and a convenient location. The past (even if it is an imagined one) weighs heavily on the intellectual, while the ordinary conservative doesn’t dwell on it.

This explains why anti-strip mall rhetoric will gain an audience among right-wing intellectuals and online dissidents, but would be a dud with average conservative audiences. The two sides see the world differently and sometimes have conflicting preferences.

This rhetoric should generate skepticism of anti-capitalist views from the Right. They often disregard basic economic thinking on behalf of aesthetic preferences and fantastical sentiments. It’s common for right-wingers to want to ban corporate chains, banks, loans, and other fundamentals of our economy on behalf of these questionable reasons. It’s why so many go for such silly ideas as “distributism.” This thinking would wreck the economy, but that doesn’t dissuade its adherents from thinking we can colonize Mars if we just eliminate capitalism. Fantasy, not sober analysis, animates economic thinking here.

The Left is notorious for its poor economic thinking, believing money grows on trees and we can distribute it to the poor to solve inequality. But, even if idiotic, it has the concrete goal of spreading the wealth. The anti-capitalist Right often advocates for dubious economic proposals simply to build castles across the country rather than solve anything practical.

Anti-strip mall rhetoric is, ironically, out of touch with current right-wing nostalgia. Presently, conservatives yearn for the “Merry America” of the ‘90s with its superior strip malls. They want the classic Pizza Hut to return and long for the memories of visiting their nearby Blockbuster. They have no memories of mom-and-pop stores or agrarian life. They want the old strip mall experience back.

This nostalgia inspired the fight over Cracker Barrel’s logo change. Conservatives felt the corporate chain’s alteration was a threat to their heritage, even though it was just a corporate logo for a chain restaurant. A sight of a Cracker Barrel by a strip mall is common in America. But conservatives didn’t want to eliminate this corporate artifice. They wanted to keep it the way they remembered it.

If Cracker Barrel is part of American heritage, then so is the strip mall.

It’s understandable to not find strip malls aesthetically pleasing. One would hope to have good taste and not be awed by their design. But aesthetic preferences don’t make for the best guide for economic policy. Americans like these places because they’re functional and suited to their busy lives. Americans would need to radically change how they live and what they want from a society to achieve a strip mall ban. It expresses our national spirit, for both good and ill.

One can have aesthetic preferences at odds with strip mall landscapes, but they should be separated from how we run our country. Foggy sentimentalism and vague platitudes are no way to direct an economy.