OLD LEFTISTS THE NEW PALEOCONS?
Has Your Ville Come Of Age As A ‘Latte Town’?
By Todd Wilkinson, 12-07-06
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Heaven knows that folks in the go-go West love their cups of morning java.
We are as addicted to caffeine as we are adrenaline-lusted for feats of athletic hedonism.
From mom and pop roadside bean huts springing up in working class towns to more elegant shops adorning suburban strip malls and gentrified downtowns, the business of slinging coffee appears to be lucrative.
But is your community a "Latte Town"?
Nine years ago, political commentator David Brooks penned a wonderfully sneering piece for The Weekly Standard in which he created a new social category for certain lifestyle communities.
Like De Tocqueville, Brooks has a special fetish for traveling through the hinters of America identifying trends based upon patterns of conspicuous consumption that he believes translate into expressions of conservative or Liberal ideals.
I'll get to the punch line later but meantime, read on:
"Latte Towns," Brooks wrote in the latter half of the 1990s, "are upscale.....communities, often in magnificent natural settings, often university-based, that have become the gestation centers for America's new upscale culture."
For those of you who drink your coffee on Sundays with a copy of The New York Times in hand, you already know that Mr. Brooks is a columnist for the old gray lady. He's also a writer whose opinions put him in the company of guys like George Will, William F. Buckley, and William Safire.
Yes, I'm speaking code.
Brooks also wrote a book, "Bobos in Paradise: The Upper Class and How They Got There", an outgrowth of his Latte Town piece in the Standard in which he coins the term "bourgeois bohemians"—or Bobos if you will—to describe hoity-toity Patagucci and Carhartt-wearing Americans who dress and act outdoorsy because it gives them cool cachet.
He followed that book up with another, "On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense." In this treatise, he applies his insouciant baseball bat to the shallow consumptive impulses of the middle class.
Let it also be known that I have a personal bias when it comes to Mr. Brooks. I have great admiration for his work and the place he was trained. He and I both are alumni of the City News Bureau of Chicago, where we each reported on violent crime in the Windy City, though we were separated by a couple of years.
That said, let's press on:
"You know you're in a Latte Town," Brooks observed, "when you can hop right off a bike path, browse in a used bookstore with shelves and shelves of tomes on Marxism the owner can no longer get rid of, and then drink coffee at a place with a punnish name...before sauntering through an African drum store or a feminist lingerie shop."
Besides having "hip coffee shops," Latte Towns, he adds, have gourmet bread stores, micro-breweries, organic stores "and the rest of the sensibly-drenched enterprises that marry natural goodness, high craftsmanship, cosmopolitan taste, social concerns, and inflated prices to create genteel culture."
What are a few of the other characteristics of towns oriented toward bean worship?
"If you walk into one of the many home-furnishing stores, you see that the Latte Town elite has transformed the old Protestant elite's animal motifs," he writes. "Artwork featuring hunting-related creatures like stags, hounds, and ducks is out; artwork featuring non-threatening animals like cats, frogs, and small birds is in. Cows, which are fashionably unglamorous and also pacifist, are quite chic."
Does his synopsis match the artwork on your wall?
"Latte Towns," he continues, " have developed their own sumptuary code, which is now spreading to all the places in America with high NPR listenerships. The code is based on a distinction between needs and wants. Needs are things we must have to survive, like shelter, food, clothing, and exercise. Wants are those things we desire to make us feel superior to others. The genius of the code of Financial Correctness that prevails in Latte Towns is that you can spend as much as you want on needs, so long as you are not ostentatious when you spend on wants."
He cites examples: "You can shell out $50,000 on an in-home media center, because that is a mere want. You can drop $4,400 on a Merlin Extralite road bike at the local cycle shop, because man must exercise, but it would be vulgar to have a powerboat, because while man needs to move around, he doesn't need motors to propel him."
In Brooks' mind, "the entire rural population of America can be divided between those who are Motor (powerboats, motorcycles, snowmobiles) and those who are Non-motor (canoes, mountain bikes, cross country skis). Latte Towns people are Non-motor."
