"Left," "Right," Zeleneskyy, and the Signals Inherent to Restoration Hardware Politics

I’m back in West Marin to talk to ranchers, ahead of the closure of the Point Reyes ranches, and I’m thinking about the Zelenskyy-Trump-Vance cagefight in terms that are shaped by what I’m seeing.

Twenty years ago, the public schools in West Marin had about 800 students; today they’re under 500, and headed toward 400. Go search for “Point Reyes” at VRBO:

As the rancher Kevin Lunny said to me, the last time I was here, West Marin is becoming a place that is visited. It’s still an agricultural community, and there are still cows just about everywhere. As a highly experienced journalist, I will characterize the presence of the cows using professional framing: It’s a lot of cows. I have about a hundred new pictures of cows standing on hills, if anybody wants to see those.

But the shift toward weekend playground for the affluent is nonetheless pretty distinct, and a dozen ranches will be disappearing over the next year or so. Remember that the Santa Rosa newspaper described the effort by environmental activists to fund the removal of the ranches this way:

Making the rounds in the affluent Marin County enclave of Ross on Jan. 12, 2023, they stopped by the house of Dan Kalafatas and his wife Hadley Mullin. He is chairman of the global climate strategy company 3Degrees, and she is senior partner and senior managing director at the private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners. Together, they agreed early on to support the cause and to help fundraise and spread the word to their well-connected friends.

The demographics of Ross, California, the site of this gathering of anti-ranching leftist activists: 87% white, median household income over $250,000. Very, very left. Here’s a political map of red and blue areas in Marin County:

There is, one might venture to say, a limited amount of red on the map.

As the shift from agriculture to luxury travel accelerates, West Marin is changing culturally. A place that has faced left for decades is going “left” in a different tone of voice. The little bookstore in the small town of Point Reyes Station is currently greeting the second Trump term with a curated selection of books, in a notice-me semi-circle in front of the cash register, about fascism and resistance. A block north from me, an old sign in a store window still says proudly that Muslims are welcome here, while signs for the recent march for immigrant rights and the recent immigrant strike day have been taken down. And the distress-signaling American flag at the top of this post flies with a Ukrainian flag at a house near the school, just outside the small business district in Point Reyes Station. I drove in on Sunday afternoon in time to catch a pro-Palestine protest at the intersection where you turn toward Inverness — I got a quick photo through the windshield, the quality of which you’re free to admire:

I don’t remember if there’s a Pulitzer for news photography, but feel free to submit this one for a nomination. It captures the spirit of the age.

As West Marin becomes more affluent, the politics become more insistent and more performative. Affluence is “left,” loudly. You don’t want to be seen being a Trump person in the place where a one-week vacation rental is $10,572.

If you pick up a political science textbook and try to figure out what “left” and “right” are, right is the politics of the status quo, of existing relationships of power and status, and left is the politics of change, opposed to power and inclined toward social leveling. If you look at the actual political landscape of the country, the leftists are gathering with other private equity executives at their home in Ross to put a stop to all this agriculture that’s making their weekend playground less pleasing to the eye.

As I’ve been saying, my strong impression is that we’re living in upside-down world, and the Democratic presidential candidate went out on the campaign trail with Liz Cheney. There is, I think, currently not much value to political discussion about “left” and “right.” I’m pretty sure the split in America is between people who are firmly attached to institutions and the status quo, because they benefit from them, and people who think our institutions are broken. There’s room within that division for another division, which can break left and right, and someone like Chris Hedges who sees the broken institutions thinks that the collapse of those institutions means that we need to resist capitalism and grow the government. But mostly, I think, we’re having a culture war over status and rice bowls.

So.

Angelo Codevilla:

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity.

Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

So my strong impression is that the quite reasonable Trump-Vance rejection of strategically aimless eternal war by an eternally needy and obtuse client is being read in terms of status and class, and my goodness, this JD Vance person still sounds like a poor. He’s not speaking the correct signals! I think the political analysis of the Oval Office meeting mostly isn’t a political analysis. It’s especially fascinating to see the aggressiveness with which a certain kind of status-attached institutional prostitute is reacting to Vance, who came from extreme poverty and made it to Yale for law school:

My sense is that our internal conflict, our struggle over who gets status and affluence, is a fog that prevents us from seeing the substance of discussions like does it make sense to remain endlessly locked in a stalemated war that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people toward no apparent end?

I’ll be spending much of the week offline, so apologies if emails and comments go without a response for a while. More to come.