Does this perhaps explain the social schism which exists today between environmentalists and snowmobilers; between mountain bikers and ATVers; between those open to driving hybrids and those who peel around in Hummers just to piss you off?
Were the perfect Latte Town ever socially engineered, Brooks says, it would have "Rocky Mountain views to the west, Redwood forests downtown around the town square, a New England lake along the waterfront, and a major city with a really good alternative weekly (newspaper) within a few hours' drive."
Sound like anyplace you know?
Here's something else that distinguishes Latte Towns: Hippies and fun hogs who descended there decades ago in order to drop out of the career rat race have ironically turned into some of the most ferocious capitalistic-minded entrepreneurs. They've become rich by giving up ski bumdom for carpentry and, as contractors, building 8,000 square foot trophy homes; they've become CEOs of backpack-making companies and now have wine cellars in their basements; they've sold off the sputtering VW van, secured their real estate licenses and now own an Espalade.
Yet to re-sanctify their commitment to land preservation and perhaps to sate their guilty conscience, they dutifully zip off a check for $25 to cover their annual membership in the most radical local environmental group.
Observes Brooks: "Maybe it's not surprising that the 1960s-era rebels who once lived on communes named Walden, would, in the fullness of time, discover that business can be converted into a spiritually satisfying lifestyle.
"Business, which was once considered soul-destroying, can actually be quite enriching," he adds. "They [Latte Town inhabitants] were among those who made a crucial discovery, a discovery that is at the heart of the Latte Town success: They discovered that the anti-capitalist ethos of the 1960s can be converted into an efficient capitalist ethos for the 1990s and beyond."
So here's the point, the punch line of Brooks' hypothesis, the de Tocquevillean coup de grace about many of the coffee-drinkin' enclaves in the New West where a significant number of Americans are gravitating in droves.
Latte Towns, Brooks insists, are bastions not for naturally-evolving Republicans, but for Liberals, pragmatic Leftists, do gooders and intellectual feel gooders who would seem to represent a progressive, well healed counter pole of the country club set.
Indeed, he is writing to entice.
This is not empirical but I wonder how towns with the highest concentration of boutique coffee houses voted in the recent election? Would those villes with a denser concentration of national franchise coffee houses be dens of Republicanism while those burgs with an array of family-owned establishments be strongholds for Democrats?
Speculate here all you want.
For Brooks, one thing is clear: For as fashionable as these places aspire to be [insert whatever town comes to your mind here], they are resistant to surrender the image they've cultivated as being holdouts of friendly neighborliness and down-home values.
According to Brooks, Latte Towns have distinguished themselves as "an interesting mixture of liberal social concern and paeloconservative effort to ward off encroaching modernism. Like the paleocons, the Latte Town elites seek to preserve old buildings and old communities and reduce the creative destruction of capitalism."
Is your community a Latte Town?
Chances are that if you're reading these words wirelessly while leaning over a cup of steaming Chai or an exotic roasted brew, Brooks would argue yes and stir your froth with an exclamation mark made of fine imported wood.
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Comments
Montana would seem to make mincemeat of his theories. Bozeman and Whitefish would appear to be Latte Towns to an outsider like Brooks, but try telling me those are bastions of liberalism.
And the phrase is "well-heeled."
And if you had been to the brand new 17 million dollar library, you'd see that indeed, right inside the front door is a latte store waiting to impress you with their gently picked, fair trade, shade grown, gender neutral, sun roasted without releasing carbon, served in bleach free biodegradeable cups, politically correct coffee varieties.
"On Paradise Drive" as a decent enough library book. Glad I didn't buy it. One lesson I gleaned from it was the need to encourage the redevelopment of that sad lookin North 7th or Reserve Street (or Colfax Avenue) type 60s strip sprawl into something that resembles new urbanist living. Bozeman's taking steps to do that, to its credit. And, of course, the other lesson is never doing that again.
"Oh, y'know -- tai chi and chai tea."
Great piece. I think there is something to Brook's rants. From an ecological perspective, the Old West did considerable damage to the land community, and quite frankly, the New West isn't doing any better. We seem to have replaced cows with people. Otherwise, the impact of too much and too many is pretty much the same.
In all places and at all times, capitalism is a great evil and its practitioners must expiate their sins with penance.
I do wish people would drop "paleo-" as an epithet for stupidity or idiocy. The Paleolithic was the golden age of hunting and gathering; by necessity, Paleolithic peoples were ecologically aware and they knew every square inch of ground in the places where they lived. Arguably, they possessed an artistic sophistication that hasn't been seen again for 10,000 years. Paleolithic peoples had larger brains and lived healthy lives, having a healthy diet of natural foods, with no corn syrup or faux butter to clog up their digestive systems. They were outdoors constantly, were tough and tough-minded, and everyone had to pull his or her weight to survive. Equality marked their societies.
Once agriculture was discovered, things went downhill pretty fast, and are still going downhill at greater rates of speed than ever before.
"Paleo" sounds a whole more intelligent and forward-looking to me than "liberal-progressive-capitalist."
Best,
Robert
As the recent election in the mountain West proved, generalizing about ranchers,rural towns and their political persuasions is impossible. Brooks' articles are REALLY off-base when he claims "Latte Towns" have only a conservitive or a liberal political bias. There are towns in the new West that serve latte and it ONLY means one or two shop owners decided to try to increase their caffeine offerings. It's not like they took a vote of the town's political leanings before they made the changes.
Every mountain West town has plenty of blue collar liberals and white-collar conservatives as well as vice-versa.
Thought the purpose of this website/blog was to show that the West is changing and the old stereptypes don't mecessarily hold up anymore.
Today they're more likely lift a pinkie over some some hundred dollar wine and fancy fourteen dollar a plate finger food while bemoaning sprawl consumerism and glorifying in how enlightened they are.
If Neil Young were singing about Western Man today, he'd point out that:
Western Man, better feed your head
Do exactly what the barrista said
Western changes gonna come at last
I heard creaming and cappucinos steaming...
How long how long?
I thought the purpose of this website is to document the downfall of that Western Civilization.
He and his comrades at National Review and Weekly Standard are desperate to stereotype, hence belittle those who have rejected their nasty Orwellian politics while creating intelligent lives and healthy communities.
They know we know that they are elitists and opportunists who have bet on the wrong horse, blindly enabling Bush's corporatism, warmongering and incompetence.
They need to fantasize that they are still smarter than anyone else in the room. (Here I'd knowingly peg what they wear and drink and drive, as a form of insult, but I'm not feeling all that insecure.)
I thought the purpose of this website was to show that traditional
"real Western men" can still exist right along beside the next born-in-the-West generation who uses science and concervation in ranching and might be more flexible and accepting about gender and race and those who are culturally different. And that both of these westerners can still coexist today without causing the fall of "Western" Civilization.
Those who are culturally different, you say? What about respecting the culture of Montana that was here decades ago before the influx of those insisting that the culture change, "for the better"? Who respects that?
I do. It was that insistence that each individual prove their worth that I loved about Montana. Not the mountains, or the environment, but the tough mindedness of the people who expected each person to pull their weight and contribute their share.
As the Ringling Five sing, "the more you do, the more you screw up Montana".
You're living in the wrong country. The United States of America is founded on putting the individual and his or her ability and freedom to make moral choices individually, and to reap the benefits, or suffer the consequences of those choices.
As a result, capitalism is the enlightened Westerner at his or her finest, and the United States, with it's emphasis on individual rights and individual choice the finest expression of Lockean freedom.
This website, for example, exists because of individual choices, among those the individuals who run it desire to make money while doing something they care about.
What is evil, throughout the centuries, has been the dominance of mysticism and collective authoritarianism over individual freedom and intitiative. Even today, the fundamentalists threaten us because we value individuals and their choices. The ability to own your individual person, to direct it, to make moral choice, and to direct and benefit from the labor of your person is what makes america revolutionary, and great.
>>>>>>>
The Pilgrims' unhappiness stemmed from their system of common property --
not inspired, as often asserted, by their religious convictions, but imposed against their will by the colony's sponsors. The fruits of each person's efforts went to the community, and each received a share from the common wealth. This caused severe strains among the members, as colony Gov. William Bradford recorded: "... the young men ... did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense. The strong ... had not more in division ... than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes, etc. ... thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And the men's wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it."
Bradford summarized the effects of their common property system: "For this community of property (so far as it went) was found to breed much confusion and discontentment and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort ... all being to have alike, and all to do alike . .. if it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them."
How did the Pilgrims move from this dysfunctional system to the situation we try to emulate in our own gatherings? In the spring of 1623, they decided to let people produce for their own benefit: "All their victuals were spent ... no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length ... the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves ... And so assigned to every family a parcel of land ..."
The results were dramatic: "This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn, which before would allege weakness and inability, whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression."
That was quite a change from their previous situation, where severe whippings had been resorted to as an inducement to more labor effort, with little success other than in creating discontent.
Despite the Pilgrims' increased efforts in 1623, a summer drought threatened their crops. Following their beliefs, they offered contrition for their sins. Then the drought broke, which led to the Thanksgiving we still try to emulate. And as historian Russell Kirk, who used the example to illustrate the importance of property rights in "Economics: Work and Prosperity," observed, "never again were the Pilgrims short of food."
It is appropriate to remember the Pilgrims as we celebrate Thanksgiving. Though we have incomparably more than they did, we can learn much from their "way of thanksgiving." But we should also remember that our material blessings are the fruits of America's system of private-property rights and the liberties they ensure, including the freedom to choose our employment and spend money as we see fit. Those rights are under constant assault today, from limits on people's ability to contract as they wish, especially in labor relationships, to abuses of government's eminent domain. Nevertheless, the power for peaceful and productive cooperation that the Pilgrims began to prove by experiment almost four centuries ago endures.
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I guess it depends on a person's value judgments whether the Pligrm's discovered means to prospertity and survival was good or evil.
By "culturally different," I had in mind Native-Americans and Mexican-Americans who were born and raised in the mountain West and share your philosophy as a part of their culture, as well as wanting to live in places like Montana or Wyoming for all the same reasons you do.
Now comes the greenie from the city, who not only feels thsi is a wonderful free and beautiful place to live (and it is), but they feel the oldtimers are defiling the land, and it is up to them to save it...for themselves at someone else's expense. Their latte is only a symbol of their picture of themselves.
In the posters, behind the goddess Progress came the pioneers: the miners, the ranchers, the loggers, and then the capitalists, who consolidated it all by taking it away from the little guys who were first on the ground even before the Natives got kicked out. This is particularly true of the mining industry and later the logging industry. The livestock industry was under the thumb of eastern and British/Scottish capitalists from the beginning. Of course, the same was true of the fur trade, which preceeded the pioneers.
This is all standard Western history. Nothing unique.
Those 19th century progressives did a lot of damage to land and after chasing away or killing off the native inhabitants, who after all, weren't using it properly. The conservation and then the environmental movements arose in the late 19th and 20th centuries to mitigate the damage done by the 19th century exemplars of progressivism and to prevent further damage. As part of the economic process, a new progressive movement arose in the 20th century, beginning with the tourist industry and now exemplified by the amenities-based economy that is replacing the natural resources extraction industry.
The assumption of the new progressive movement is that the amenities based economy is a "higher and better use" of the land, and of course, is not doing as much damage as the previous economic regime. In other words, the practioners of the old economy aren't making good use of the land, and were ruining it to boot, so they had and still have to go, just as the Native Americans and wildlife had to go a hundred years earlier, to make way for all the seekers of pleasurable amenities who end up in Jackson, Bozeman, Missoula, Kalispell, Saratoga, Aspen, Vail, etc. looking for their lattes and looking down their noses at cowboy coffee.
But exploitation is still exploitation, and running off the previous inhabitants to make way for "superior" peoples is still a form of colonialism. In short, New West colonialism is no different from Old West colonialism, except that people have replaced the cows, and boutiques have replaced the feedstores. The impact on the land is the same.
Another way of putting it is, what makes the New West different from the Old West is that there are now more money changers in the temple.
To hit another thread, when the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, they stole the land. Their descendants and later immigrants did the same in the march to the Pacific. It's easy to create wealth when the basis of that wealth is stolen and then exploited.
That's American capitalism; steal it under color of law. I recall a wonderful statement made by writer Marc Reisner in an intereview some time before he died, describing what happened to California's Owens Valley: "Los Angeles stole the water, but they stole if fair and square." That is, they stole it legally.
But theft is theft, and colonialism is still colonialism, no matter how you justify it.
Let's take a look at how you'd manage:
Every bit of clothing was produced by a rancher, farmer, or industrialist, and likely all three. You are kept warm by the extractive industry, as well as more capitalists. You food comes from farmers and ranchers again.....even your tofu and latte, how long can you survive without it? Then of course your shelter is provided by loggers, manufacturers and brought together by capitalists. So there you are left naked out in the open without shelter or food, and of course you can't run your car to keep warm because that too is the result of manufacturing and capitalism.
Your money comes from capitalism whether you work for a capitalist, live on an inheritance left to you by a capitalist, or on some sort of entitlement program paid for by capitalism.
So while you kick back at the computer with your cup of latte and a bowl of tofu, just remember how fortuante you are to live in this great country where capitalism has brought you so much, and don't forget to think the farmer that grew the coffee bean and milked the cows!
"Dairy Industry Crushed Innovator Who Bested Price-Control System"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/09/AR2006120900925.html
A good example of how capitalism has little to do with free enterprise.
It's actually the _Old West_ that was (and vestigially is) devoted to, if not exactly comfort, then certainly irresponsibility. THAT situation "is neither sustainable nor survivable." The economies of the farming, livestock, mining, and logging industries are utterly artificial, and unobtainable without massive subsidies from our government. A market economy that addressed the true costs would look very different and creative
Good Article Todd Thumbs uP from the Colonel on this one!!
Giddup...;)
Were we actually living in a society where costs were truly accounted for and assessed, not to mention accepted by inhabitants, hardly anyone would be living here, because the productive capacity of the land HERE is at a level that can only support a small population.
All civilized societies exceed the carrying capacity of their habitats, and survive in the short term only through two processes: intensifying, centralizing, and extending the production, management, and distribution of resources "at home" and taking control of resources elsewhere through the extension of empire through military force, entailing the slaughter and enslavement of the peoples who live in these places. That's in addition to the slavery imposed upon people "at home" to support various elites.
Isn't that what is happening with oil?
We're all living with blood on our hands. Progressives can ignore that truth by talking about how much better things are now than they were in the old days. We're so superior.
The New West's economy, based upon insatiable and unsustainable demands for food, water, energy, housing, transportation, entertainment, and yes, coffee, is as artificial and as equally subsidized as was the old economy based upon the extractive industries.
No doubt we can all imagine the squawking from people if an attempt were made to actually collect full payment for the production, distribution, and recycling of the resources necessary to support living here at the standard of living to which people have become accustomed.
In short, there is a human ecology, and there are principles and rules to that ecology that civilized humans have been ignoring for thousands of years. Every civilization in history has collapsed as a consequence of ignoring the realities of human ecology. This one will be no different.
Your milk example is not a failing of capitalism, rather it is an all too frequent occurrence of special interest politics. Here another:
“Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson woke up Friday morning to learn that his Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act got dumped from a federal spending bill to make room for a tax break for Illinois.
The Idaho Republican was stung by the last-minute substitution made at the behest of House Speaker Dennis Hastert for his home state.”
While captialists often parade under the banner of the free market, they in fact are frequently its greatest enemy. From automobile import quotas to steel tariffs and condemnations of private land for industrial and commercial parks, business interests use the power of government to circumvent the market process.
//www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneblog/archives/061211/lobbying_and_th.htm
"The people who benefit from these laws will, as the Post shows, work hard to defend them. And those people include not only dairy farmers but also trade association executives and lobbyists who are very well paid out of the money extracted by the system from milk consumers–a group tilted toward young families with small children, a group with very little wealth and tending to have below-average incomes. That's big government for you."